General, natural religion, properly speaking, requires no faith; for the persuasion that a great producing, regulating, and conducting Being conceals himself, as it were, behind Nature, to make himself comprehensible to us—­such a conviction forces itself upon every one.  Nay, if we for a moment let drop this thread, which conducts us through life, it may be immediately and everywhere resumed.  But it is different with a special religion, which announces to us that this Great Being distinctly and pre-eminently interests himself for one individual, one family, one people, one country.  This religion is founded on faith, which must be immovable if it would not be instantly destroyed.  Every doubt of such a religion is fatal to it.  One may return to conviction, but not to faith.  Hence the endless probation, the delay in the fulfilment of so often repeated promises, by which the capacity for faith in those ancestors is set in the clearest light.

It is in this faith also that Jacob begins his expedition; and if, by his craft and deceit, he has not gained our affections, he wins them by his lasting and inviolable love for Rachel, whom he himself wooes on the instant, as Eleazar had courted Rebecca for his father.  In him the promise of a countless people was first to be fully unfolded:  he was to see many sons around him, but through them and their mothers was to endure manifold sorrows of heart.

Seven years he serves for his beloved, without impatience and without wavering.  His father-in-law, crafty like himself, and disposed, like him, to consider legitimate this means to an end, deceives him, and so repays him for what he has done to his brother.  Jacob finds in his arms a wife whom he does not love.  Laban, indeed, endeavors to appease him, by giving him his beloved also after a short time, and this but on the condition of seven years of further service.  Vexation arises out of vexation.  The wife he does not love is fruitful:  the beloved one bears no children.  The latter, like Sarai, desires to become a mother through her handmaiden:  the former grudges her even this advantage.  She also presents her husband with a maid, but the good patriarch is now the most troubled man in the world.  He has four women, children by three, and none from her he loves.  Finally she also is favored; and Joseph comes into the world, the late fruit of the most passionate attachment.  Jacob’s fourteen years of service are over; but Laban is unwilling to part with him, his chief and most trusty servant.  They enter into a new compact, and portion the flocks between them.  Laban retains the white ones, as most numerous:  Jacob has to put up with the spotted ones, as the mere refuse.  But he is able here, too, to secure his own advantage:  and as by a paltry mess (of pottage) he had procured the birthright, and, by a disguise, his father’s blessing, he manages by art and sympathy to appropriate to himself the best and largest part of the herds; and on this side