hatred, for envy is one of the most powerful passions that move the human soul, and is malignant in its developments.  Strange to say, it is most common in large families and among those who pass for friends.  We do not envy prosperous enemies with the virulence we feel for prosperous relatives, who theoretically are our equals.  Nor does envy cease until inequality has become so great as to make rivalry preposterous:  a subject does not envy his king, or his generally acknowledged superior.  Envy may even give place to respect and deference when the object of it has achieved fame and conceded power.  Relatives who begin with jealousy sometimes end as worshippers, but not until extraordinary merit, vast wealth, or overtopping influence are universally conceded.  Conceive of Napoleon’s brothers envying the great Emperor, or Webster’s the great statesman, or Grant’s the great general, although the passion may have lurked in the bosoms of political rivals and military chieftains.

But one thing certainly extinguishes envy; and that is death.  Hence the envy of Joseph’s brothers, after they had sold him to a caravan of Ishmaelite merchants, was succeeded by remorse and shame.  Their murmurings passed into lies.  They could not tell their broken-hearted father of their crime; they never told him.  Jacob was led to suppose that his favorite son was devoured by wild beasts; they added deceit and cowardice to a depraved heartlessness, and nearly brought down the gray hairs of their father to the grave.  No subsequent humiliation or punishment could be too severe for such wickedness.  Although they were destined to become the heads of powerful tribes, even of the chosen people of God, these men have incurred the condemnation of all ages.  But Judah and Reuben do not come in for unlimited censure, since these sons of Leah sought to save their brother from a violent death; and subsequently in Egypt Judah looms up as a magnanimous character, whom we admire almost as much as we do Joseph himself.  What can be more eloquent than his defence of Benjamin, and his appeal to what seemed to him to be an Egyptian potentate!

The sale of Joseph as a slave is one of the most signal instances of the providence of God working by natural laws recorded in all history,—­more marked even than the elevation of Esther and Mordecai.  In it we see permission of evil and its counteraction,—­its conversion into good; victory over evil, over conspiracy, treachery, and murderous intent.  And so marked is this lesson of a superintending Providence over all human action, that a wise and good man can see wars and revolutions and revolting crimes with almost philosophical complacency, knowing that out of destruction proceeds creation; that the wrath of man is always overruled; that the love of God is the brightest and clearest and most consoling thing in the universe.  We cannot interpret history without the recognition of this fundamental truth.  We cannot be unmoved amid the prevalence of evil without this feeling, that God is more powerful than all the combined forces of his enemies both on earth and in hell; and that no matter what the evil is, it will surely be made to praise Him who sitteth in the heavens.  This is a sublime revelation of the omnipotence and benevolence of a personal God, of his constant oversight of the world which he has made.