JOSEPH'S SUCCESS

The narrative shifts to a new scene. Joseph is past the struggles of poverty. Freed from the prison, he has gained money and power and an assured position in Egypt. He is past all his trials, we are apt to think; but that is not the view of the Hebrew writer. To him Joseph is only past the trials of poverty, and has now to face the greater trial of possessions. He has said good-bye to the temptations of the slave, and has now to meet the temptations of the free and powerful. And so the writer does not merely relate how Joseph won liberty and money and power; he tells also what Joseph did with these things after they were won, and especially he tells what Joseph did when he had power over the brothers who had wronged him. In that he saw a test of manhood and faith.

1. The Touchstone of Character.

It was one of the conventions of the older novelists that the hero was brought after many strenuous efforts to the church door and was there dismissed, a married man. So far as it recognised that a man then reached a great end of right effort, it was no mean convention, since it realised that he who has won love has won the best thing in the world's gift, better even than runners before one's chariot or multitudes bowing the knee. But it was a weak convention in so far as it failed to see that what makes men is the habitual attitude they take to the great things of life after they have won them. What a man does with his money after he has made it, how he bears himself to love when he has won it, go to determine his spiritual manhood.

Yet it is unhappily true that many men grow uninteresting after they have gained some assured position. The desire even for outward success in life, and for a place in which a man's personal influence tells, quickens the spiritual faculties. We are watchful then, we show self-control and patience, we strengthen our will to do and bear. But when the goal we have set to ourselves is reached, how often the life becomes relaxed, and at once the man becomes a lay figure on which his outward trappings are hung. Men feel that he has grown less interesting, and so he has. The man is hidden behind things.

Success is a test to every institution as well as to every man. There is hardly a finer record of a spiritual struggle bravely fought out than the story of the Ten Years Conflict. One of the things which are finer, is the Disruption in which it issued. For clear assertion of principle, for patient reassertion of it after it was aspersed, for readiness to sacrifice much toward its final victory, it has litde to set beside it in Scottish Church history. Then came the period of success, and with success weakness which the period of struggle had not shown. For then came the inclination to lean on past deeds instead of using them as Christ's summons to a nobler service. Then came the claim to possess truth as a peculiar property of one Church, instead of the recognition that it was a gift of God's grace to men.

God's grant of success is a subtle touchstone. It forms the test of whether men have really set their heart on a spiritual thing, on liberty as the means to do what they like, or as the necessary means to listen for a higher voice and to obey. If a man have set his heart on a great thing, he will accept God's gift of success as a means of winning the great thing, and will grow stronger thereby. If he have set his heart on a little thing, he will take his success and sit down to enjoy it.

Perhaps one thing which helped to steady Joseph in his hour of brilliant recognition was that the thing he won was so far beyond what he could ever have hoped to gain. His success came to him, a gift, surprising and strange, from men. And it came, not merely because of his ability, but because of his character. He interprets Pharaoh's dream. When the courtiers are bewildered before the thought of the unexpected misfortune which is about to fall upon themselves and their country, he tells what must be done to meet the emergency. The men were, of course, impressed by the power to interpret the dream; but what manifestly impressed them most was the bearing of the man who was the means of interpreting it. Here was a man who had the fear of God before his eyes, who had clean hands, whose character had been braced by adversity, who had shown himself capable of considering not his own interests only, but the interests of his master and his fellow-slaves. He was fit to do more than interpret dreams, he was fit to hold power. They felt themselves safe in his hands. That was what told, and what ought always to tell. Influence and power over the destinies of other men belong in the end to the men who rid their minds of private and selfish hopes, and who live as before the Judge of all. Men feel themselves safe with those whose lives they recognise to be governed by the unseen power of God. Power comes to such men, often more than they care to take, always power which they fear to use. But their fear to use it is the guarantee that they recognise their responsibility for it, and that in using it they will not lose their own souls.

2. The Ideal and the Reward op Love.

As to the policy which Joseph followed in order to diminish the suffering brought by the famine on the people of Egypt, there is not much that needs to be said here. Such a scheme as is described in detail in Scripture must be judged on its own merits and in view of the conditions of its own time; and then its discussion is best left in the hands of students of social history. But there is a larger aspect of the question on which a few words may be said. The worldly wisdom which formulates such plans and rightly claims to review them, is always apt to degenerate into a shallow cleverness that does not grasp how a great purpose of all human society and the chief reason why it should exist at all is to keep men alive in famine and to bring them to the highest measure of well-being. It loses sight of the ideal elements that keep human society together, and so loses frequently the spirit of charity. Now charity is so often the larger wisdom. It might have been possible to keep Pharaoh's throne erect, though the rulers, engrossed in care for their own safety, had left the multitudes to die. But Pharaoh's throne was given a more stable foundation, because his policy at this time was controlled by Joseph. And Joseph had known all the changes and chances of human life, and through them all had preserved charity. He had ordered his life in its weakness and in its glory by the holy justice of God. He had kept his heart, in poverty and in wealth, from the control of discontent and selfishness. Such a man is given an insight into the ideal foundations of the most earthly power. Pharaoh was secure and his throne was stayed up, because behind him was one who had not forgotten the heart of a slave even after he had become the second man in Egypt

How rich in human sympathy the man remained, in his power as in his day of weakness, the Hebrew writer shows us again. He was prosperous; he was the king's right-hand man; he wore the signs of his dignity when he rode abroad among bowing multitudes; he was married into one of the old families of Egypt. But it was not till his child was laid in his arms that he said, "God hath caused me to forget all my toil, and all my father's house." There speaks the heart of a man, an exile. He has been lonely through the prison, lonely before the throne, lonely in his chariot along the bowing streets, until God in His goodness gave him a home.

This was all a man: a man, when he proved in the dungeon that he could live by principle though none supported him; a man, when he acknowledged in his success that the heart of a man needs love for its strength and fulness.