1. We can hardly imagine a position more terribly difficult than that of Joseph. His master's wife shared in the general admiration which his bearing had inspired, and was, in addition, infatuated by his comely form and youthful vigour. Carried away by wanton impulse, she eagerly besought him to gratify her passion.
(1) Now Joseph was not a glorified spirit. He was a young mortal man, subject to “like passions such as we are.” The fiery arrows of the words, actions, looks, of the temptress were aimed upon no statue, no automaton, but upon a being full of the perils of our nature in its glowing prime. Not only so: this young man, this young Oriental man, was placed in circumstances exquisitely difficult for virtue and terribly easy for moral relaxation. Outwardly, there was no call upon him such as the words noblesse oblige imply; he was but a purchased slave. And he was in a country-namely, Egypt-which was infected to an extreme degree by moral pollution; he had breathed for years the air of its opinion and practice everywhere around him. His home in Canaan had been no perfect home, yet the breath of the Lord and the Promise had been in it. But now here he was, a young man, away from home, helplessly separated from all its aids, including the moral influence of a father who had “seen God face to face,” imperfect as his use of that blessing had often been. Moreover, Joseph had been carried off from home by an act of atrocious injustice and cruelty, enough to embitter his spirit for all time.
(2) Joseph might have pleaded that the consequences of his sin would be favour and advancement, while the consequences of his resistance would be, in all likelihood, irretrievable disgrace. It oftens happens, in this strange life of ours, that men seem to succeed and to obtain the respect of their fellows by means of the very qualities and actions which ought, one would think, to make all men despise them. Provided a man has reached eminence, the world does not inquire too closely what sort of contemptible ladder he may have used. Joseph, by yielding to temptation, would have found favour in the eyes of Potiphar's wife, and we may take it for granted that she would have let no harm come to him from Potiphar. To sin seemed by far the easiest way out of the difficulty.
In that far-gone period when Joseph lived, moral restraint was much weaker than it is to-day, and the mere pagan joy of life proportionately stronger. Consider what it meant for such a youth to be suddenly introduced to the corrupting and luxurious life of Egypt. From the simple patriarchal life of the plains he was violently separated by a series of bitter vicissitudes. He was a peasant of genius, suddenly made a citizen of a complex civilization; and such an instance as that of Robert Burns may serve to remind us of the grave perils of the position. If he had ever sighed for a larger life than that of the agriculturist and cattle breeder, now he had it. If he ever felt his veins athirst for the pleasures of life, now that thirst might be easily gratified. He was among a people who loved pleasure, and who knew little of sin. The standards by which they measured life were wholly different from those to which he had been accustomed. Probably there was not one among his acquaintances who would not have laughed at his scruples, and have jeeringly told him to do in Egypt as Egypt did.1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Divine Challenge, 234.]
2. Let us now consider the way in which Joseph, instead of yielding to the pressure of these circumstances, met and overcame the temptation which assailed him. He did not allow his youth, or his distance from home or the possible consequences, to blind him to the true nature of the proposal which was made to him, did not beat about the bush and endeavour to sophisticate himself into the belief that wrong was right, did not try to mitigate the evil by talking about sin as if it were merely folly, or a pardonable indiscretion. How then did he fortify himself against the enticement of evil?
(1) Joseph resisted temptation by calling things by their right name.-There is a vast difference between the ways in which temptation is resisted. Some, knowing the thing desired of them to be essentially wrong, have recourse to cowardly shifts and evasions. They are unable to comply: thus much they will answer; but for this inability they will render all sorts of secondary and insufficient reasons, and keep back the right one. They will represent that they are precluded from compliance by some promise, or some engagement at the time proposed; or will put forward considerations of thriftiness, or want of inclination, or in fact any reason to mask the true one, of which they are ashamed. How very different from this weak and ineffectual course is the refusal of one who fearlessly states at once the right and master-reason why he should not yield to temptation: “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?”
There is no more mischievous maxim than that which finds expression in the saying of Burke: “Vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.” It is when “Satan is transformed into an angel of light” that his power is most deadly. He who has learnt to call the sin to which he is tempted “this great wickedness” has already won half the battle.1 [Note: J. R. Bailey.]
Sin is a dreadful, positive, malignant thing. What the world in its worst part needs is not to be developed, but to be destroyed. Any other talk about it is shallow and mischievous folly. The only question is about the best method and means of destruction. Let the sharp surgeon's knife do its terrible work, let it cut deep and separate as well and thoroughly as it can, the false from the true, the corrupt from the uncorrupt; it can never dissect away the very principle of corruption which is in the substance of the blood itself. Nothing but a new reinforcement of health can accomplish that.2 [Note: Phillips Brooks, by J. Gregory, 110.]
There was a profound meaning in the comment on Socrates which Matthew Arnold puts into the mouth of Carlyle, that he was too much at ease in Sion. A man who knows the world cannot be wholly at ease; he may have a deep repose of spirit, but he sees about him that with which he must wage relentless war. Repose we may possess even in the most arduous toil; ease we can never have while we are surrounded by conditions which are hostile to our highest life. For this reason Dante, notwithstanding a certain narrowness of temper, impresses the world as an essentially higher nature than Goethe, notwithstanding the immense breadth and productivity of the great German. Dante was not, it is possible, a wholly stainless man, but he came to see sin with a clearness which no other human soul has surpassed, and to hate it with all the intensity of his passionate soul. The “Divine Comedy” is very far removed from us in its forms and phrases, but the deepest impression we get from it is the impression of reality. Under the terrible light which Dante holds aloft in the Inferno, sin is no matter of imperfect development; it is an appalling and loathsome reality. Its hideousness becomes concrete in a thousand repulsive forms and, its disguises all sternly stripped from it, we see its naked deformity and realize how corrupting and unspeakably degrading it is. The insight of the great artists, even when divorced from or indifferent to the moral aspects of life, has detected the secret nature of sin quite as unerringly as the insight of the men of spiritual genius. The drama, from the earliest to the latest times, abounds in expositions of its inherent corrupting and destructive power, overwhelming in their impressiveness. From the days of Æschylus to those in which Browning wrote “A Blot in the 'Scutcheon,” the dramatist has told again and again, in every conceivable form, the tragedy of the transgressor. The penetrating genius of Hawthorne was continually searching the mystery, studying it from the side of inheritance, of personal responsibility and its reactive influence, and dealing with it always with a sincerity and subtlety which bore constant witness to the directness and authority of the vision brought to bear on some of the most terrible and elusive facts of human experience. In fact, fiction in its higher form bears constant witness to the presence and reality of sin amongst men. Flaubert's masterpiece is, in its way, one of the most searching pieces of moral analysis ever made, and no one can read Madame Bovary without feeling the merciless accuracy with which the successive stages of moral disintegration are traced. In like manner, Zola has made the most appalling disclosure of the ravages of intemperance in L'Assommoir. Such pictures as these, even when painted with repulsive frankness and in a cynical temper, bear unimpeachable testimony to the horror of sin even in the vision of the artist indifferent to definite teaching and intent only on seeing things as they are.1 [Note: H. W. Mabie, The Life of the Spirit, 21.]
(2) Joseph recognized that his sin would be a sin against God.-“How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” At once we recognize the presence of the Holy God in this scene. He is its light and glory, its power and victory. God the Holy fills the entire field of vision, and Joseph is strengthened with might in the inner man by an all-pervading awe of Him. His heart throbs with a vehement solicitude not to offend God, not to violate His will or in the slightest particular displease Him. That is the fire which burns with such scorching heat in these words. That is the flame which leaps up in his heart in cleansing force. That is the source of the mighty passion by which in a moment, and at one throw, he flings far behind him the corrupting bait of the temptress. It is not hatred of the woman, though that might have been excused. It is not anxiety for his own reputation first and foremost, though that is not without its influence. It is not even solicitude, before all things, to maintain his integrity in his trust as the steward of Potiphar, though that too operates with great and decisive energy; it is the recognition of God. He cannot sin against Him. There is the impassable barrier. That Sacred Presence for ever blocks the way. This Authority ruling in and for righteousness utterly shuts out all possibility of yielding, and constrains the tempted man to escape, at lightning speed, from the neighbourhood of danger.
All sin is sin against God. “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,” said David in his penitence. Cruelty to an animal is sin against God. Treachery to Potiphar was sin against God. All our acts have reference to God. Sins against innocence and purity are sins against God. We can never get away from our relation to God in any act of our life. In all such temptations as this of Joseph's, men should remember that, while to yield would be treason to another, it would also be sin against God.1 [Note: J. R. Miller.]
