After the death of his beloved Rachel, the heart of Jacob may have turned to Leah, and a peaceful friendship have succeeded the storm and the conflicts of youthful passion.  Sorrow may have knit hearts softened by the mutual consciousness of error and by the tears of repentance, and strengthened by the hopes of pardon, and drawn to each other by the strong ties of parental love for their mutual offspring.  When the patriarch was called into Egypt, Leah went not with him.  He had laid her in the gathering-place of his sons, in the tent of his fathers.  From the touching expression of the dying patriarch—­himself far from the land of his fathers’ sepulchres—­“And there I buried Leah,” we feel that, in age and bereavement, the heart of Jacob turned to Leah.  The repudiated wife of his youth became the solace of his age, and her memory awoke the last tender recollections in the dying patriarch.  As we have read the book of God, we have been taught that good, inordinately coveted, or obtained by injustice and deceit, ever brings a curse.  The principal actors in the events recorded in these chapters of Genesis, may have secured the object which they sought, yet the attainment did not avert or mitigate the punishment of the treachery by which it was secured.

Rebekah obtained the birth-right and the coveted blessing for her favourite child, and by that act separated him from herself and doomed him to a banishment from his father’s house, and from that hour she saw his face no more.  Laban secured by his deceit the marriage of his unattractive daughter and the establishment of the beautiful Rachel, but he thus alienated the children he still seems to have loved, and that wealth which he so coveted.

Leah, by her connivance at her father’s deceit, married the man she loved, but it was to lead a life of bitter, of heart-consuming sorrow.  Jacob, departing from the institution of marriage that he might yet possess Rachel, entailed upon himself a career of strife, bitterness and disappointment; and introduced into his family an example that became a fruitful source of individual depravity and national corruption; while he first witnessed the evil effects of his complicated domestic relations in the conduct of his eldest son, and felt at once his shame as a husband and his reproach as a father.  And are not these things written for our edification?  Are we not, in every page of God’s word, taught explicitly that for man there is neither safety nor happiness save in the path of duty and of literal obedience?  That each departure from the rule of right, whatever be the motive, and crowned as it may seem to be with success, draws a long succession of sin and sorrow in its train?  Many have studied the word of God to justify sin, or palliate guilt, by the examples of the former dispensation.  Let it be carefully studied, and it will show that the transgression which secured a positive object, still brought its punishment,—­if delayed, never remitted—­although successful, never justified.  The word of God never justifies crimes, though in infinite wisdom He over-rules them to promote the designs of his eternal providence.