or greatness. To think any part of this web of life has been woven by another than Him,-my brothers were able to throw me into a pit, I was able to win these honours without him,'-would have been an utter inconceivable horror; simply the loss of the treasure which had been imparted to him in his father's tent, and compared with which all more recent treasures, except so far as they were the expansion and multiplication of this, had no worth at all.

that we forget it.

I am sorry to use so many words for the purpose of impressing you with what may well seem so plain a truth. But it is because of its plainness In a complicated state of society much of our time is spent in trying to unravel its complications; if not, we lose ourselves in them. In either case it is very hard indeed, to preserve or to acquire the habit of honestly and simply confessing an actual personal Being as the source of the order we find in our own existence and in the universe. Phrases importing that we do, are very familiar to us; far too familiar. They are so ready for use, and are so much used, that their stamp is worn off, and they become merely conventional. For this reason it is so profitable to go back into this early morning of the world's day; not that we may talk about its clearness and freshness; not that we may fancy the earth was not the same earth as it is now, less subject to the damps and dreariness of night; not that we may fancy it was illuminated by some different sun; but that we may convince ourselves that it has a sun

now which will warm us, and shew us our way if we walk in the light of it. And this is the more necessary because a very serious doubt, which must be settled, arises some time or other in all our minds, how, when so much of what we see and feel around us is evil, we dare attribute the universe and all its scheme and order to God. Must we not, in some sense, dispute his absolute goodness, or else let in at some corner of our mind the idea of a rival creator-an Ahriman as well as an Ormuzd? In a number of different phases we shall have hereafter to face this question, and to see what help the Scripture gives us in solving it, when it has become most intricate and apparently hopeless. But now, before the deeper puzzles of the conscience and heart have been brought out, while crimes are broad, coarse, palpable, and there is no casuistry among those who escape from them, we have to enquire how Joseph was able with such simple boldness to speak of God as having ordained a series of events the actors in which, no one felt more keenly than himself, had been heartless, cruel, and false.

The answer, you will perceive, is precisely that to which all our previous examination of this book has led us. He recognised with infinite wonder an order in the whole story of his life; that order he was certain was God's. He knew that violence and disorder had been at work in it. What temptation had he to think of them as God's? Imputing to Him a distinct purpose of good and blessedness, what a strange perverseness it would

have been to think that anything which had marred the good and blessedness, anything which had striven to defeat the purpose, was his? It was no distinction which the schools were to elaborate; it was the great eternal distinction, deeper than that between day and night, light and darkness, which a heart cultivated, purged, made simple by God's discipline, confessed, nay, found it impossible to deny. And just that which Joseph discovered in his own particular experience, Moses has been setting forth for the Universe. The order which God created is very good. The order which He preserves and upholds is very good. There was no flaw in it before man fell, there is no flaw in it since man fell. That fall had actually no power to subvert it, or derange it. That fall was precisely the refusal of a man to recognize his own glorious place in this order, an effort to make for himself an independent place out of it. He wants to be something in himself, he will not act and live as one made in the image of God. The history goes on, the disbelief and disorder multiply. But the eternal order goes on asserting itself, calmly, uninterruptedly. God treats man according to the law which He laid down for him on the Creation-day. He speaks to Him, unveils Himself to him, shews him that he can only live while he confesses a relation to Him. Do you find a few acknowledging this truth, the majority setting it at nought? But you find also that the few are leading simple, orderly, human lives; that the others are out of order, are inhuman. You must

use that language; any other carries contradiction on the face, and in the heart, of it. But how are these inhuman, disorderly creatures regarded by their Creator? Have they succeeded in establishing that place for themselves outside His universe which they seem to covet? No! they are within the circle of it, they are under His discipline and education. He is teaching them by their own disorders, by all that they are doing to set at nought His government, and to canonize their own self-will. He claims them as belonging to Him. They may resist the claim, they may choose a way of their own. They may try to shut themselves up in their separate Adam nature. But they eannot do it. The divine order is hemming them in, forcing them in their most inconsistent acts to acknowledge its presence, and to pay it homage. They are husbands, children, brothers, fathers. They cannot live in themselves, to themselves. They must act as if they belonged to a society. They will try to construct that society upon the basis of selfishness and self-will. They will throw aside the family bonds, and set up a mere wild desert independence, or combine under some mighty hunter, or build cities where they are knit together by a desire to get a greater number of material enjoyments than they could procure separately. But in the desert the feeling of tribe is still present; their ready submission to the tyrant shews that they are meant for government; the cities must acknowledge a law; when it is utterly cast aside, and absolute self-indulgence reigns, fire

comes down from heaven to assert its reality. And meantime the world is not left to these wild experiments to frame an order from disorders. God brings out Abraham, and teaches him what it is to be a husband and a father. The mystery of these relations discovers itself to him by slow degrees, through his own errors, through the delay in the fulfilment of God's promises, through the witness which the covenant bears that he lives for the sake of a race unborn. So the ground is laid for a divine and human society. There is to be no hasty building upon that ground; the children of the covenant are to be for the present shepherds merely; every inclination they may feel to connect themselves with tribes apparently more advanced and organized, is disappointed. Yet they are not to be stationary. The twelve sons of Jacob bring forth a set of experiences altogether different from any which we could hear of in Abraham's tent. The brotherly relation is elucidated through these experiences, as the fatherly and filial had been in the birth, circumcision, and sacrifice of Isaac. The sins of brothers form the subject of the narrative; through these sins we come to understand the true form of the character from which they are departures.

II. This is the second principle which the words of Joseph expound to us: 'God hath sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance.'

He starts with assuring them that God has been the orderer and director of his history, and