Daily Strength for Daily Living Author:John Clifford General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1885 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: Jacob's Baptism of Fire. " Then Jacob Was Greatly Afraid And Distressed." "and Jacob Said, .... Deliver Me, I Pray Thee, FROM THK HAND OF MY BROTHER, FROM THE HAND OF ESAU, FOR I FEAR HIM, LEST HE WILL COME AND SMITE ME, AND THE MOTHER WITH THE CHILDREN.". . . . "AND Jacob Was Left Alone, And There Wrestled A MAN WITH HIM UNTIL THE BREAKING OF THE DAY.". . " THY NAME SHALL BE CALLED NO MORE JACOB, BUT Israel." -- Genetis xxxii. 7,11, 24, 28. Does this familiar, but deeply mysterious, episode in the life of Jacob, afford us any aid in the solution of the chief problem of life, the full acquisition and perfect use of Daily Strength For Daily Living? I know it is an old-world story, and in its strange Oriental setting appears as remote from our modes of thinking and vital aspirations as the dress of an Arab, or the war-tactics of the Mahdi, from the habits and practices of English life to-day. Still, you know enough of the40 THE BIBLE, practical spirit which reigns in this building, to be sure that if I take you into the Old Testament I shall never lose sight of home, or get beyond call of the real life we are now living, the difficulties we face, and the work we have to do. For I hold that saying of our poet-novelist, George Macdonald, to be as true as it is terse, "Life and Religion are one, or neither is anything." If then we travel into Hebrew times, and hold fellowship with Hebrew heroes, it is solely because Hebrew teaching and Hebrew biography are, in their essence and uses, actually nearer to our inward life, in its struggle and hope, its repeated failure and renewe'l yearning, than all th...« less