These then, remember, are the very family feelings which come out in the story of Joseph. He honours holy wedlock when he tells his master’s wife, ‘How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?’ He honours his father, when he is not ashamed of him, wild shepherd out of the desert though he might be, and an abomination to the Egyptians, while he himself is now in power and wealth and glory, as a prince in a civilized country. He honours the tie of brother to brother, by forgiving and weeping over the very brothers who have sold him into slavery.
But what has all this to do with God?
Now man, as we know, is an animal with an immortal spirit in him. He has, as St. Paul so carefully explains to us, a flesh and a spirit—a flesh like the beasts which perish; a spirit which comes from God.
Now the Bible teaches us that man did not get these family feelings from his flesh, from the animal, brute part of him. They are not carnal, but spiritual. He gets them from his spirit, and they are inspired into him by the Spirit of God. They come not from the earth below, but from the heaven above; from the image of God, in which man alone of all living things was made.
For if it were not so, we should surely see some family feeling in the beasts which are most like men. But we do not. In the apes, which are, in their shape and fleshly nature, so strangely and shockingly like human beings, there is not as much family feeling as there is in many birds, or even insects. Nay, the wild negroes, among whom they live, hold them in abhorrence, and believe that they were once men like themselves, who were gradually changed into brute beasts, by giving way to detestable sins; while these very negroes themselves, heathens and savages as they are, have the family feeling—the feeling of husband for wife, father for child, brother for brother; not, indeed, as strongly and purely as we, or at least those of us who are really Christian and civilized, but still they have it; and that makes between the lowest man and the highest brute a difference which I hold is as wide as the space between heaven and earth.
It is man alone, I say, who has the idea of family; and who has, too, the strange, but most true belief that these family ties are appointed by God—that they are a part of his religion—that in breaking them, by being an unfaithful husband, a dishonest servant, an unnatural son, a selfish brother, he sins, not only against man, and man’s order and laws, but against God.
Parent and child, brother and sister—those ties are not of the earth earthy, but of the heaven of God, eternal. They may begin in time; of what happened before we came into this world we know nought. But having begun, they cannot end. Of what will happen after we leave this world, that at least we know in part.
Parent and child; brother and sister; husband and wife likewise; these are no ties of man’s invention. They are ties of God’s binding; they are patterns and likenesses of his substance, and of his being. Of the eternal Father, who says for ever to the eternal Son, ‘This day have I begotten thee.’ Of the Son who says for ever to the Father, ‘I come to do thy will, O God.’ Of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who is not ashamed to call us his brethren; but like a greater Joseph, was sent before by God to save our lives with a great deliverance when our forefathers were but savages and heathens. Husband and wife likewise—are not they two divine words—not human words at all? Has not God consecrated the state of matrimony to such an excellent mystery, that in it is signified and represented the mystical union between Christ and his Church? Are not husbands to love their wives, and give themselves for them as Christ loved the Church and gave himself for it? That, indeed, was not revealed in the Old Testament, but it is revealed in the New; and marriage, like all other human ties, is holy and divine, and comes from God down to men.
Yes. These family ties are of God. It was to show us how sacred, how Godlike they are—how eternal and necessary for all mankind—that Joseph’s story was written in Holy Scripture.
They are of God, I say. And he who despises them, despises not man but God; who hath also given us his Holy Spirit to make us know how sacred these bonds are.