Five Young Men: Messages of Yesterday for the Young Men of To-day

by Charles Reynolds Brown

There came a night when Pharaoh dreamed. The monarch saw seven fat cows come up out of the River Nile, which was the source of all fertility there in the Delta. Then he saw seven lean cows come up out of the river and they ate up the seven fat cows and yet remained as lean and hungry as they had been before. In the morning Pharaoh called for his wise men and his magicians, but they could make nothing of it.

Then the chief butler remembered his fault. He remembered Joseph who had interpreted his own dream in yonder prison. He told Pharaoh of that strange experience, and the monarch promptly sent for this gifted young Hebrew. "Seest thou a man diligent in his business he shall stand before kings." Joseph had shown himself diligent in his business as a servant in the house of Potiphar, and as a prisoner he had made himself useful to the warden of the jail. Now he is summoned to stand before the ruler of all the land of Egypt.

He is the same man in name as when he walked across the fields of Dothan with his heart full of conceit, but how much he has learned! His coat of many colours has been replaced by the dull gray of the prison garb. He has acquired new moods and new methods and a finer quality of manhood. When Pharaoh called upon him to interpret his strange dream, Joseph replied modestly, "It is not in me. Interpretations belong to God. And God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace." It was in this mood of reverent, expectant awe that he undertook the interpretation of the monarch's dream.

How character ripens in adversity! Wheat ripens best under smiling, sunny skies, but the rigorous winter of hardship and struggle is demanded for the maturing of those fine qualities of mind and heart which make up character at its best. Men have found by experience that it is impossible to produce apples of the choicest flavour where there is no frost. I am quite sure that the best type of human excellence cannot be secured without frost. "He is testing me," Job said, when all those troubles fell upon him; "He knows the way that I take and when He has tried me I shall come forth as gold."

Here was a young man who in early life had been a spoiled child, a conceited prig, a talebearer among his fellows, but in the hard school of adversity he had learned to labour and to wait. He could now endure as seeing One who is invisible.

The law of gravitation never forgets anything, never overlooks anything. It matters not whether it is a pound of feathers or a ton of lead or a planet, the power of gravitation is right there attending to business. If a man falls out of a fifth story window in New York, in Constantinople, or in Calcutta, the law of gravitation is there and the man gets hurt. The moral order never forgets anything, never overlooks anything. What men sow, they reap, though the harvest be long delayed. If they sow to the flesh, sometime, somewhere they go out with bruised hands and bleeding hearts to reap corruption. When they sow to the spirit they will in the same inevitable way reap life eternal. Here at last the man of purpose and of faith is reaping the results of discipline bravely met and nobly borne.

This young man owed his ultimate success to the fact that he was a man of vision. There is a certain fascination in the story of any life which rises from obscurity to eminence. Whether the path lies from the log cabin of a rail splitter to the White House, from the lowly work of the lanyard to the head of victorious armies, or from a pit on the plains of Dothan to a palace on the banks of the Nile, there is something in the human heart which responds to the unfolding of such a life-story.

The Hebrews were happy in relating how men of their race had made their way up to places of honour at alien courts through the sheer force of their own personal ability. Here was Joseph coming up out of the prison house to the right hand of Pharaoh! Here was Daniel preferred above the other presidents and princes at the court of Darius! Here was Benjamin Disraeli belonging to a race formerly disfranchised in England becoming at last Prime Minister of Her Most Christian Majesty Queen Victoria! Let every man who looks down upon some lowly life beware lest he despise what God has blessed!

Here was a young man who had vision! He saw things. He did not merely "look," as would some dog that bays the moon. When he walked across the plains of Dothan his mind was not altogether upon wool and mutton—he was already dreaming of high achievement in his future years. When he was thrown into the pit and sold into slavery his brain was busy with the stars. When he faced temptation he saw it all with the eye of faith—how could he do this great wickedness and sin against God. And when he was confronted with a problem confessedly too hard for him he lifted up his eyes to the hills from whence cometh help. "It is not in me. The interpretation of life belongs to God."

He was only seventeen years old when he walked across the fields that day to the place where his brothers kept their flocks. Now he was thirty. He had increased in stature, in wisdom and in favour with God and man. It had taken thirteen long years to add those cubits to his height, but they had been well spent. The Almighty takes His time in working out His finer effects. The spoiled child, the censorious talebearer, the callow, conceited youth must be wrought upon by the beat and play of human life. When any man has vision and faith there is a divinity which shapes his ends, rough-hewn though they be by doting fathers and envious brothers, by false accusers, and by ungrateful companions. When a man is faced right, all things, no matter what shape they bear, will ultimately work together for his good.