One of the marked characteristics of the man who is truly great is his right estimate of values. A rainbow is a beautiful thing; but a man may become so absorbed in admiring a rainbow as to let his automobile run into the ditch. That sense of correct proportion which clearly distinguishes between the essential and the non-essential is a rare gift. The lack of it once wrought disaster to Esau, as many of us may remember. Returning one day tired and hungry from hunting, he found his younger brother, Jacob, seething a mess of pottage for his own supper; and the savory odor greeted him so pleasantly that he cried out, "Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint." There seems to be a general belief that when a man is hungry he will do almost anything for food; and in this case covetousness and duplicity quickly took advantage of the opportunity to drive a hard bargain. "Sell me this day thy birthright," suggested Jacob; and the elder brother sold it, just because that little dish of red pottage looked bigger to him for the moment than anything else in the world.
Let him who feels disposed to smile at the manifest absurdity of that transaction of centuries ago, first honestly ask of his own heart whether or not he himself has ever done, or has ever been seriously tempted to do, an equally foolish thing. Sometimes we make mistakes without realizing that they are mistakes until afterward; and it is quite possible that until Esau actually went to his father for the first-born's blessing and failed to receive it, he had entirely forgotten that moment of weakness, when the savory smell of pottage so took possession of his senses that he sacrificed everything to get it.
Moments of weakness are common to humanity, and they seem to be the moments, unfortunately, for which the adversary is always watching. It was when Jesus had been for "forty days and forty nights" in the wilderness without food that the devil first appeared to him. It is when a mortal is "an hungred," when the heart is starving, unsatisfied, desolate, and desperate, that one listens to arguments which he would at any other time repudiate with scorn. Red pottage is not a thing of the past, although it calls itself today by quite a different name. Indeed, its name is legion, for red pottage means only that particular phase of temptation best adapted to attack each human consciousness at its weakest point, whatever that may be.
