And so it was that Jacob "Dreamed a dream, and behold a ladder set up on earth "and the top of it reached to heaven, and behold the angels of God ascending and descending upon it.
God sent that dream to Jacob. A cream that was a turning point in his life—And thank God we too have our dreams! For every good ambition and holy aspiration is a dream.—Men's ideals are dream Every hope that paints our sky, and gives spring to our feet is more or less a dream; and we are better men and women for such dreams.
And now let us see what this dream of Jacob's has to teach us.
Let us look at this Revelation first of all from the human point of view We see it as a picture of life and its possibilities. We are all familiar with the idea of evolution, and with those theories which account for man by tracing his development and rise from the lowest forms of life to what he now is. To some it may be attractive. But how infinitely more attractive is this which is sug. gested by Jacob's dream, with all those possibilities of enlargement and enrichment that are involved in it. For in this dream we have Heaven joined to earth, and man linked to God. At the foot of the ladder is the poor sinful man, Jacob.—Akin to God, made in his image, but marre by his grasping and selfish world-lines. And at the top, God himself, eternal goodness and inti They are far apart now are in unbroken connection.
The Incarnation was prefigured in that dream ladder. For does not the Incarnation teach—in that God could become man—that God and man, though far apart, are linked in kinship by their very nature—linked by a spiritual ladder. So near akin that God could descend that ladder and assume our form. So near akin that man may ascend that ladder until he becomes God-like, and lives in perfect communion and fellowship with Him.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.