GEN. xlii.-xliv.

"Fear not: for am I in the place of God? But as for you, ye thought

evil against me; but God meant it unto good."--GEN. 1. 19, 20.

The purpose of God to bring Israel into Egypt was accomplished by the

unconscious agency of Joseph's natural affection for his kindred.

Tenderness towards home is usually increased by residence in a foreign

land; for absence, like a little death, sheds a halo round those

separated from us. But Joseph could not as yet either re-visit his old

home or invite his father's family into Egypt. Even, indeed, when his

brothers first appeared before him, he seems to have had no immediate

intention of inviting them as a family to settle in the country of his

adoption, or even to visit it. If he had cherished any such purpose or

desire he might have sent down wagons at once, as he at last did, to

bring his father's household out of Canaan. Why, then, did he proceed so

cautiously? Whence this mystery, and disguise, and circuitous compassing

of his end? What intervened between the first and last visit of his

brethren to make it seem advisable to disclose himself and invite them?

Manifestly there had intervened enough to give Joseph insight into the

state of mind his brethren were in, enough to satisfy him they were not

the men they had been, and that it was safe to ask them and would be

pleasant to have them with him in Egypt. Fully alive to the elements of

disorder and violence that once existed among them, and having had no

opportunity of ascertaining whether they were now altered, there was no

course open but that which he adopted of endeavouring in some unobserved

way to discover whether twenty years had wrought any change in them.

For effecting this object he fell on the expedient of imprisoning them,

on pretence of their being spies. This served the double purpose of

detaining them until he should have made up his mind as to the best

means of dealing with them, and of securing their retention under his

eye until some display of character might sufficiently certify him of

their state of mind. Possibly he adopted this expedient also because it

was likely deeply to move them, so that they might be expected to

exhibit not such superficial feelings as might have been elicited had he

set them down to a banquet and entered into conversation with them over

their wine, but such as men are surprised to find in themselves, and

know nothing of in their lighter hours. Joseph was, of course, well

aware that in the analysis of character the most potent elements are

only brought into clear view when the test of severe trouble is applied,

and when men are thrown out of all conventional modes of thinking and

speaking.

The display of character which Joseph awaited he speedily obtained. For

so new an experience to these free dwellers in tents as imprisonment

under grim Egyptian guards worked wonders in them. Men who have

experienced such treatment aver that nothing more effectually tames and

breaks the spirit: it is not the being confined for a definite time

with the certainty of release in the end, but the being shut up at the

caprice of another on a false and absurd accusation; the being cooped up

at the will of a stranger in a foreign country, uncertain and hopeless

of release. To Joseph's brethren so sudden and great a calamity seemed

explicable only on the theory that it was retribution for the great

crime of their life. The uneasy feeling which each of them had hidden in

his own conscience, and which the lapse of twenty years had not

materially alleviated, finds expression: "And they said one to another,

We are verily guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the anguish

of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear; therefore is

this distress come upon us." The similarity of their position to that in

which they had placed their brother stimulates and assists their

conscience. Joseph, in the anguish of his soul, had protested his

innocence, but they had not listened; and now their own protestations

are treated as idle wind by this Egyptian. Their own feelings,

representing to them what they had caused Joseph to suffer, stir a

keener sense of their guilt than they seem ever before to have reached.

Under this new light they see their sin more clearly, and are humbled by

the distress into which it has brought them.

When Joseph sees this, his heart warms to them. He may not yet be quite

sure of them. A prison-repentance is perhaps scarcely to be trusted. He

sees they would for the moment deal differently with him had they the

opportunity, and would welcome no one more heartily than himself, whose

coming among them had once so exasperated them. Himself keen in his

affections, he is deeply moved, and his eyes fill with tears as he

witnesses their emotion and grief on his account. Fain would he relieve

them from their remorse and apprehension--why, then, does he forbear?

Why does he not at this juncture disclose himself? It has been

satisfactorily proved that his brethren counted their sale of him the

great crime of their life. Their imprisonment has elicited evidence that

that crime had taken in their conscience the capital place, the place

which a man finds some one sin or series of sins will take, to follow

him with its appropriate curse, and hang over his future like a cloud--a

sin of which he thinks when any strange thing happens to him, and to

which he traces all disaster--a sin so iniquitous that it seems capable

of producing any results however grievous, and to which he has so given

himself that his life seems to be concentrated there, and he cannot but

connect with it all the greater ills that happen to him. Was not this,

then, security enough that they would never again perpetrate a crime of

like atrocity? Every man who has almost at all observed the history of

sin in himself, will say that most certainly it was quite insufficient

security against their ever again doing the like. Evidence that a man is

conscious of his sin, and, while suffering from its consequences, feels

deeply its guilt, is not evidence that his character is altered.

And because we believe men so much more readily than God, and think that

they do not require, for form's sake, such needless pledges of a changed

character as God seems to demand, it is worth observing that Joseph,

moved as he was even to tears, felt that common prudence forbade him to

commit himself to his brethren without further evidence of their

disposition. They had distinctly acknowledged their guilt, and in his

hearing had admitted that the great calamity that had befallen them was

no more than they deserved; yet Joseph, judging merely as an

intelligent man who had worldly interests depending on his judgment,

could not discern enough here to justify him in supposing that his

brethren were changed men. And it might sometimes serve to expose the

insufficiency of our repentance were clear-seeing men the judges of it,

and did they express their opinion of its trustworthiness. We may think

that God is needlessly exacting when He requires evidence not only of a

changed mind about past sin, but also of such a mind being now in us as

will preserve us from future sin; but the truth is, that no man whose

common worldly interests were at stake would commit himself to us on any

less evidence. God, then, meaning to bring the house of Israel into

Egypt in order to make progress in the Divine education He was giving to

them, could not introduce them into that land in a state of mind which

would negative all the discipline they were there to receive.

These men then had to give evidence that they not only saw, and in some

sense repented of, their sin, but also that they had got rid of the evil

passion which had led to it. This is what God means by repentance. Our

sins are in general not so microscopic that it requires very keen

spiritual discernment to perceive them. But to be quite aware of our

sin, and to acknowledge it, is not to repent of it. Everything falls

short of thorough repentance which does not prevent us from committing

the sin anew. We do not so much desire to be accurately informed about

our past sins, and to get right views of our past selves; we wish to be

no longer sinners, we wish to pass through some process by which we may

be separated from that in us which has led us into sin. Such a process

there is, for these men passed through it.

The test which revealed the thoroughness of his brothers' repentance was

unintentionally applied by Joseph. When he hid his cup in Benjamin's

sack, all that he intended was to furnish a pretext for detaining

Benjamin, and so gratifying his own affection. But, to his astonishment,

his trick effected far more than he intended; for the brothers,

recognising now their brotherhood, circled round Benjamin, and, to a

man, resolved to go back with him to Egypt. We cannot argue from this

that Joseph had misapprehended the state of mind in which his brothers

were, and in his judgment of them had been either too timorous or too

severe; nor need we suppose that he was hampered by his relations to

Pharaoh, and therefore unwilling to connect himself too closely with men

of whom he might be safer to be rid; because it was this very peril of

Benjamin's that matured their brotherly affection. They themselves could

not have anticipated that they would make such a sacrifice for Benjamin.

But throughout their dealings with this mysterious Egyptian, they felt

themselves under a spell, and were being gradually, though perhaps

unconsciously, softened, and in order to complete the change passing

upon them, they but required some such incident as this of Benjamin's

arrest. This incident seemed by some strange fatality to threaten them

with a renewed perpetration of the very crime they had committed against

Rachel's other son. It threatened to force them to become again the

instrument of bereaving their father of his darling child, and bringing

about that very calamity which they had pledged themselves should never

happen. It was an incident, therefore, which, more than any other, was

likely to call out their family love.

The scene lives in every one's memory. They were going gladly back to

their own country with corn enough for their children, proud of their

entertainment by the lord of Egypt; anticipating their father's

exultation when he heard how generously they had been treated and when

he saw Benjamin safely restored, feeling that in bringing him back they

almost compensated for having bereaved him of Joseph. Simeon is

revelling in the free air that blew from Canaan and brought with it the

scents of his native land, and breaks into the old songs that the strait

confinement of his prison had so long silenced--all of them together

rejoicing in a scarcely hoped-for success; when suddenly, ere the first

elation is spent, they are startled to see the hasty approach of the

Egyptian messenger, and to hear the stern summons that brought them to a

halt, and boded all ill. The few words of the just Egyptian, and his

calm, explicit judgment, "Ye have done evil in so doing," pierce them

like a keen blade--that they should be suspected of robbing one who had

dealt so generously with them; that all Israel should be put to shame in

the sight of the stranger! But they begin to feel relief as one brother

after another steps forward with the boldness of innocence; and as sack

after sack is emptied, shaken, and flung aside, they already eye the

steward with the bright air of triumph; when, as the very last sack is

emptied, and as all breathlessly stand round, amid the quick rustle of

the corn, the sharp rattle of metal strikes on their ear, and the gleam

of silver dazzles their eyes as the cup rolls out in the sunshine. This,

then, is the brother of whom their father was so careful that he dared

not suffer him out of his sight! This is the precious youth whose life

was of more value than the lives of all the brethren, and to keep whom a

few months longer in his father's sight Simeon had been left to rot in a

dungeon! This is how he repays the anxiety of the family and their love,

and this is how he repays the extraordinary favour of Joseph! By one

rash childish act had this fondled youth, to all appearance, brought

upon the house of Israel irretrievable disgrace, if not complete

extinction. Had these men been of their old temper, their knives had

very speedily proved that their contempt for the deed was as great as

the Egyptian's; by violence towards Benjamin they might have cleared

themselves of all suspicion of complicity; or, at the best, they might

have considered themselves to be acting in a fair and even lenient

manner if they had surrendered the culprit to the steward, and once

again carried back to their father a tale of blood. But they were under

the spell of their old sin. In all disaster, however innocent they now

were, they saw the retribution of their old iniquity; they seem scarcely

to consider whether Benjamin was innocent or guilty, but as humbled,

God-smitten men, "they rent their clothes, and laded every man his ass,

and returned to the city."

Thus Joseph in seeking to gain _one_ brother found eleven--for now there

could be no doubt that they were very different men from those brethren

who had so heartlessly sold into slavery their father's favourite--men

now with really brotherly feelings, by penitence and regard for their

father so wrought together into one family, that this calamity, intended

to fall only on one of their number, did in falling on him fall on them

all. So far from wishing now to rid themselves of Rachel's son and their

father's favourite, who had been put by their father in so prominent a

place in his affection, they will not even give him up to suffer what

seemed the just punishment of his theft, do not even reproach him with

having brought them all into disgrace and difficulty, but, as humbled

men who knew they had greater sins of their own to answer for, went

quietly back to Egypt, determined to see their younger brother through

his misfortune or to share his bondage with him. Had these men not been

thoroughly changed, thoroughly convinced that at all costs upright

dealing and brotherly love should continue; had they not possessed that

first and last of Christian virtues, love to their brother, then nothing

could so certainly have revealed their want of it as this apparent theft

of Benjamin's. It seemed in itself a very likely thing that a lad

accustomed to plain modes of life, and whose character it was to "ravin

as a wolf," should, when suddenly introduced to the gorgeous Egyptian

banqueting-house with all its sumptuous furnishings, have coveted some

choice specimen of Egyptian art, to carry home to his father as proof

that he could not only bring himself back in safety, but scorned to come

back from any expedition empty-handed. It was not unlikely either that,

with his mother's own superstition, he might have conceived the bold

design of robbing this Egyptian, so mysterious and so powerful,

according to his brothers' account, and of breaking that spell which he

had thrown over them; he may thus have conceived the idea of achieving

for himself a reputation in the family, and of once for all redeeming

himself from the somewhat undignified, and to one of his spirit somewhat

uncongenial, position of the youngest of a family. If, as is possible,

he had let any such idea ooze out in talking with his brethren as they

went down to Egypt, and only abandoned it on their indignant and urgent

remonstrance, then when the cup, Joseph's chief treasure according to

his own account, was discovered in Benjamin's sack, the case must have

looked sadly against him even in the eyes of his brethren. No

protestations of innocence in a particular instance avail much when the

character and general habits of the accused point to guilt. It is quite

possible, therefore, that the brethren, though willing to believe

Benjamin, were yet not so thoroughly convinced of his innocence as they

would have desired. The fact that they themselves had found their money

returned in their sacks, made for Benjamin; yet in most cases,

especially where circumstances corroborate it, an accusation even

against the innocent takes immediate hold and cannot be summarily and at

once got rid of.

Thus was proof given that the house of Israel was now in truth one

family. The men who, on very slight instigation, had without compunction

sold Joseph to a life of slavery, cannot now find it in their heart to

abandon a brother who, to all appearance, was worthy of no better life

than that of a slave, and who had brought them all into disgrace and

danger. Judah had no doubt pledged himself to bring the lad back without

scathe to his father, but he had done so without contemplating the

possibility of Benjamin becoming amenable to Egyptian law. And no one

can read the speech of Judah--one of the most pathetic on record--in

which he replies to Joseph's judgment that Benjamin alone should remain

in Egypt, without perceiving that he speaks not as one who merely seeks

to redeem a pledge, but as a good son and a good brother. He speaks,

too, as the mouth-piece of the rest, and as he had taken the lead in

Joseph's sale, so he does not shrink from standing forward and

accepting the heavy responsibility which may now light upon the man who

represents these brethren. His former faults are redeemed by the

courage, one may say heroism, he now shows. And as he spoke, so the rest

felt. They could not bring themselves to inflict a new sorrow on their

aged father; neither could they bear to leave their young brother in the

hands of strangers. The passions which had alienated them from one

another, and had threatened to break up the family, are subdued. There

is now discernible a common feeling that binds them together, and a

common object for which they willingly sacrifice themselves. They are,

therefore, now prepared to pass into that higher school to which God

called them in Egypt. It mattered little what strong and equitable laws

they found in the land of their adoption, if they had no taste for

upright living; it mattered little what thorough national organization

they would be brought into contact with in Egypt, if in point of fact

they owned no common brotherhood, and were willing rather to live as

units and every man for himself than for any common interest. But now

they were prepared, open to teaching, and docile.

To complete our apprehension of the state of mind into which the

brethren were brought by Joseph's treatment of them, we must take into

account the assurance he gave them, when he made himself known to them,

that it was not they but God who had sent him into Egypt, and that God

had done this for the purpose of preserving the whole house of Israel.

At first sight this might seem to be an injudicious speech, calculated

to make the brethren think lightly of their guilt, and to remove the

just impressions they now entertained of the unbrotherliness of their

conduct to Joseph. And it might have been an injudicious speech to

impenitent men; but no further view of sin can lighten its heinousness

to a really penitent sinner. Prove to him that his sin has become the

means of untold good, and you only humble him the more, and more deeply

convince him that while he was recklessly gratifying himself and

sacrificing others for his own pleasure, God has been mindful of others,

and, pardoning him, has blessed them. God does not need our sins to work

out His good intentions, but we give Him little other material; and the

discovery that through our evil purposes and injurious deeds God has

worked out His beneficent will, is certainly not calculated to make us

think more lightly of our sin or more highly of ourselves.

Joseph in thus addressing his brethren did, in fact, but add to their

feelings the tenderness that is in all religious conviction, and that

springs out of the consciousness that in all our sin there has been with

us a holy and loving Father, mindful of His children. This is the final

stage of penitence. The knowledge that God has prevented our sin from

doing the harm it might have done, does relieve the bitterness and

despair with which we view our life, but at the same time it strengthens

the most effectual bulwark between us and sin--love to a holy,

over-ruling God. This, therefore, may always be safely said to

penitents: Out of your worst sin God can bring good to yourself or to

others, and good of an apparently necessary kind; but good of a

permanent kind can result from your sin only when you have truly

repented of it, and sincerely wish you had never done it. Once this

repentance is really wrought in you, then, though your life can never be

the same as it might have been had you not sinned, it may be, in some

respects, a more richly developed life, a life fuller of humility and

love. You can never have what you sold for your sin; but the poverty

your sin has brought may excite within you thoughts and energies more

valuable than what you have lost, as these men lost a brother but found

a Saviour. The wickedness that has often made you bow your head and

mourn in secret, and which is in itself unutterable shame and loss, may,

in God's hand, become food against the day of famine. You cannot ever

have the enjoyments which are possible only to those whose conscience is

laden with no evil remembrances, and whose nature, uncontracted and

unwithered by familiarity with sin, can give itself to enjoyment with

the abandonment and fearlessness reserved for the innocent. No more at

all will you have that fineness of feeling which only ignorance of evil

can preserve; no more that high and great conscientiousness which, once

broken, is never repaired; no more that respect from other men which for

ever and instinctively departs from those who have lost self-respect.

But you may have a more intelligent sympathy with other men and a keener

pity for them; the experience you have gathered too late to save

yourself may put it in your power to be of essential service to others.

You cannot win your way back to the happy, useful, evenly-developed life

of the comparatively innocent, but the life of the true-hearted penitent

is yet open to you. Every beat of your heart now may be as if it

throbbed against a poisoned dagger, every duty may shame you, every day

bring weariness and new humiliation, but let no pain or discouragement

avail to defraud you of the good fruits of true reconciliation to God

and submission to His lifelong discipline. See that you lose not both

lives, the life of the comparatively innocent and the life of the truly

penitent.

XXX.

_THE RECONCILIATION._

GEN. xlv.

"By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the

children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his

bones."--HEB. xi. 22.

It is generally by some circumstance or event which perplexes, troubles,

or gladdens us, that new thoughts regarding conduct are presented to us,

and new impulses communicated to our life. And the circumstances through

which Joseph's brethren passed during the famine not only subdued and

softened them to a genuine family feeling, but elicited in Joseph

himself a more tender affection for them than he seems at first to have

cherished. For the first time since his entrance into Egypt did he feel,

when Judah spoke so touchingly and effectively, that the family of

Israel was one; and that he himself would be reprehensible did he make

further breaches in it by carrying out his intention of detaining

Benjamin. Moved by Judah's pathetic appeal, and yielding to the generous

impulse of the moment, and being led by a right state of feeling to a

right judgment regarding duty, he claimed his brethren as brethren, and

proposed that the whole family be brought into Egypt.

The scene in which the sacred writer describes the reconciliation of

Joseph and his brothers is one of the most touching on record;--the long

estrangement so happily terminated; the caution, the doubts, the

hesitation on Joseph's part, swept away at last by the resistless tide

of long pent-up emotion; the surprise and perplexity of the brethren as

they dared now to lift their eyes and scrutinize the face of the

governor, and discerned the lighter complexion of the Hebrew, the

features of the family of Jacob, the expression of their own brother;

the anxiety with which they wait to know how he means to repay their

crime, and the relief with which they hear that he bears them no

ill-will--everything, in short, conduces to render this recognition of

the brethren interesting and affecting. That Joseph, who had controlled

his feeling in many a trying situation, should now have "wept aloud,"

needs no explanation. Tears always express a mingled feeling; at least

the tears of a man do. They may express grief, but it is grief with some

remorse in it, or it is grief passing into resignation. They may express

joy, but it is joy born of long sorrow, the joy of deliverance, joy that

can now afford to let the heart weep out the fears it has been holding

down. It is as with a kind of breaking of the heart, and apparent

unmanning of the man, that the human soul takes possession of its

greatest treasures; unexpected success and unmerited joy humble a man;

and as laughter expresses the surprise of the intellect, so tears

express the amazement of the soul when it is stormed suddenly by a great

joy. Joseph had been hardening himself to lead a solitary life in Egypt,

and it is with all this strong self-sufficiency breaking down within him

that he eyes his brethren. It is his love for them making its way

through all his ability to do without them, and sweeping away as a

flood the bulwarks he had built round his heart,--it is this that breaks

him down before them, a man conquered by his own love, and unable to

control it. It compels him to make himself known, and to possess himself

of its objects, those unconscious brethren. It is a signal instance of

the law by which love brings all the best and holiest beings into

contact with their inferiors, and, in a sense, puts them in their power,

and thus eternally provides that the superiority of those that are high

in the scale of being shall ever be at the service of those who in

themselves are not so richly endowed. The higher any being is, the more

love is in him: that is to say, the higher he is, the more surely is he

bound to all who are beneath him. If God is highest of all, it is

because there is in Him sufficiency for all His creatures, and love to

make it universally available.

It is one of our most familiar intellectual pleasures to see in the

experience of others, or to read, a lucid and moving account of emotions

identical with those which have once been our own. In reading an account

of what others have passed through, our pleasure is derived mainly from

two sources--either from our being brought, by sympathy with them and in

imagination, into circumstances we ourselves have never been placed in,

and thus artificially enlarging our sphere of life, and adding to our

experience feelings which could not have been derived from anything we

ourselves have met with; or, from our living over again, by means of

their experience, a part of our life which had great interest and

meaning to us. It may be excusable, therefore, if we divert this

narrative from its original historical significance, and use it as the

mirror in which we may see reflected an important passage or crisis in

our own spiritual history. For though some may find in it little that

reflects their own experience, others cannot fail to be reminded of

feelings with which they were very familiar when first they were

introduced to Christ, and acknowledged by Him.

1. The modes in which our Lord makes Himself known to men are various as

their lives and characters. But frequently the forerunning choice of a

sinner by Christ is discovered in such gradual and ill-understood

dealings as Joseph used with those brethren. It is the closing of a net

around them. They do not see what is driving them forward, nor whither

they are being driven; they are anxious and ill at ease; and not

comprehending what ails them, they make only ineffectual efforts for

deliverance. There is no recognition of the hand that is guiding all

this circuitous and mysterious preparatory work, nor of the eye that

affectionately watches their perplexity, nor are they aware of any

friendly ear that catches each sigh in which they seem hopelessly to

resign themselves to the relentless past from which they cannot escape.

They feel that they are left alone to make what they can now of the life

they have chosen and made for themselves; that there is floating behind

and around them a cloud bearing the very essence exhaled from their

past, and ready to burst over them; a phantom that is yet real, and that

belongs both to the spiritual and material world, and can follow them in

either. They seem to be doomed men--men who are never at all to get

disentangled from their old sin.

If any one is in this baffled and heartless condition, fearing even good

lest it turn to evil in his hand; afraid to take the money that lies in

his sack's mouth, because he feels there is a snare in it; if any one is

sensible that life has become unmanageable in his hands, and that he is

being drawn on by an unseen power which he does not understand, then let

him consider in the scene before us how such a condition ends or may

end. It took many months of doubt, and fear, and mystery to bring those

brethren to such a state of mind as made it advisable for Joseph to

disclose himself, to scatter the mystery, and relieve them of the

unaccountable uneasiness that possessed their minds. And your perplexity

will not be allowed to last longer than it is needful. But it is often

needful that we should first learn that in sinning we have introduced

into our life a baffling, perplexing element, have brought our life into

connection with inscrutable laws which we cannot control, and which we

feel may at any moment destroy us utterly. It is not from carelessness

on Christ's part that His people are not always and from the first

rejoicing in the assurance and appreciation of His love. It is His

carefulness which lays a restraining hand on the ardour of His

affection. We see that this burst of tears on Joseph's part was genuine,

we have no suspicion that he was feigning an emotion he did not feel; we

believe that his affection at last could not be restrained, that he was

fairly overcome,--can we not trust Christ for as genuine a love, and

believe that His emotion is as deep? We are, in a word, reminded by this

scene, that there is always in Christ a greater love seeking the

friendship of the sinner than there is in the sinner seeking for Christ.

The search of the sinner for Christ is always a dubious, hesitating,

uncertain groping; while on Christ's part there is a clear-seeing,

affectionate solicitude which lays joyful surprises along the sinner's

path, and enjoys by anticipation the gladness and repose which are

prepared for him in the final recognition and reconcilement.

2. In finding their brother again, those sons of Jacob found also their

own better selves which they had long lost. They had been living in a

lie, unable to look the past in the face, and so becoming more and more

false. Trying to leave their sin behind them, they always found it

rising in the path before them, and again they had to resort to some new

mode of laying this uneasy ghost. They turned away from it, busied

themselves among other people, refused to think of it, assumed all kinds

of disguise, professed to themselves that they had done no great wrong;

but nothing gave them deliverance--there was their old sin quietly

waiting for them in their tent door when they went home of an evening,

laying its hand on their shoulder in the most unlooked-for places, and

whispering in their ear at the most unwelcome seasons. A great part of

their mental energy had been spent in deleting this mark from their

memory, and yet day by day it resumed its supreme place in their life,

holding them under arrest as they secretly felt, and keeping them

reserved to judgment.

So, too, do many of us live as if yet we had not found the life eternal,

the kind of life that we can always go on with--rather as those who are

but making the best of a life which can never be very valuable, nor ever

perfect. There seem voices calling us back, assuring us we must yet

retrace our steps, that there are passages in our past with which we are

not done, that there is an inevitable humiliation and penitence awaiting

us. It is through that we can alone get back to the good we once saw and

hoped for; there were right desires and resolves in us once, views of a

well-spent life which have been forgotten and pressed out of

remembrance, but all these rise again in the presence of Christ.

Reconciled to Him and claimed by Him, all hope is renewed within us. If

He makes Himself known to us, if He claims connection with us, have we

not here the promise of all good? If He, after careful scrutiny, after

full consideration of all the circumstances, bids us claim as our

brother Him to whom all power and glory are given, ought not this to

quicken within us everything that is hopeful, and ought it not to

strengthen us for all frank acknowledgment of the past and true

humiliation on account of it?

3. A third suggestion is made by this narrative. Joseph commanded from

his presence all who might be merely curious spectators of his burst of

feeling, and might, themselves unmoved, criticise this new feature of

the governor's character. In all love there is a similar reserve. The

true friend of Christ, the man who is profoundly conscious that between

himself and Christ there is a bond unique and eternal, longs for a time

when he may enjoy greater liberty in uttering what he feels towards his

Lord and Redeemer, and when, too, Christ Himself shall by telling and

sufficient signs put it for ever beyond doubt that this love is more

than responded to. Words sufficiently impassioned have indeed been put

into our lips by men of profound spiritual feeling, but the feeling

continually weighs upon us that some more palpable mutual recognition is

desirable between persons so vitally and peculiarly knit together as

Christ and the Christian are. Such recognition, indubitable and

reciprocal, must one day take place. And when Christ Himself shall have

taken the initiative, and shall have caused us to understand that we are

verily the objects of His love, and shall have given such expression to

His knowledge of us as we cannot now receive, we on our part shall be

able to reciprocate, or at least to accept, this greatest of

possessions, the brotherly love of the Son of God. Meanwhile this

passage in Joseph's history may remind us that behind all sternness of

expression there may pulsate a tenderness that needs thus to disguise

itself; and that to those who have not yet recognised Christ, He is

better than He seems. Those brethren no doubt wonder now that even

twenty years' alienation should have so blinded them. The relaxation of

the expression from the sternness of an Egyptian governor to the

fondness of family love, the voice heard now in the familiar mother

tongue, reveal the brother; and they who have shrunk from Christ as if

He were a cold official, and who have never lifted their eyes to

scrutinize His face, are reminded that He can so make Himself known to

them that not all the wealth of Egypt would purchase from them one of

the assurances they have received from Him.

The same warm tide of feeling which carried away all that separated

Joseph from his brethren bore him on also to the decision to invite his

father's entire household into Egypt. We are reminded that the history

of Joseph in Egypt is an episode, and that Jacob is still the head of

the house, maintaining its dignity and guiding its movements. The

notices we get of him in this latter part of his history are very

characteristic. The indomitable toughness of his youth remained with him

in his old age. He was one of those old men who maintain their vigour to

the end, the energy of whose age seems to shame and overtax the prime of

common men; whose minds are still the clearest, their advice the safest,

their word waited for, their perception of the actual state of affairs

always in advance of their juniors, more modern and fully abreast of the

times in their ideas than the latest born of their children. Such an

old age we recognise in Jacob's half-scornful chiding of the

helplessness of his sons even after they had heard that there was corn

in Egypt. "Why look ye one upon another? Behold! I have heard that there

is corn in Egypt; get ye down thither and buy for us from thence."

Jacob, the man who had wrestled through life and bent all things to his

will, cannot put up with the helpless dejection of this troop of strong

men, who have no wit to devise an escape for themselves, and no

resolution to enforce upon the others any device that may occur to them.

Waiting still like children for some one else to help them, having

strength to endure but no strength to undertake the responsibility of

advising in an emergency, they are roused by their father, who has been

eyeing this condition of theirs with some curiosity and with some

contempt, and now breaks in upon it with his "Why look ye one upon

another?" It is the old Jacob, full of resources, prompt and

imperturbable, equal to every turn of fortune, and never knowing how to

yield.

Even more clearly do we see the vigour of Jacob's old age when he comes

in contact with Joseph. For many years Joseph had been accustomed to

command; he had unusual natural sagacity and a special gift of insight

from God, but he seems a child in comparison with Jacob. When he brings

his two sons to get their grandfather's blessing, Jacob sees what Joseph

has no inkling of, and peremptorily declines to follow the advice of his

wise son. With all Joseph's sagacity there were points in which his

blind father saw more clearly than he. Joseph, who could teach the

Egyptian senators wisdom, standing thus at a loss even to understand his

father, and suggesting in his ignorance futile corrections, is a picture

of the incapacity of natural affection to rise to the wisdom of God's

love, and of the finest natural discernment to anticipate God's purposes

or supply the place of a lifelong experience.

Jacob's warm-heartedness has also survived the chills and shocks of a

long lifetime. He clings now to Benjamin as once he clung to Joseph. And

as he had wrought for Rachel fourteen years, and the love he bare to her

made them seem but a few days, so for twenty years now had he remembered

Joseph who had inherited this love, and he shows by his frequent

reference to him that he was keeping his word and going down to the

grave mourning for his son. To such a man it must have been a severe

trial indeed to be left alone in his tents, deprived of all his twelve

sons; and we hear his old faith in God steadying the voice that yet

trembles with emotion as he says, "If I be bereaved of my children, I am

bereaved." It was a trial not, indeed, so painful as that of Abraham

when he lifted the knife over the life of his only son; but it was so

similar to it as inevitably to suggest it to the mind. Jacob also had to

yield up all his children, and to feel, as he sat solitary in his tent,

how utterly dependent upon God he was for their restoration; that it was

not he but God alone who could build the house of Israel.

The anxiety with which he gazed evening after evening towards the

setting sun, to descry the returning caravan, was at last relieved. But

his joy was not altogether unalloyed. His sons brought with them a

summons to shift the patriarchal encampment into Egypt--a summons which

evidently nothing would have induced Jacob to respond to had it not come

from his long-lost Joseph, and had it not thus received what he felt to

be a divine sanction. The extreme reluctance which Jacob showed to the

journey, we must be careful to refer to its true source. The Asiatics,

and especially shepherd tribes, move easily. One who thoroughly knows

the East says: "The Oriental is not afraid to go far, if he has not to

cross the sea; for, once uprooted, distance makes little difference to

him. He has no furniture to carry, for, except a carpet and a few brass

pans, he uses none. He has no trouble about meals, for he is content

with parched grain, which his wife can cook anywhere, or dried dates, or

dried flesh, or anything obtainable which will keep. He is, on a march,

careless where he sleeps, provided his family are around him--in a

stable, under a porch, in the open air. He never changes his clothes at

night, and he is profoundly indifferent to everything that the Western

man understands by 'comfort.'" But there was in Jacob's case a

peculiarity. He was called upon to abandon, for an indefinite period,

the land which God had given him as the heir of His promise. With very

great toil and not a little danger had Jacob won his way back to Canaan

from Mesopotamia; on his return he had spent the best years of his life,

and now he was resting there in his old age, having seen his children's

children, and expecting nothing but a peaceful departure to his fathers.

But suddenly the wagons of Pharaoh stand at his tent-door, and while the

parched and bare pastures bid him go to the plenty of Egypt, to which

the voice of his long-lost son invites him, he hears a summons which,

however trying, he cannot disregard.

Such an experience is perpetually reproduced. Many are they who having

at length received from God some long-expected good are quickly summoned

to relinquish it again. And while the waiting for what seems

indispensable to us is trying, it is tenfold more so to have to part

with it when at last obtained, and obtained at the cost of much besides.

That particular arrangement of our worldly circumstances which we have

long sought, we are almost immediately thrown out of. That position in

life, or that object of desire, which God Himself seems in many ways to

have encouraged us to seek, is taken from us almost as soon as we have

tasted its sweetness. The cup is dashed from our lips at the very moment

when our thirst was to be fully slaked. In such distressing

circumstances we cannot _see_ the end God is aiming at; but of this we

may be certain, that He does not wantonly annoy, or relish our

discomfiture, and that when we are compelled to resign what is partial,

it is that we may one day enjoy what is complete, and that if for the

present we have to forego much comfort and delight, this is only an

absolutely necessary step towards our permanent establishment in all

that can bless and prosper us.

It is this state of feeling which explains the words of Jacob when

introduced to Pharaoh. A recent writer, who spent some years on the

banks of the Nile and on its waters, and who mixed freely with the

inhabitants of Egypt, says: "Old Jacob's speech to Pharaoh really made

me laugh, because it is so exactly like what a Fellah says to a Pacha,

'Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been,' Jacob being a

most prosperous man, but it is manners to say all that." But Eastern

manners need scarcely be called in to explain a sentiment which we find

repeated by one who is generally esteemed the most self-sufficing of

Europeans. "I have ever been esteemed," Goethe says, "one of Fortune's

chiefest favourites; nor will I complain or find fault with the course

my life has taken. Yet, truly, there has been nothing but toil and

care; and I may say that, in all my seventy-five years, I have never

had a month of genuine comfort. It has been the perpetual rolling of a

stone, which I have always had to raise anew." Jacob's life had been

almost ceaseless disquiet and disappointment. A man who had fled his

country, who had been cheated into a marriage, who had been compelled by

his own relative to live like a slave, who was only by flight able to

save himself from a perpetual injustice, whose sons made his life

bitter,--one of them by the foulest outrage a father could suffer, two

of them by making him, as he himself said, to stink in the nostrils of

the inhabitants of the land he was trying to settle in, and all of them

by conspiring to deprive him of the child he most dearly loved--a man

who at last, when he seemed to have had experience of every form of

human calamity, was compelled by famine to relinquish the land for the

sake of which he had endured all and spent all, might surely be forgiven

a little plaintiveness in looking back upon his past. The wonder is to

find Jacob to the end unbroken, dignified, and clear-seeing, capable and

commanding, loving and full of faith.

Cordial as the reconciliation between Joseph and his brethren seemed, it

was not as thorough as might have been desired. So long, indeed, as

Jacob lived, all went well; but "when Joseph's brethren saw that their

father was dead, they said, Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will

certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him." No wonder

Joseph wept when he received their message. He wept because he saw that

he was still misunderstood and distrusted by his brethren; because he

felt, too, that had they been more generous men themselves, they would

more easily have believed in his forgiveness; and because his pity was

stirred for these men, who recognised that they were so completely in

the power of their younger brother. Joseph had passed through severe

conflicts of feeling about them, had been at great expense both of

emotion and of outward good on their account, had risked his position in

order to be able to serve them, and here is his reward! They supposed he

had been but biding his time, that his apparent forgetfulness of their

injury had been the crafty restraint of a deep-seated resentment; or, at

best, that he had been unconsciously influenced by regard for his

father, and now, when that influence was removed, the helpless condition

of his brethren might tempt him to retaliate. This exhibition of a

craven and suspicious spirit is unexpected, and must have been

profoundly saddening to Joseph. Yet here, as elsewhere, he is

magnanimous. Pity for them turns his thoughts from the injustice done to

himself. He comforts them, and speaks kindly to them, saying, Fear ye

not; I will nourish you and your little ones.

Many painful thoughts must have been suggested to Joseph by this

conduct. If, after all he had done for his brethren, they had not yet

learned to love him, but met his kindness with suspicion, was it not

probable that underneath his apparent popularity with the Egyptians

there might lie envy, or the cold acknowledgment that falls far short of

love? This sudden disclosure of the real feeling of his brethren towards

him must necessarily have made him uneasy about his other friendships.

Did every one merely make use of him, and did no one give him pure love

for his own sake? The people he had saved from famine, was there one of

them that regarded him with anything resembling personal affection?

Distrust seemed to pursue Joseph from first to last. First his own

family misunderstood and persecuted him. Then his Egyptian master had

returned his devoted service with suspicion and imprisonment. And now

again, after sufficient time for testing his character might seem to

have elapsed, he was still looked upon with distrust by those who of all

others had best reason to believe in him. But though Joseph had through

all his life been thus conversant with suspicion, cruelty, falsehood,

ingratitude, and blindness, though he seemed doomed to be always

misread, and to have his best deeds made the ground of accusation

against him, he remained not merely unsoured, but equally ready as ever

to be of service to all. The finest natures may be disconcerted and

deadened by universal distrust; characters not naturally unamiable are

sometimes embittered by suspicion; and persons who are in the main

high-minded do stoop, when stung by such treatment, to rail at the

world, or to question all generous emotion, steadfast friendship, or

unimpeachable integrity. In Joseph there is nothing of this. If ever man

had a right to complain of being unappreciated, it was he; if ever man

was tempted to give up making sacrifices for his relatives, it was he.

But through all this he bore himself with manly generosity, with simple

and persistent faith, with a dignified respect for himself and for other

men. In the ingratitude and injustice he had to endure, he only found

opportunity for a deeper unselfishness, a more God-like forbearance. And

that such may be the outcome of the sorest parts of human experience we

have one day or other need to remember. When our good is evil spoken of,

our motives suspected, our most sincere sacrifices scrutinized by an

ignorant and malicious spirit, our most substantial and well-judged acts

of kindness received with suspicion, and the love that is in them quite

rejected, it is then we have opportunity to show that to us belongs the

Christian temper that can pardon till seventy times seven, and that can

persist in loving where love meets no response, and benefits provoke no

gratitude.

How Joseph spent the years which succeeded the famine we have no means

of knowing; but the closing act of his life seemed to the narrator so

significant as to be worthy of record. "Joseph said unto his brethren, I

die: and God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto

the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. And Joseph

took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit

you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence." The Egyptians must have

chiefly been struck by the simplicity of character which this request

betokened. To the great benefactors of our country, the highest award is

reserved to be given after death. So long as a man lives, some rude

stroke of fortune or some disastrous error of his own may blast his

fame; but when his bones are laid with those who have served their

country best, a seal is set on his life, and a sentence pronounced which

the revision of posterity rarely revokes. Such honours were customary

among the Egyptians; it is from their tombs that their history can now

be written. And to none were such honours more accessible than to

Joseph. But after a life in the service of the state he retains the

simplicity of the Hebrew lad. With the magnanimity of a great and pure

soul, he passed uncontaminated through the flatteries and temptations of

court-life; and, like Moses, "esteemed the reproach of Christ greater

riches than the treasures of Egypt." He has not indulged in any

affectation of simplicity, nor has he, in the pride that apes humility,

declined the ordinary honours due to a man in his position. He wears

the badges of office, the robe and the gold necklace, but these things

do not reach his spirit. He has lived in a region in which such honours

make no deep impression; and in his death he shows where his heart has

been. The small voice of God, spoken centuries ago to his forefathers,

deafens him to the loud acclaim with which the people do him homage.

By later generations this dying request of Joseph's was looked upon as

one of the most remarkable instances of faith. For many years there had

been no new revelation. The rising generations that had seen no man with

whom God had spoken, were little interested in the land which was said

to be theirs, but which they very well knew was infested by fierce

tribes who, on at least one occasion during this period, inflicted

disastrous defeat on one of the boldest of their own tribes. They were,

besides, extremely attached to the country of their adoption; they

luxuriated in its fertile meadows and teeming gardens, which kept them

supplied at little cost of labour with delicacies unknown on the hills

of Canaan. This oath, therefore, which Joseph made them swear, may have

revived the drooping hopes of the small remnant who had any of his own

spirit. They saw that he, their most sagacious man, lived and died in

full assurance that God would visit His people. And through all the

terrible bondage they were destined to suffer, the bones of Joseph, or

rather his embalmed body, stood as the most eloquent advocate of God's

faithfulness, ceaselessly reminding the despondent generations of the

oath which God would yet enable them to fulfil. As often as they felt

inclined to give up all hope and the last surviving Israelitish

peculiarity, there was the unburied coffin remonstrating; Joseph still,

even when dead, refusing to let his dust mingle with Egyptian earth.

And thus, as Joseph had been their pioneer who broke out a way for them

into Egypt, so did he continue to hold open the gate and point the way

back to Canaan. The brethren had sold him into this foreign land,

meaning to bury him for ever; he retaliated by requiring that the tribes

should restore him to the land from which he had been expelled. Few men

have opportunity of showing so noble a revenge; fewer still, having the

opportunity, would so have used it. Jacob had been carried up to Canaan

as soon as he was dead: Joseph declines this exceptional treatment, and

prefers to share the fortunes of his brethren, and will then only enter

on the promised land when all his people can go with him. As in life, so

in death, he took a large view of things, and had no feeling that the

world ended in him. His career had taught him to consider national

interests; and now, on his death-bed, it is from the point of view of

his people that he looks at the future.

Several passages in the life of Joseph have shown us that where the

Spirit of Christ is present, many parts of the conduct will suggest, if

they do not actually resemble, acts in the life of Christ. The attitude

towards the future in which Joseph sets his people as he leaves them,

can scarcely fail to suggest the attitude which Christians are called to

assume. The prospect which the Hebrews had of fulfilling their oath grew

increasingly faint, but the difficulties in the way of its performance

must only have made them more clearly see that they depended on God for

entrance on the promised inheritance. And so may the difficulty of our

duties as Christ's followers measure for us the amount of grace God has

provided for us. The commands that make you sensible of your weakness,

and bring to light more clearly than ever how unfit for good you are,

are witnesses to you that God will visit you and enable you to fulfil

the oath He has required you to take. The children of Israel could not

suppose that a man so wise as Joseph had ended his life with a childish

folly, when he made them swear this oath, and could not but renew their

hope that the day would come when his wisdom would be justified by their

ability to discharge it. Neither ought it to be beyond our belief that,

in requiring from us such and such conduct, our Lord has kept in view

our actual condition and its possibilities, and that His commands are

our best guide towards a state of permanent felicity. He that aims

always at the performance of the oath he has taken, will assuredly find

that God will not stultify Himself by failing to support him.

XXXI.

_THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES._

GENESIS xlviii. and xlix.

Jacob's blessing of his sons marks the close of the patriarchal

dispensation. Henceforth the channel of God's blessing to man does not

consist of one person only, but of a people or nation. It is still _one

seed_, as Paul reminds us, a unit that God will bless, but this unit is

now no longer a single person--as Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob--but one

people, composed of several parts, and yet one whole; equally

representative of Christ, as the patriarchs were, and of equal effect

every way in receiving God's blessing and handing it down until Christ

came. The Old Testament Church, quite as truly as the New, formed one

whole with Christ. Apart from Him it had no meaning, and would have had

no existence. It was the promised seed, always growing more and more to

its perfect development in Christ. As the promise was kept to Abraham

when Isaac was born, and as Isaac was truly the promised seed--in so far

as he was a part of the series that led on to Christ, and was given in

fulfilment of the promise that promised Christ to the world--so all

through the history of Israel we must bear in mind that in them God is

fulfilling this same promise, and that they are the promised seed in so

far as they are one with Christ. And this interprets to us all those

passages of the prophets regarding which men have disputed whether they

are to be applied to Israel or to Christ: passages in which God

addresses Israel in such words as, "Behold My servant," "Mine elect,"

and so forth, and in the interpretation of which it has been thought

sufficient proof that they do not apply to Christ, to prove that they do

apply to Israel; whereas, on the principle just laid down, it might much

more safely be argued that because they apply to Israel, therefore they

apply to Christ. And it is at this point--where Israel distributes among

his sons the blessing which heretofore had all lodged in himself--that

we see the first multiplication of Christ's representatives; the

mediation going on no longer through individuals, but through a nation;

and where individuals are still chosen by God, as commonly they are, for

the conveyance of God's communications to earth, these individuals,

whether priests or prophets, are themselves but the official

representatives of the nation.

As the patriarchal dispensation ceases, it secures to the tribes all the

blessing it has itself contained. Every father desires to leave to his

sons whatever he has himself found helpful, but as they gather round his

dying bed, or as he sits setting his house in order, and considering

what portion is appropriate for each, he recognises that to some of them

it is quite useless to bequeath the most valuable parts of his property,

while in others he discerns a capacity which promises the improvement of

all that is entrusted to it. And from the earliest times the various

characters of the tribes were destined to modify the blessing conveyed

to them by their father. The blessing of Israel is now distributed, and

each receives what each can take; and while in some of the individual

tribes there may seem to be very little of blessing at all, yet, taken

together, they form a picture of the common outstanding features of

human nature, and of that nature as acted upon by God's blessing, and

forming together one body or Church. A peculiar interest attaches to the

history of some nations, and is not altogether absent from our own, from

the precision with which we can trace the character of families,

descending often with the same unmistakable lineaments from father to

son for many generations.[2] One knows at once to what families to look

for restless and turbulent spirits, ready for conspiracy and revolution;

and one knows also where to seek steady and faithful loyalty,

public-spiritedness, or native ability. And in Israel's national

character there was room for the great distinguishing features of the

tribes, and to show the richness and variety with which the promise of

God could fulfil itself wherever it was received. The distinguishing

features which Jacob depicts in the blessings of his sons are

necessarily veiled under the poetic figures of prophecy, and spoken of

as they would reveal themselves in worldly matters; but these features

were found in all the generations of the tribes, and displayed

themselves in things spiritual also. For a man has not two characters,

but one; and what he is in the world, that he is in his religion. In our

own country, it is seen how the forms of worship, and even the doctrines

believed, and certainly the modes of religious thought and feeling,

depend on the natural character, and the natural character on the local

situation of the respective sections of the community. No doubt in a

country like ours, where men so constantly migrate from place to place,

and where one common literature tends to mould us all to the same way of

thinking, you do get men of all kinds in every place; yet even among

ourselves the character of a place is generally still visible, and

predominates over all that mingles with it. Much more must this

character have been retained in a country where each man could trace his

ancestry up to the father of the tribe, and cultivated with pride the

family characteristics, and had but little intercourse, either literary

or personal, with other minds and other manners. As we know by dialect

and by the manners of the people when we pass into a new country, so

must the Israelite have known by the eye and ear when he had crossed the

county frontier, when he was conversing with a Benjamite, and when with

a descendant of Judah. We are not therefore to suppose that any of these

utterances of Jacob are mere geographical predictions, or that they

depict characteristics which might appear in civil life, but not in

religion and the Church, or that they would die out with the first

generation.

In these blessings, therefore, we have the history of the Church in its

most interesting form. In these sons gathered round him, the patriarch

sees his own nature reflected piece by piece, and he sees also the

general outline of all that must be produced by such natures as these

men have. The whole destiny of Israel is here in germ, and the spirit of

prophecy in Jacob sees and declares it. It has often been remarked[3]

that as a man draws near to death, he seems to see many things in a much

clearer light, and especially gets glimpses into the future, which are

hidden from others.

"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,

Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made."

Being nearer to eternity, he instinctively measures things by its

standard, and thus comes nearer a just valuation of all things before

his mind, and can better distinguish reality from appearance. Jacob has

studied these sons of his for fifty years, and has had his acute

perception of character painfully enough called to exercise itself on

them. He has all his life long had a liking for analysing men's inner

life, knowing that, when he understands that, he can better use them for

his own ends; and these sons of his own have cost him thought enough

over and above that sometimes penetrating interest which a father will

take in the growth of a son's character; and now he knows them

thoroughly, understands their temptations, their weaknesses, their

capabilities, and, as a wise head of a house, can, with delicate and

unnoticed skill, balance the one against the other, ward off awkward

collisions, and prevent the evil from destroying the good. This

knowledge of Jacob prepares him for being the intelligent agent by whom

God predicts in outline the future of His Church.

One cannot but admire, too, the faith which enables Jacob to apportion

to his sons the blessings of a land which had not been much of a

resting-place to himself, and regarding the occupation of which his sons

might have put to him some very difficult questions. And we admire this

dignified faith the more on reflecting that it has often been very

grievously lacking in our own case--that we have felt almost ashamed of

having so little of a present tangible kind to offer, and of being

obliged to speak only of invisible and future blessings; to set a

spiritual consolation over against a worldly grief; to point a man

whose fortunes are ruined to an eternal inheritance; or to speak to one

who knows himself quite in the power of sin of a remedy which has often

seemed illusory to ourselves. Some of us have got so little comfort or

strength from religion ourselves, that we have no heart to offer it to

others; and most of us have a feeling that we should seem to trifle were

we to offer invisible aid against very visible calamity. At least we

feel that we are doing a daring thing in making such an offer, and can

scarce get over the desire that we had something to speak of which sight

could appreciate, and which did not require the exercise of faith. Again

and again the wish rises within us that to the sick man we could bring

health as well as the promise of forgiveness, and that to the poor we

could grant an earthly, while we make known a heavenly, inheritance. One

who has experienced these scruples, and known how hard it is to get rid

of them, will know also how to honour the faith of Jacob, by which he

assumes the right to bless Pharaoh--though he is himself a mere

sojourner by sufferance in Pharaoh's land, and living on his bounty--and

by which he gathers his children round him and portions out to them a

land which seemed to have been most barren to himself, and which now

seemed quite beyond his reach. The enjoyments of it, which he himself

had not very deeply tasted, he yet knew were real; and if there were a

look of scepticism, or of scorn, on the face of any one of his sons; if

the unbelief of any received the prophetic utterances as the ravings of

delirium, or the fancies of an imbecile and worn-out mind going back to

the scenes of its youth, in Jacob himself there was so simple and

unsuspecting a faith in God's promise, that he dealt with the land as if

it were the only portion worth bequeathing to his sons, as if every

Canaanite were already cast out of it, and as if he knew his sons could

never be tempted by the wealth of Egypt to turn with contempt from the

land of promise. And if we would attain to this boldness of his, and be

able to speak of spiritual and future blessings as very substantial and

valuable, we must ourselves learn to make much of God's promise, and

leave no taint of unbelief in our reception of it.

And often we are rebuked by finding that when we do offer things

spiritual, even those who are wrapped in earthly comforts appreciate and

accept the better gifts. So it was in Joseph's case. No doubt the

highest posts in Egypt were open to his sons; they might have been

naturalised, as he himself had been, and, throwing in their lot with the

land of their adoption, might have turned to their advantage the rank

their father held, and the reputation he had earned. But Joseph turns

from this attractive prospect, brings them to his father, and hands them

over to the despised shepherd-life of Israel. One need scarcely point

out how great a sacrifice this was on Joseph's part. So universally

acknowledged and legitimate a desire is it to pass to one's children the

honour achieved by a life of exertion, that states have no higher

rewards to confer on their most useful servants than a title which their

descendants may wear. But Joseph would not suffer his children to risk

the loss of their share in God's peculiar blessing, not for the most

promising openings in life, or the highest civil honours. If the

thoroughly open identification of them with the shepherds, and their

profession of a belief in a distant inheritance, which must have made

them appear madmen in the eyes of the Egyptians, if this was to cut

them off from worldly advancement, Joseph was not careful of this, for

resolved he was that, at any cost, they should be among God's people.

And his faith received its reward; the two tribes that sprang from him

received about as large a portion of the promised land as fell to the

lot of all the other tribes put together.

You will observe that Ephraim and Manasseh were adopted as sons of

Jacob. Jacob tells Joseph, "They shall be mine," not my grandsons, but

as Reuben and Simeon. No other sons whom Joseph might have were to be

received into this honour, but these two were to take their place on a

level with their uncles as heads of tribes, so that Joseph is

represented through the whole history by the two populous and powerful

tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. No greater honour could have been put on

Joseph, nor any more distinct and lasting recognition made of the

indebtedness of his family to him, and of how he had been as a father

bringing new life to his brethren, than this, that his sons should be

raised to the rank of heads of tribes, on a level with the immediate

sons of Jacob. And no higher honour could have been put on the two lads

themselves than that they should thus be treated as if they were their

father Joseph--as if they had his worth and his rank. He is merged in

them, and all that he has earned is, throughout the history, to be

found, not in his own name, but in theirs. It all proceeds from him; but

his enjoyment is found in their enjoyment, his worth acknowledged in

their fruitfulness. Thus did God familiarise the Jewish mind through its

whole history with the idea, if they chose to think and have ideas, of

adoption, and of an adoption of a peculiar kind, of an adoption where

already there was an heir who, by this adoption, has his name and worth

merged in the persons now received into his place. Ephraim and Manasseh

were not received alongside of Joseph, but each received what Joseph

himself might have had, and Joseph's name as a tribe was henceforth only

to be found in these two. This idea was fixed in such a way, that for

centuries it was steeping into the minds of men, so that they might not

be astonished if God should in some other case, say the case of His own

Son, adopt men into the rank He held, and let His estimate of the worth

of His Son, and the honour He puts upon Him, be seen in the adopted.

This being so, we need not be alarmed if men tell us that imputation is

a mere legal fiction, or human invention; a legal fiction it may be, but

in the case before us it was the never-disputed foundation of very

substantial blessings to Ephraim and Manasseh; and we plead for nothing

more than that God would act with us as here He did act with these two,

that He would make us His direct heirs, make us His own sons, and give

us what He who presents us to Him to receive His blessing did earn, and

merits at the Father's hand.

We meet with these crossed hands of blessing frequently in Scripture;

the younger son blessed above the elder--as was needful, lest grace

should become confounded with nature, and the belief gradually grow up

in men's minds that natural effects could never be overcome by grace,

and that in every respect grace waited upon nature. And these crossed

hands we meet still; for how often does God quite reverse _our_ order,

and bless most that about which we had less concern, and seem to put a

slight on that which has engrossed our best affection. It is so, often

in precisely the way in which Joseph found it so; the son whose youth

is most anxiously cared for, to whom the interests of the younger

members of the family are sacrificed, and who is commended to God

continually to receive His right-hand blessing, this son seems neither

to receive nor to dispense much blessing; but the younger, less thought

of, left to work his own way, is favoured by God, and becomes the

comfort and support of his parents when the elder has failed of his

duty. And in the case of much that we hold dear, the same rule is seen;

a pursuit we wish to be successful in we can make little of, and are

thrown back from continually, while something else into which we have

thrown ourselves almost accidentally prospers in our hand and blesses

us. Again and again, for years together, we put forward some cherished

desire to God's right hand, and are displeased, like Joseph, that still

the hand of greater blessing should pass to some other thing. Does God

not know what is oldest with us, what has been longest at our hearts,

and is dearest to us? Certainly He does: "I know it, My son, I know it,"

He answers to all our expostulations. It is not because He does not

understand or regard your predilections, your natural and excusable

preferences, that He sometimes refuses to gratify your whole desire, and

pours upon you blessings of a kind somewhat different from these you

most earnestly covet. He will give you the whole that Christ hath

merited; but for the application and distribution of that grace and

blessing you must be content to trust Him. You may be at a loss to know

why He does no more to deliver you from some sin, or why He does not

make you more successful in your efforts to aid others, or why, while He

so liberally prospers you in one part of your condition, you get so much

less in another that is far nearer your heart; but God does what He

will with His own, and if you do not find in one point the whole

blessing and prosperity you think should flow from such a Mediator as

you have, you may only conclude that what is lacking there will

elsewhere be found more wisely bestowed. And is it not a perpetual

encouragement to us that God does not merely crown what nature has

successfully begun, that it is not the likely and the naturally good

that are most blessed, but that God hath chosen the foolish things of

the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to

confound the things that are mighty; and base things of the world and

things which are despised hath God chosen, yea, and things which are

not, to bring to nought things that are?

In Reuben, the first-born, conscience must have been sadly at war with

hope as he looked at the blind, but expressive, face of his father. He

may have hoped that his sin had not been severely thought of by his

father, or that the father's pride in his first-born would prompt him to

hide, though it could not make him forget it. Probably the gross offence

had not been made known to the family. At least, the words "he went up"

may be understood as addressed in explanation to the brethren. It may

indeed have been that the blind old man, forcibly recalling the

long-past transgression, is here uttering a mournful, regretful

soliloquy, rather than addressing any one. It may be that these words

were uttered to himself as he went back upon the one deed that had

disclosed to him his son's real character, and rudely hurled to the

ground all the hopes he had built up for his first-born. Yet there is no

reason to suppose, on the other hand, that the sin had been previously

known or alluded to in the family. Reuben's hasty, passionate nature

could not understand that if Jacob had felt that sin of his deeply, he

should not have shown his resentment; he had stunned his father with the

heavy blow, and because he did not cry out and strike him in return, he

thought him little hurt. So do shallow natures tremble for a night after

their sin, and when they find that the sun rises and men greet them as

cordially as before, and that no hand lays hold on them from the past,

they think little more of their sin--do not understand that fatal calm

that precedes the storm. Had the memory of Reuben's sin survived in

Jacob's mind all the sad events that had since happened, and all the

stirring incidents of the emigration and the new life in Egypt? Could

his father at the last hour, and after so many thronged years, and

before his brethren, recall the old sin? He is relieved and confirmed in

his confidence by the first words of Jacob, words ascribing to him his

natural position, a certain conspicuous dignity too, and power such as

one may often see produced in men by occupying positions of authority,

though in their own character there be weakness. But all the excellence

that Jacob ascribes to Reuben serves only to embitter the doom

pronounced upon him. Men seem often to expect that a future can be

_given_ to them irrespective of what they themselves are, that a series

of blessings and events might be prepared for them, and made over to

them; whereas every man's future must be made by himself, and is already

in great part formed by the past. It was a vain expectation of Reuben to

expect that he, the impetuous, unstable, superficial son, could have the

future of a deep, and earnest, and dutiful nature, or that his children

should derive no taint from their parent, but be as the children of

Joseph. No man's future need be altogether a doom to him, for God may

bless to him the evil fruit his life has borne; but certainly no man

need look for a future which has no relation to his own character. His

future will always be made up of _his_ deeds, _his_ feelings, and the

circumstances which _his_ desires have brought him into.

The future of Reuben was of a negative, blank kind--"Thou shalt _not_

excel;" his unstable character must empty it of all great success. And

to many a heart since have these words struck a chill, for to many they

are as a mirror suddenly held up before them. They see themselves when

they look on the tossing sea, rising and pointing to the heavens with

much noise, but only to sink back again to the same everlasting level.

Men of brilliant parts and great capacity are continually seen to be

lost to society by instability of purpose. Would they only pursue one

direction, and concentrate their energies on one subject, they might

become true heirs of promise, blessed and blessing; but they seem to

lose relish for every pursuit on the first taste of success--all their

energy seems to have boiled over and evaporated in the first glow, and

sinks as the water that has just been noisily boiling when the fire is

withdrawn from under it. No impression made upon them is permanent: like

water, they are plastic, easily impressible, but utterly incapable of

retaining an impression; and therefore, like water, they have a downward

tendency, or at the best are but retained in their place by pressure

from without, and have no eternal power of growth. And the misery of

this character is often increased by the _desire_ to excel which

commonly accompanies instability. It is generally this very desire which

prompts a man to hurry from one aim to another, to give up one path to

excellence when he sees that other men are making way upon another:

having no internal convictions of his own, he is guided mostly by the

successes of other men, the most dangerous of all guides. So that such a

man has all the bitterness of an eager desire doomed never to be

satisfied. Conscious to himself of capacity for something, feeling in

him the excellency of power, and having that "excellency of dignity," or

graceful and princely refinement, which the knowledge of many things,

and intercourse with many kinds of people, have imparted to him, he

feels all the more that pervading weakness, that greedy, lustful craving

for all kinds of priority, and for enjoying all the various advantages

which other men severally enjoy, which will not let him finally choose

and adhere to his own line of things, but distracts him by a thousand

purposes which ever defeat one another.[4]

The sin of the next oldest sons was also remembered against them, and

remembered apparently for the same reason--because the character was

expressed in it. The massacre of the Shechemites was not an accidental

outrage that any other of the sons of Jacob might equally have

perpetrated, but the most glaring of a number of expressions of a fierce

and cruel disposition in these two men. In Jacob's prediction of their

future, he seems to shrink with horror from his own progeny--like her

who dreamt she would give birth to a firebrand. He sees the possibility

of the direst results flowing from such a temper, and, under God,

provides against these by scattering the tribes, and thus weakening

their power for evil. They had been banded together so as the more

easily and securely to accomplish their murderous purposes. "Simeon and

Levi are brethren"--showing a close affinity, and seeking one another's

society and aid, but it is for bad purposes; and therefore they must be

divided in Jacob and scattered in Israel. This was accomplished by the

tribe of Levi being distributed over all the other tribes as the

ministers of religion. The fiery zeal, the bold independence, and the

pride of being a distinct people, which had been displayed in the

slaughter of the Shechemites, might be toned down and turned to good

account when the sword was taken out of their hand. Qualities such as

these, which produce the most disastrous results when fit instruments

can be found, and when men of like disposition are suffered to band

themselves together, may, when found in the individual and kept in check

by circumstances and dissimilar dispositions, be highly beneficial.

In the sin, Levi seems to have been the moving spirit, Simeon the

abetting tool, and in the punishment, it is the more dangerous tribe

that is scattered, so that the other is left companionless. In the

blessings of Moses, the tribe of Simeon is passed over in silence; and

that the tribe of Levi should have been so used for God's immediate

service stands as evidence that punishments, however severe and

desolating, even threatening something bordering on extinction, may yet

become blessings to God's people. The sword of murder was displaced in

Levi's hand by the knife of sacrifice; their fierce revenge against

sinners was converted into hostility against sin; their apparent zeal

for the forms of their religion was consecrated to the service of the

tabernacle and temple; their fanatical pride, which prompted them to

treat all other people as the offscouring of the earth, was informed by

a better spirit, and used for the upbuilding and instruction of the

people of Israel. In order to understand why this tribe, of all others,

should have been chosen for the service of the sanctuary and for the

instruction of the people, we must not only recognise how their being

scattered in punishment of their sin over all the land fitted them to be

the educators of the nation and the representatives of all the tribes,

but also we must consider that the sin itself which Levi had committed

broke the one command which men had up till this time received from the

mouth of God; no law had as yet been published but that which had been

given to Noah and his sons regarding bloodshed, and which was given in

circumstances so appalling, and with sanctions so emphatic, that it

might ever have rung in men's ears, and stayed the hand of the murderer.

In saying, "At the hand of every man's brother will I require the life

of man," God had shown that human life was to be counted sacred. He

Himself had swept the race from the face of the earth, but adding this

command immediately after, He showed all the more forcibly that

punishment was His own prerogative, and that none but those appointed by

Him might shed blood--"Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord." To take

private revenge, as Levi did, was to take the sword out of God's hand,

and to say that God was not careful enough of justice, and but a poor

guardian of right and wrong in the world; and to destroy human life in

the wanton and cruel manner in which Levi had destroyed the Shechemites,

and to do it under colour and by the aid of religious zeal, was to God

the most hateful of sins. But none can know the hatefulness of a sin so

distinctly as he who has fallen into it, and is enduring the punishment

of it penitently and graciously, and therefore Levi was of all others

the best fitted to be entrusted with those sacrificial symbols which set

forth the value of all human life, and especially of the life of God's

own Son. Very humbling must it have been for the Levite who remembered

the history of his tribe to be used by God as the hand of His justice on

the victims that were brought in substitution for that which was so

precious in the sight of God.

The blessing of Judah is at once the most important and the most

difficult to interpret in the series. There is enough in the history of

Judah himself, and there is enough in the subsequent history of the

tribe, to justify the ascription to him of all lion-like qualities--a

kingly fearlessness, confidence, power, and success; in action a

rapidity of movement and might that make him irresistible, and in repose

a majestic dignity of bearing. As the serpent is the cognisance of Dan,

the wolf of Benjamin, the hind of Naphtali, so is the lion of the tribe

of Judah. He scorns to gain his end by a serpentine craft, and is

himself easily taken in; he does not ravin like a wolf, merely

plundering for the sake of booty, but gives freely and generously, even

to the sacrifice of his own person: nor has he the mere graceful and

ineffective swiftness of the hind, but the rushing onset of the lion--a

character which, more than any other, men reverence and admire--"Judah,

_thou_ art he whom thy brethren shall praise"--and a character which,

more than any other, fits a man to take the lead and rule. If there were

to be kings in Israel, there could be little doubt from which tribe they

could best be chosen; a wolf of the tribe of Benjamin, like Saul, not

only hung on the rear of retreating Philistines and spoiled them, but

made a prey of his own people, and it is in David we find the true king,

the man who more than any other satisfies men's ideal of the prince to

whom they will pay homage;--falling indeed into grievous error and sin,

like his forefather, but, like him also, right at heart, so generous and

self-sacrificing that men served him with the most devoted loyalty, and

were willing rather to dwell in caves with him than in palaces with any

other.

The kingly supremacy of Judah was here spoken of in words which have

been the subject of as prolonged and violent contention as any others in

the Word of God. "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a

lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come." These words are very

generally understood to mean that Judah's supremacy would continue until

it culminated or flowered into the personal reign of Shiloh; in other

words, that Judah's sovereignty was to be perpetuated in the person of

Jesus Christ. So that this prediction is but the first whisper of that

which was afterwards so distinctly declared, that David's seed should

sit on the throne for ever and ever. It was not accomplished in the

letter, any more than the promise to David was; the tribe of Judah

cannot in any intelligible sense be said to have had rulers of her own

up to the coming of Christ, or for some centuries previous to that date.

For those who would quickly judge God and His promise by what they could

see in their own day, there was enough to provoke them to challenge God

for forgetting His promise. But in due time _the_ King of men, He to

whom all nations have gathered, did spring from this tribe; and need it

be said that the very fact of His appearance proved that the supremacy

had not departed from Judah? This prediction, then, partook of the

character of very many of the Old Testament prophecies; there was

sufficient fulfilment in the letter to seal, as it were, the promise,

and give men a token that it was being accomplished, and yet so

mysterious a falling short, as to cause men to look beyond the literal

fulfilment, on which alone their hopes had at first rested, to some far

higher and more perfect spiritual fulfilment.

But not only has it been objected that the sceptre departed from Judah

long before Christ came, and that therefore the word Shiloh cannot refer

to Him, but also it has been truly said that wherever else the word

occurs it is the name of a town--that town, viz., where the ark for a

long time was stationed, and from which the allotment of territory was

made to the various tribes; and the prediction has been supposed to mean

that Judah should be the leading tribe till the land was entered. Many

objections to this naturally occur, and need not be stated. But it comes

to be an inquiry of some interest, How much information regarding a

personal Messiah did the brethren receive from this prophecy? A question

very difficult indeed to answer. The word Shiloh means "peace-making,"

and if they understood this as a proper name, they must have thought of

a person such as Isaiah designates as the Prince of Peace--a name it was

similar to that wherewith David called his son Solomon, in the

expectation that the results of his own lifetime of disorder and battle

would be reaped by his successor in a peaceful and prosperous reign. It

can scarcely be thought likely, indeed, that this single term "Shiloh,"

which might be applied to many things besides a person, should give to

the sons of Jacob any distinct idea of a personal Deliverer; but it

might be sufficient to keep before their eyes, and specially before the

tribe of Judah, that the aim and consummation of all lawgiving and

ruling was peace. And there was certainly contained in this blessing an

assurance that the purpose of Judah would not be accomplished, and

therefore that the existence of Judah as a tribe would not terminate,

until peace had been through its means brought into the world: thus was

the assurance given, that the productive power of Judah should not fail

until out of that tribe there had sprung that which should give peace.

But to us who have seen the prediction accomplished, it plainly enough

points to _the_ Lion of the tribe of Judah, who in His own person

combined all kingly qualities. In Him we are taught by this prediction

to discover once more the single Person who stands out on the page of

this world's history as satisfying men's ideal of what their King should

be, and of how the race should be represented;--the One who without any

rival stands in the mind's eye as that for which the best hopes of men

were waiting, still feeling that the race could do more than it had

done, and never satisfied but in Him.

Zebulun, the sixth and last of Leah's sons, was so called because said

Leah, "Now will my husband _dwell with me_" (such being the meaning of

the name), "for I have borne him six sons." All that is predicted

regarding this tribe is that his _dwelling_ should be by the sea, and

near the Ph[oe]nician city Zidon. This is not to be taken as a strict

geographical definition of the tract of country occupied by Zebulun, as

we see when we compare it with the lot assigned to it and marked out in

the Book of Joshua; but though the border of the tribe did not reach to

Zidon, and though it can only have been a mere tongue of land belonging

to it that ran down to the Mediterranean shore, yet the situation

ascribed to it is true to its character as a tribe that had commercial

relations with the Ph[oe]nicians, and was of a decidedly mercantile

turn. We find this same feature indicated in the blessing of Moses:

"Rejoice, Zebulun, in thy _going out_, and Issachar in thy

tents"--Zebulun having the enterprise of a seafaring community, and

Issachar the quiet bucolic contentment of an agricultural or pastoral

population: Zebulun always restlessly eager for emigration or commerce,

for _going out_ of one kind or other; Issachar satisfied to live and die

in his own tents. It is still, therefore, character rather than

geographical position that is here spoken of--though it is a trait of

character that is peculiarly dependent on geographical position: we, for

example, because islanders, having become the maritime power and the

merchants of the world; not being shut off from other nations by the

encompassing sea, but finding paths by it equally in all directions

ready provided for every kind of traffic.

Zebulun, then, was to represent the commerce of Israel, its _outgoing_

tendency; was to supply a means of communication and bond of connection

with the world outside, so that through it might be conveyed to the

nations what was saving in Israel, and that what Israel needed from

other lands might also find entrance. In the Church also, this is a

needful quality: for our well-being there must ever exist among us those

who are not afraid to launch on the wide and pathless sea of opinion;

those in whose ears its waves have from their childhood sounded with a

fascinating invitation, and who at last, as if possessed by some spirit

of unrest, loose from the firm earth, and go in quest of lands not yet

discovered, or are impelled to see for themselves what till now they

have believed on the testimony of others. It is not for all men to quit

the shore, and risk themselves in the miseries and disasters of so

comfortless and hazardous a life; but happy the people which possesses,

from one generation to another, men who must see with their own eyes,

and to whose restless nature the discomforts and dangers of an unsettled

life have a charm. It is not the instability of Reuben that we have in

these men, but the irrepressible longing of the born seaman, who _must_

lift the misty veil of the horizon and penetrate its mystery. And we are

not to condemn, even when we know we should not imitate, men who cannot

rest satisfied with the ground on which we stand, but venture into

regions of speculation, of religious thought which we have never

trodden, and may deem hazardous. The nourishment we receive is not all

native-grown; there are views of truth which may very profitably be

imported from strange and distant lands; and there is no land, no

province of thought, from which we may not derive what may

advantageously be mixed with our own ideas; no direction in which a

speculative mind can go in which it may not find something which may

give a fresh zest to what we already use, or be a real addition to our

knowledge. No doubt men who refuse to confine themselves to one way of

viewing truth--men who venture to go close to persons of very different

opinions from their own, who determine for themselves to prove all

things, who have no very special love for what they were native to and

originally taught, who show rather a taste for strange and new

opinions--these persons live a life of great hazard, and in the end are

generally, like men who have been much at sea, unsettled; they have not

fixed opinions, and are in themselves, as individual men,

unsatisfactory and unsatisfied; but still they have done good to the

community, by bringing to us ideas and knowledge which otherwise we

could not have obtained. Such men God gives us to widen our views; to

prevent us from thinking that we have the best of everything; to bring

us to acknowledge that others, who perhaps in the main are not so

favoured as ourselves, are yet possessed of some things we ourselves

would be the better of. And though these men must themselves necessarily

hang loosely, scarcely attached very firmly to any part of the Church,

like a seafaring population, and often even with a border running very

close to heathenism, yet let us own that the Church has need of

such--that without them the different sections of the Church would know

too little of one another, and too little of the facts of this world's

life. And as the seafaring population of a country might be expected to

show less interest in the soil of their native land than others, and yet

we know that in point of fact we are dependent on no class of our

population so much for leal patriotism, and for the defence of our

country, so one has observed that the Church also must make similar use

of her Zebuluns--of men who, by their very habit of restlessly

considering all views of truth which are alien to our own ways of

thinking, have become familiar with, and better able to defend us

against, the error that mingles with these views.

Issachar receives from his father a character which few would be proud

of or would envy, but which many are very content to bear. As the strong

ass that has its stall and its provender provided can afford to let the

free beasts of the forest vaunt their liberty, so there is a very

numerous class of men who have no care to assert their dignity as human

beings, or to agitate regarding their rights as citizens, so long as

their obscurity and servitude provide them with physical comforts, and

leave them free of heavy responsibilities. They prefer a life of ease

and plenty to a life of hardship and glory. They are not lazy nor idle,

but are quite willing to use their strength so long as they are not

overdriven out of their sleekness. They have neither ambition nor

enterprise, and willingly bow their shoulders to bear, and become the

servants of those who will free them from the anxiety of planning and

managing, and give them a fair and regular remuneration for their

labour. This is not a noble nature, but in a world in which ambition so

frequently runs through a thorny and difficult path to a disappointing

and shameful end, this disposition has much to say in its own defence.

It will often accredit itself with unchallengeable common sense, and

will maintain that it alone enjoys life and gets the good of it. They

will tell you they are the only true utilitarians, that to be one's own

master only brings cares, and that the degradation of servitude is only

an idea; that _really_ servants are quite as well off as masters. Look

at them: the one is as a strong, powerful, well-cared-for animal, his

work but a pleasant exercise to him, and when it is over never following

him into his rest; he eats the good of the land, and has what all seem

to be in vain striving for, rest and contentment: the other, the master,

has indeed his position, but that only multiplies his duties; he has

wealth, but that proverbially only increases his cares and the mouths

that are to consume it; it is _he_ who has the air of a bondsman, and

never, meet him when you may, seems wholly at ease and free from care.

Yet, after all that can be said in favour of the bargain an Issachar

makes, and however he may be satisfied to rest, and in a quiet, peaceful

way enjoy life, men feel that at the best there is something despicable

about such a character. He gives his labour and is fed, he pays his

tribute and is protected; but men feel that they ought to meet the

dangers, responsibilities, and difficulties of life in their own

persons, and at first hand, and not buy themselves off so from the

burden of individual self-control and responsibility. The animal

enjoyment of this life and its physical comforts may be a very good

ingredient in a national character: it might be well for Israel to have

this patient, docile mass of strength in its midst: it may be well for

our country that there are among us not only men eager for the highest

honours and posts, but a great multitude of men perhaps equally

serviceable and capable, but whose desires never rise beyond the

ordinary social comforts; the contentedness of such, even though

reprehensible, tempers or balances the ambition of the others, and when

it comes into personal contact rebukes its feverishness. They, as well

as the other parts of society, have amidst their error a truth--the

truth that the ideal world in which ambition, and hope, and imagination

live is not everything; that the material has also a reality, and that

though hope does bless mankind, yet attainment is also something, even

though it be a little. Yet this truth is not the whole truth, and is

only useful as an ingredient, as a part, not as the whole; and when we

fall from any high ideal of human life which we have formed, and begin

to find comfort and rest in the mere physical good things of this world,

we may well despise ourselves. There is a pleasantness still in the land

that appeals to us all; a luxury in observing the risks and struggles

of others while ourselves secure and at rest; a desire to make life

easy, and to shirk the responsibility and toil that public-spiritedness

entails. Yet of what tribe has the Church more cause to complain than of

those persons who seem to imagine that they have done enough when they

have joined the Church and received their own inheritance to enjoy; who

are alive to no emergency, nor awake to the need of others; who have no

idea at all of their being a part of the community, for which, as well

as for themselves, there are duties to discharge; who couch, like the

ass of Issachar, in their comfort without one generous impulse to make

common cause against the common evils and foes of the Church, and are

unvisited by a single compunction that while they lie there, submitting

to whatever fate sends, there are kindred tribes of their own being

oppressed and spoiled?

There seems to have been an improvement in this tribe, an infusion of

some new life into it. In the time of Deborah, indeed, it is with a note

of surprise that, while celebrating the victory of Israel, she names

even Issachar as having been roused to action, and as having helped in

the common cause--"the princes of Issachar were with Deborah, _even_

Issachar;" but we find them again in the days of David wiping out their

reproach, and standing by him manfully. And there an apparently new

character is given to them--"the children of Issachar, which were men

that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do."

This quite accords, however, with the kind of practical philosophy which

we have seen to be imbedded in Issachar's character. Men they were not

distracted by high thoughts and ambitions, but who judged things

according to their substantial value to themselves; and who were,

therefore, in a position to give much good advice on practical

matters--advice which would always have a tendency to trend too much

towards mere utilitarianism and worldliness, and to partake rather of

crafty politic diplomacy than of far-seeing statesmanship, yet

trustworthy for a certain class of subjects. And here, too, they

represent the same class in the Church, already alluded to; for one

often finds that men who will not interrupt their own comfort, and who

have a kind of stolid indifference as to what comes of the good of the

Church, have yet also much shrewd practical wisdom; and were these men,

instead of spending their sagacity in cynical denunciation of what the

Church does, to throw themselves into the cause of the Church, and

heartily advise her what she _ought_ to do, and help in the doing of it,

their observation of human affairs, and political understanding of the

times, would be turned to good account, instead of being a reproach.

Next came the eldest son of Rachel's handmaid, and the eldest son of

Leah's handmaid, Dan and Gad. Dan's name, meaning "judge," is the

starting point of the prediction--"Dan shall judge his people." This

word "judge" we are perhaps somewhat apt to misapprehend; it means

rather to defend than to sit in judgment on; it refers to a judgment

passed between one's own people and their foes, and an execution of such

judgment in the deliverance of the people and the destruction of the

foe. We are familiar with this meaning of the word by the constant

reference in the Old Testament to God's _judging_ His people; this being

always a cause of joy as their sure deliverance from their enemies. So

also it is used of those men who, when Israel had no king, rose from

time to time as the champions of the people, to lead them against the

foe, and who are therefore familiarly called "The Judges." From the

tribe of Dan the most conspicuous of these arose, Samson, namely, and it

is probably mainly with reference to this fact that Jacob so

emphatically predicts of _this_ tribe, "Dan shall judge his people." And

notice the appended clause (as reflecting shame on the sluggish

Issachar), "as one of the tribes of Israel," recognising always that his

strength was not for himself alone, but for his country; that he was not

an isolated people who had to concern himself only with his own affairs,

but _one_ of the tribes of Israel. The manner, too, in which Dan was to

do this was singularly descriptive of the facts subsequently evolved.

Dan was a very small and insignificant tribe, whose lot originally lay

close to the Philistines on the southern border of the land. It might

seem to be no obstacle whatever to the invading Philistines as they

passed to the richer portion of Judah, but this little tribe, through

Samson, smote these terrors of the Israelites with so sore and alarming

a destruction as to cripple them for years and make them harmless. We

see, therefore, how aptly Jacob compares them to the venomous snake that

lurks in the road and bites the horses' heels; the dust-coloured adder

that a man treads on before he is aware, and whose poisonous stroke is

more deadly than the foe he is looking for in front. And especially

significant did the imagery appear to the Jews, with whom this poisonous

adder was indigenous, but to whom the horse was the symbol of foreign

armament and invasion. The whole tribe of Dan, too, seems to have

partaken of that "grim humour" with which Samson saw his foes walk time

after time into the traps he set for them, and give themselves an easy

prey to him--a humour which comes out with singular piquancy in the

narrative given in the Book of Judges of one of the forays of this

tribe, in which they carried off Micah's priest and even his gods.

But why, in the full flow of his eloquent description of the varied

virtues of his sons, does the patriarch suddenly check himself, lie back

on his pillows, and quietly say, "I have waited for Thy salvation, O

God"? Does he feel his strength leave him so that he cannot go on to

bless the rest of his sons, and has but time to yield his own spirit to

God? Are we here to interpolate one of those scenes we are all fated to

witness when some eagerly watched breath seems altogether to fail before

the last words have been uttered, when those who have been standing

apart, through sorrow and reverence, quickly gather round the bed to

catch the last look, and when the dying man again collects himself and

finishes his work? Probably Jacob, having, as it were, projected himself

forward into those stirring and warlike times he has been speaking of,

so realises the danger of his people, and the futility even of such help

as Dan's when God does not help, that, as if from the midst of doubtful

war, he cries, as with a battle cry, "I have waited for Thy salvation, O

God." His longing for victory and blessing to his sons far overshot the

deliverance from Philistines accomplished by Samson. That deliverance he

thankfully accepts and joyfully predicts, but in the spirit of an

Israelite indeed, and a genuine child of the promise, he remains

unsatisfied, and sees in all such deliverance only the pledge of God's

coming nearer and nearer to His people, bringing with Him _His_ eternal

salvation. In Dan, therefore, we have not the catholic spirit of

Zebulun, nor the practical, though sluggish, temper of Issachar; but we

are guided rather to the disposition which ought to be maintained

through all Christian life, and which, with special care, needs to be

cherished in Church-life--a disposition to accept with gratitude all

success and triumph, but still to aim through all at that highest

victory which God alone can accomplish for His people. It is to be the

battle-cry with which every Christian and every Church is to preserve

itself, not merely against external foes, but against the far more

disastrous influence of self-confidence, pride, and glorying in

man--"For _Thy_ salvation, O God, do we wait."

Gad also is a tribe whose history is to be warlike, his very name

signifying a marauding, guerilla troop; and his history was to

illustrate the victories which God's people gain by tenacious, watchful,

ever-renewed warfare. The Church has often prospered by her Dan-like

insignificance; the world not troubling itself to make war upon her. But

oftener Gad is a better representative of the mode in which her

successes are gained. We find that the men of Gad were among the most

valuable of David's warriors, when his necessity evoked all the various

skill and energy of Israel. "Of the Gadites," we read, "there separated

themselves unto David into the hold of the wilderness men of might, and

men of war fit for the battle, that could handle shield and buckler,

whose faces were like the faces of lions, and were as swift as the roes

upon the mountains: one of the least of them was better than an hundred,

and the greatest mightier than a thousand." And there is something

particularly inspiriting to the individual Christian in finding this

pronounced as part of the blessing of God's people--"a troop shall

overcome him, _but he shall_ overcome at the last." It is this that

enables us to persevere--that we have God's assurance that present

discomfiture does not doom us to final defeat. If you be among the

children of promise, among those that gather round God to catch His

blessing, you shall overcome at the last. You may now feel as if

assaulted by treacherous, murderous foes, irregular troops, that betake

themselves to every cruel deceit, and are ruthless in spoiling you; you

may be assailed by so many and strange temptations that you are

bewildered and cannot lift a hand to resist, scarce seeing where your

danger comes from; you may be buffeted by messengers of Satan,

distracted by a sudden and tumultuous incursion of a crowd of cares so

that you are moved away from the old habits of your life amid which you

seem to stand safely; your heart may seem to be the rendezvous of all

ungodly and wicked thoughts, you may feel trodden under foot and overrun

by sin, but, with the blessing of God, you shall overcome at the last.

Only cultivate that dogged pertinacity of Gad, which has no thought of

ultimate defeat, but rallies cheerfully and resolutely after every

discomfiture.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Merivale's _Romans under the Empire_, vi. 261.

[3] Plato, _Repub._ i. 5, etc.

[4] The subsequent history of the tribe shows that the character of its

father was transmitted. "No judge, no prophet, not one of the tribe of

Reuben, is mentioned." (_Vide_ Smith's Dictionary, _Reuben_.)