JOSEPH THE SLAVE

It was as hard a test of worth as any to which a man has ever been exposed. Joseph had, no doubt, been a little difficult to live with, and not always wise. He may have been somewhat arrogant in relating his dreams, and ill-advised when he carried tales about his brethren to the old father. But the situation was one of extraordinary difficulty. The lad was of a higher type than his brethren, with a richer nature and a sweeter strain in him. He heard things spoken of and saw deeds done which were hidden from the eyes of Jacob. And the sins of his brethren were not the trifling peccadilloes of childhood about which all boys feel a fierce resentment, when one of their number carries the account to the authorities. The men were men: their sins were the coarse, far-reaching crimes of men. They were capable of dropping their brother into a cistern, and taking their dinner without allowing themselves to be disturbed by his cries. These and such as these were the rude surroundings in which Joseph's life as a youth was spent. To any youth of finer moral feeling and surer spiritual insight, it must have been a sore burden to see his father's house lapsing back into the barbarism from which it had promised for a time to rise. And, even if he did not realise the scope of their failure, there was the instinctive revolt of sweet cleanness against a moral disorder. The only one who could understand was the old father, whose sons had grown beyond him. To him the lad went with his spiritual distress and in his impotence. His complaint was more than tale-bearing: it was the means to lighten his heart.

1. His Natural Superiority.

Joseph's dreams were controlled in some measure by the same element in him. No doubt they were in part prompted by the unwise favouritism of the father, who gave his beloved son the sleeved coat of a ruler without teaching him the self-restraint by which alone he could become capable of rule. But the dreams were also the forecast of his innate capacity. He had something in him which could make him stand alone and which should compel men to do him homage. The future for the race lay, not in the coarser powers of the brothers, but in the powers by which Joseph was superior to them, and of which he could not remain wholly unconscious in himself. He had hold of something which they did not yet acknowledge. To him life had richer issues and a higher aim: and the future and the power to control the future were there. Because he held this loftier faith, he was already the superior of his brethren; and the days to come must only make more undeniable his superiority.

There must always be, especially in the beginning, a touch of arrogance in any man who knows that he has something to say or do, which other men will be compelled to acknowledge. The Christian man, who believes he has attained to what other men are seeking, often has the appearance of being a superior person. He knows he is not merely groping after life's secret, but that through God's mercy he has reached it He is not simply a seeker, but he has found the end of life. He has the victory. Small wonder that, especially at first, he irritates so many of those with whom he comes in contact. It is true that the sense of how everything he has is his through the divine grace, the further sense of how all he holds he holds for the good of men, will make his judgment more gentle and take the edge off his superiority. Yet the spiritual man judgeth all, while he himself is judged of none. The man who knows the highest end of life and the secret of its attainment will have to utter them. Though he should restrain his speech and bear no public testimony, the fact that he severs himself from other men's pursuits and cannot share in some of their interests, is his most eloquent testimony. He does not need to say how deeply he differs, when once he has quietly ceased to share the common interests and hopes. The measure, too, of his faith in the truth of the ends he seeks, is the measure of his confidence that ultimately they are going to win. The others will need, sooner or later, to come bowing to what he knows to be true. The men who hold his faith have the future and the control of it He must believe that too, if he believes in his faith at all. He may not utter it with the naïveté of Joseph, but he cannot help believing it: and, since he believes it, somehow or other it will control his conduct and betray itself in the things he does.

There is no clash in life like the clash of two opposing ideals, two opposite ends for life itself. There is no difficulty in the home or the State like the difficulty of determining how men, who hold opposite views of the ends for which life is lived at all, can still succeed in living and working together. We have heard much of the intolerance of Churchmen and their crude methods of silencing opposition. Perhaps we shall hear more in these later days of the intolerance of irreligious men. The cistern, into which the brethren dropped Joseph, was a clumsy way of escaping from a life which made the others uneasy. And the irritation which the pagan showed to the early Christians, the irritation which the Cavalier felt in the presence of the Puritan, the intolerance of the artistic and literary world for the evangelical, are the reminder of how easily the cistern could be reopened.

Without doubt, Joseph was unwise in the way in which he expressed his thoughts. He was face to face with one of the most difficult practical questions which are ever set to men to answer: and he was still young. How, without seeming a very superior person, to say something that bears on the intimate conduct of life and that one cannot neglect without disloyalty, and especially how to say it to men who are older than oneself, when to be silent and when to speak, how to express one's convictions so as to make them most effective — these are matters which are not discovered in a day. Joseph, no doubt, needed the discipline of living in a large family. A lad, who can live among ten brothers in the same house and about the same work and who can grow up either a braggart or a superior person, must be singularly incapable of learning from the discipline to which they are likely to submit him. But not this kind of discipline 1 His old father rebuked his favourite son for the vanity which pierced through his expression of his convictions; but he pondered the saying, for he was wise enough to recognise that his son might be right. The ten flung him into the cistern and sold him to the Midianites. Joseph had to begin life all anew, a slave in Potiphar's house, and a slave who was there, because his brothers had sold him.

2. His Bearing under Trial.

Yet nothing seemed able to spoil a fundamentally sweet and wholesome nature. He was already too big and real a man, living too close to the things which matter, to be determined by circumstances. Suppose Joseph had been merely a proud, hard spirit. He would have brooded over the wrong which he had received, and allowed the outrage from his brothers to master him. He would have allowed it to darken his temper, and shut out the appeal of the living world which was still all round him and in which it was still possible for him to find a place. Men are often tempted to retort on the world with the weapons which they believe it has used toward them. They count it a fine thing to meet coldness with coldness, injustice with injustice. It is not a fine thing at all, for it is an acknowledgment of defeat. So to do is to suffer oneself to be beaten by circumstances at the very outset: it is to surrender one's soul to be controlled by the accidents of life, instead of keeping its control in one's own hands. And out of it can come nothing except the perpetuation of weakness and distrust and wrong.

Suppose, again, he had been an easily cowed, really mean spirit with no inward resources. It would at once have seemed sure to him that, because his brothers had lost their tempers with him and treated him vilely, therefore the world was all vile, and life was nothing except a game of chance. And for all the wholesome uses of life he would have been a soured and spoiled man. He would have said the customary bitter things against human nature and human life. And so, even if he had put his hand to his work and done it, he would have done it, merely because he must, without zest in it, without the desire of helping any other human spirit thereby. Hope and spring would have gone out of his life; and, for all the real uses of this world, he would have been a spoiled man.

With a cheerful and indomitable heart, Joseph frankly took up the life which was left him. It was novel: it was humiliating: it promised little. But he took it as he found it, and he put the best of which he was capable into it. He was in prison, and he was a slave; but he had a place, such as it was. He laid hold of Potiphar's work, and he did it with zest.

He was an innocent man, foully wronged. But, instead of turning his thoughts to the fact of his innocence in order to think how badly he had been treated, and so making his very innocence into a means of embittering his life and souring himself against life, he kept it as a means of communing with all high and sacred thoughts. He found his way right out beyond the condition in which he was set to the source and spring of all clean and honest thought and living. He found in it an impulse for more active and zealous service.

The Lord was with him. How could it be otherwise? The Lord is with all men: "whither shall I flee from Thy presence," or how may any man be where God is not? But men so often shut the door to God's mercy, and make their lives impenetrable to His presence. And he who does it most constantly and most effectually is the man with a grievance against life. A man with a grievance is one of the most difficult things to reach at all. He cannot be got at. He has shut himself up from his fellow-men, and he would fain shut himself up from God.

The suffering of a good man is often a hard question to those who look at it from the outside; but it is as often no grievous thing to him who is passing through it The suffering touches their outward life, but within the Lord is with them, and is realised the more, because they are more dependent on Him than they once were. They need Him more, and ask for more; and he who seeketh findeth. As the Lord was with him, Joseph came, to believe that his God cared for him and for all through which he was required to pass, cared that he should do manfully what was still within his reach, cared that he should remain wholesome and sweet-natured in slavery.

So he kept more than his personal zest in life, he kept also his sympathy with other men. He had a heart at leisure from itself to see that the two men, who were flung into the prison beside him, were helpless and frightened men. He went out of his way to comfort and help them. Men had not proved themselves very generous to him, but that was evidently no reason why he should be indifferent to them. He made it his business — for, Unless he had made it so, it really was none of his business what became of the chief baker and head buder — he made it his business to see whether he could help them over this hard time in their lives. He listened to their troubles, as though he never had had any of his own.

3. His Reward.

By so doing, it may be thought that Joseph only took fresh troubles on himself. That were a great mistake. His act helped him as much at least as it helped them. It kept him from the sour brooding over his condition and his wrongs, it lifted him into the glad sense of usefulness, it brought him away to the recognition of how much still lay within his power. The quality of self-forgetfulness, like that of mercy, is twice blessed; and the blessing which it brings on him who forgets himself is at least as great as any which he confers.

And so his master trusted him. That was an inevitable result. A man of such a nature wins other men's trust and is fit to appreciate the incalculable prize he has won. There is an imperishable charm about a willing service, which is not nicely reckoned according to immediate reward. And the reward, which is implied in such trust, makes the heart of its receiver larger and his nature richer. The fact that his master trusted him, a slave, not even born in his house, but bought in the public market, came back to stay Joseph's heart in the hour of his temptation. For, when his master's wife tempted him, he reminded her with grave sweet dignity of the trust which had been put in him by his master. All that he hath is under my hand, except you, his wife. Slave as he was, with no rights in the house, and therefore, as men glibly conclude, with no duties, he remembered how Potiphar had honoured him with his faith.

On that temptation, which has come to be associated with his name, it is needless tc dwell long, for the simple reason that, as most men come to learn, it is the characteristic of the vice that even to think about its danger and ugliness can do harm. There is probably no side of human life on which it is so true that the way of escape does not come through thinking how noxious it is, but comes through thinking of things that are pure and honourable and of good report. Yet, when the Jewish historian speaks of it as befalling Joseph, he recognises frankly how in one form or another every man in this world and probably most women must meet it.

What is noteworthy is first the way in which Joseph met it. He speaks of it as treachery to his master who trusted him, and to his God who trusted him more. As she listened, the woman might have heard in his words the reminder of how her husband trusted her with more than he ever committed to his slave. He trusted her with his good name and with his honour, and she is ready to trail both in the mud at the bidding of her passions. It is the selfishness of all such vice, with its power to break up mankind into greedy atoms, which seek nothing and see nothing but their own pleasure, called sometimes their own self-development, that makes its bane. It saps honour, loyalty and truth. And, when all the glozing words have been uttered to make the vice in all its forms less foul, that remains true.

The other noteworthy fact in Joseph's attitude is his silence before the accusation. He denied his own guilt, but he made no counter-charge, and he went back to his prison with his lips sealed. It may be that he felt how his master was one of the few men who had treated him with justice. Potiphar took him to be a slave and promoted him to honour in his household; and the memory of what the man had done may have kept Joseph silent, when he had the power to sow suspicion of the wife in the mind of his master. Joseph's continence is high, but this mercy and loyalty to the bread he has eaten are higher still. For what adds to its greatness is that there was only one man in Egypt whose good opinion Joseph had reason to prize. And he had to forego that and suffer under the suspicion that he had been a lecherous traitor.