The Story of Joseph and His Brethren/Part 1/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
THE history of Joseph under this view we need not pursue much further. Our object has been to trace it chiefly with a view to exhibit before the young reader the purity and beauty of his character. The fame of the circumstance of Joseph's brethren having come, was heard in Pharaoh's house, and the king joined with his favourite deputy or viceroy, to urge Jacob and all his house to come down and make his abode in Egypt. The brethren were accordingly sent away with waggons to carry down the whole household. Joseph, in dismissing them, gave them this brotherly and useful advice—"See that ye fall not out by the way." This was a lesson which they may have needed, as they were likely to accuse one another for the more active share some of them had taken in the conspiracy against their younger brother. And it is a lesson which we all may learn, and have need to practice while journeying in the path of life with our brethren in this world.
The scene described between the brethren and their aged father is most touching. When his sons told him, saying, Joseph is yet alive, and he is governor over all the land of Egypt, "Jacob's heart fainted, for he believed them not." And well might he regard it as an idle tale. But when he became convinced, and "saw the waggons that Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of Jacob their father revived; and Israel said, It is enough; I will go and see him before I die." And when they arrived in Goshen, "Joseph made ready his chariot and went up to meet his father, and presented himself unto him and fell on his neck, and wept on his neck a good while. And Israel said unto Joseph, Now let me die, since I have seen thy face, because thou art yet alive."
How happy must the aged Jacob have been to see his son alive whom he had for so many years mourned as dead! His willingness and even his desire to die was one of the results and signs of that happiness. It is sometimes supposed that it is only a sense of misery that makes people desire death, and that the happier they are, the more unwilling or the more afraid they are to die. Perhaps merely worldly happiness always makes death terrible; but the more truly, that is, the more spiritually happy people are in this world, the more willing are they to depart into that world where happiness has its true abode. It is recorded by Benjamin Franklin, that when, during a thunderstorm, he conducted some of the lightning into a phial, and made the grand discovery that lightning was the same as electricity, and thus that a flash of lightning consists of the same subtle fluid as the electric spark, such a thrill of happiness passed through his mind that he felt as if he could have died. If such happiness as he felt on discovering a natural truth, in which he was deeply interested, could make Franklin feel as if life had accomplished its task, how much more that happiness which Jacob felt from the recovery of a long-lost son, and still more the happiness which springs from having found the pearl of great price, the one thing needful—the knowledge and love of Jesus, whom to know is life everlasting!