But silently nature was working out the harvest of retribution, through that law of heredity that makes sons repeat the qualities of their father.  When Jacob was now advanced in years his ten sons began, to develop craftiness, and soon they plowed great furrows of care in the father’s face.  In those days of care his young son Joseph stole into Jacob’s heart like a sweet sunbeam, and, with his open, loving ways, filled his father’s heart with gladness.  When the elder brothers knew Jacob had given Joseph a coat of many colors they remembered the craft of their father in his early career.  One evening, when the herds and flocks were scattered widely over the hills, Simeon sent out messengers and called his brothers together for a conference.  In that hour he said:  “Wist ye not how our father, being a younger son, supplanted his elder brother, Esau?  And behold his craft will now make his younger child, Joseph, to supplant his elder brothers!  Do ye not remember how our father, Jacob, took a kid and made his hands like unto the hands of Esau?  Let us now take a kid and make its blood represent the blood and death of Joseph.  What Jacob did for his father, Isaac, let his sons do to their father, Jacob.”  Thus, with subtle irony, nature made the man’s sins to come back to him.  A boy, Jacob deceived his father, now, grown gray and old, his boys brought their father an armful of deceits.  In that hour when Reuben and Simeon held up the coat of many colors, all red with blood, great nature might have whispered to Jacob:  “It is the blood of the kid that you slew for deceiving your father returning to enable your sons to deceive you.”  For, having sowed deceit, deceit also and stratagem Jacob reaped.  Himself a son, he thrust a dart into his father’s heart.  Become a father, his ten sons became archers, skilled with darts that filled their father’s heart with agony.  For nature loves justice; her rule is law, sometimes her rod is iron.

The principle that every deed is a seed that contains the germ of its own reward or punishment has received full interpretation by the poets and dramatists.  In his “Paradise Lost,” Milton has made a detailed study of the principles of the spiritual harvests.  The poet represents Satan as an angel, fallen indeed, and sadly battered by his fall, yet still an archangel glorious for strength and beauty.  Having visited Paradise and accomplished the destruction of Eve’s innocence and Adam’s happiness, Satan returns home, passing over a bridge of more prodigious length than now arches the gulf between earth and hell.  When the prince arrived at Pandemonium, the capital of Lucifer’s realm, he found that the leaders of the fallen host had arranged a reception in the great banquet-hall of the palace.  In the presence of the applauding throng, the prince told the story of how he had succeeded in opening the earth as a place to which these exiled angels might retreat from the prison in which they had been so long confined,