Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and Sermons

by William Gray Elmslie

There is a sad experience that almost all young folks must come to: the day which breaks so shiningly, with such sweet promise of goodness, nearly always clouds over and grows dark and stormy; the dreams get broken, the dreams that hover over you and seem so easy to reach, recede farther and farther, like one of those Alpine peaks when you are trying to climb it. From the village you start from, you see a peak which you think must be the summit, but when you reach it, it is only to find yourself separated from a far higher ridge by a valley, which you have to descend in order to reach it, and you have no sooner climbed up again than you realise that this, again, is but an intermediate peak. How toilsome, how weary it is! but in the same way dreams would be worth nothing if you had not to win them by struggle and battle. It is the tedium of the contest, I suppose, that disheartens most. It is not easy for young hearts to wait for the fulfilment of life's promise till it can be achieved honestly. Joseph is trapped in a pit, betrayed by his brethren, sold to slave-merchants, settled in an Egyptian house, becomes the bond-slave of Potiphar, torn from father, from his own country, from his God, Who had not interfered to protect him, a bond-slave, his dignity gone, all the pride of life gone! Would it have been wonderful if all the heart had gone out of him too—if he had said that God had forgotten him—"My dreams were a delusion; there is nothing worth living for"? Are there young men and women here whose hearts are aching very bitterly, and who are tempted to think that there is no outlet to this slavery of life? How did Joseph look at it? He might have broken down, and got wild with despair, and said to himself, "I will become demoralised;" but though he lay down at night tired, yet he was cheerful, and still dreamt his old dreams, and God was over him. If a man is true to himself and to his God he will come through anything; if he will be man enough, if he will not be beaten, if he will make the best of things, he must conquer. So presently Joseph reached a better position, things began to look up a little, his master marked his spirit, and made him his chief slave.

A lad who had dreamt of being a ruler and king of men, so that his father would bow before him for what he could do for him, how terrible it must have been for the boy to be sold as a slave! How terribly he must have been tempted to say, "God has deceived me; He made me to dream dreams, and here I am left in a dungeon, a slave: I cannot get what I want honourably; I will get it dishonourably; I will snatch the fruit of life, even if it be in defiance of what God and good men call right"! That is the temptation that drives many a lad to dishonesty and treachery, and many a girl to bitterness and sin. It came to Joseph in the deadliest form. The mistress of the household made overtures to him which, had he accepted them, would have meant immediate promotion, perhaps to the court; for her husband was the chief of Pharaoh's body-guard. Could there have been devised a deadlier temptation for that poor, homeless boy, so treacherously treated by those who should have loved him—who had dreamt such dreams, and had such proud ambitions, and withal no danger of discovery if he would but take the path that opened up the way of promotion? I think that was the crisis in Joseph's life; that was the supreme deed which determined his destiny. Then it was that he had to stand, and stand for ever, for God and good, or to fall and sink for ever into ruin. And what saved him? I will tell you what saved him. When Fortune tells a clerk that he has but to take a little of his master's money, which he can repay very soon, and she will smile on him, what he will do all depends upon his past. Those dreams of Joseph's meant everything to him at that great moment. If his dreams had been of the flesh, if his dreams had been base, and selfish, and sordid, and of grasping the world's gains, honourably if possible, but anyway grasping them, he could not have stood. But that boy had dreamt of being a prince, a king among men; he had dreamt of a noble, stainless manhood, of self-respect, and honour, and truth; and he had dreamt of God caring about him, of God choosing him to be His instrument in this world; he was a lad in whose soul the whispers of childhood's prayers and of morning devotions murmured, with sweet echoes of heaven. A lad on whose head still rests the soft pressure of the blessing of his Father in heaven is no game for the devil. Joseph turned from that temptation without a moment's faltering; he said to himself, "Be a traitor and a knave! stain my soul and my manhood with this foul lust!"—and in the presence and the sight of God he conquered; he was loyal to the dreams of his youth, and the result was that he went to prison.

Young men and women, do you sigh? You would fight the battles of life bravely enough, and resist its temptations, if there were a fair field and no favour; but treachery and dishonesty are saturating everything. It is not the best men who get the best wages. The whole city is full of cheating. I am afraid it is so, for many good men have told me they could hardly keep their hands clean. When you hear of a lad going to the bad, for God's sake be just; be not hard on him; it is but the common immorality tolerated everywhere. But what of that? Are you going to lose your life, and stain your conscience, because another has injured you? So long as you do not injure yourself, never mind; be a man in the image of God.

If you come nearer and nearer to that standard it will be a grander work to do in your lifetime, if you live in a poor lodging-room till your death, than to become a millionaire by injustice or cruelty. In prison Joseph played the man; he was not broken nor dispirited. And remember what I said about dreams. Those dreams of his did not allow him to lie down idly in the prison; he wanted to do everybody's work. Joseph was industrious, and kept working on because of his dreams. The keeper of the prison was evidently a man who was glad to have things managed for him; and Joseph got promoted in a wonderful way till he reached the royal court, and aided by perseverance and intelligence and an untarnished character, he became the premier, the first prince in the land. And now followed—what, do you think? Prosperity, peace, ease? No; immense responsibility, discharged nobly by Joseph, and perilous temptations. When a man has overcome the temptations of adversity I can tell him that he has fought a splendid battle, but the deadliest are those that come in the days of prosperity. The generous deeds that you thought you would do, when you were a poor clerk, if you were only wealthy—the help to churches, to missions, to the poor, where are they? You know the story told in all the collection sermons about a man who gave liberally when he was poor, but did not give in the same proportion when he grew rich, and explained it by saying that when he was poor he had a guinea heart, but now it was a penny heart! But Joseph conquers once more. He loves his cruel brothers tenderly, and he brings them, with the old father, to the land of plenty, and tends them. What was his temptation? It comes out later on, and with it the reason why he triumphed over it. While the old man lived the brothers that had betrayed Joseph were safe, because of his love to his father; but when he dies the brothers are fearful lest Joseph should wreak his vengeance on them, and so they come with their whining lie to him; the old father had told them, they say, to implore Joseph to be still generous to them. Joseph burst into tears to think that his brethren had judged so meanly of him. But to do these men justice, we must confess that the average man would act as they did. How came it that Joseph had preserved the heart of his boyhood amid his Egyptian prosperity? Men and women, do you want to know the secret of a pure and loving life? Do you want to know the magic formula that will lift you up and ennoble your character, so that it will not occur to you to pay off old wrongs when you get the chance, the formula that will make you a blessing to others? It is to open your heart wide to the sight, and the touch, and the presence of God in your life and in your world. When I hear wise men, and men that mean the world good, telling us that we shall be able to preserve morality when we have ceased to believe that Jesus had a Father in heaven, when we believe that we live our little day, and then die and vanish, and the world goes on as well without us, my heart sickens within me. Tell men and women that they are the highest race of beasts, and what motives have they for being generous and doing noble deeds? Take away the good Jesus, take away the great high heaven with its sunshine, crush down a low roof over our earth, and you crush out life's grandeur. Tell men that every human spirit has in it something mysterious, that death means something awful, that their souls are born for eternity; then life becomes great and solemn, and the great thought arises that we are born to be the sons of God.

And now the last thing in Joseph's life. I think that when he died all men and women in Egypt were talking about him, and I am pretty sure they talked about him as much in a mistaken fashion and with as many blunders as people will talk about you and me when we die. There is no man that ever lived yet that was known to the world; God only knows what we are; so when we die they are bound to speak of us better or worse than we deserve, for they will not know you nor me as we are known to God, as we have lived, and what has been our purpose in life, how earnestly we have striven for it; these are known to God, and to Him only. Thank God, there are more merciful judgments up there in heaven about us than the kindest on earth will deliver. I am pretty sure that the Egyptians all said that Joseph would be proud to be buried in Egypt. He had lived very nearly all his life there. Had he not brought his relatives there? Was he not engrossed, heart and soul, in Egypt, with not a particle of interest left for the old land, the old home, and the old life? We may imagine what would have been the exclamations of astonishment if the Egyptians could have listened at the dying bed of the prince and statesman, and have heard that while all the time he had been a loyal servant to his royal master, his heart was nevertheless away in the land of his boyhood, and that the future he was looking for was not a future of immortality among the Egyptian dead. "Promise me this one thing," he says, "that when God takes you back to the sweet dear land, back to make God's kingdom there, you will take all that is left of me, that you will take my bones out of this Egypt, where I have been in body, but never in spirit." Oh, the grandeur of such an utterance! All the Egyptian greatness, power in one of the mightiest empires the world has ever seen, is as nothing to him compared with the power that his dreams of sweetness, and goodness, and the service of God had over him. That is a life that is not broken in two when death comes.

Men and women here, who have said your prayers when you were young, and have stopped praying now; who have gone into society and given yourselves up to the world, stop and look at your poor broken life, and before it is too late come back to where in your childhood you knelt at God's throne.

Oh, young men and women that have dreamed Joseph's dreams, pray to God that you may dream the dreams of your childhood once more, if you have let the lust and greed of the world into your heart! Old men and women, for whom this world is not long, go back to your childhood, and end your life as you began it.

This is the supreme thought (and I like to end with it, for it is a comforting thought too) in the story of Joseph's life; because I know that there are so many lives crippled and broken through their own fault, as well as through the wrongs and injuries of others; lives dark, and poor, and disappointing; lives that have no triumph in this world, and find it very hard to keep up heart, to keep true to hope, and faith, and God. Listen to the lesson of Joseph's life. No true life of goodness to man and God can ever be a failure. In a pit, in a dungeon in far-off Egypt, you may seem to be shut out of all splendid achievements; wronged and smitten by the storms of life, it may seem as if God had left you; but if you can only keep your heart sweet, and good, and pure; if you can but keep yourself honourable, and generous, and loving, then, though God may give you no ties of home life, and all may appear dark and cheerless; if you can only keep yourself a good, sweet, loving woman, a brave, true, honourable man, if you can but hold fast to your faith, there is a great God over you, there is a Christ who came to die to save you, there is a holiness which God will give you. If you will but hold fast to the end—to His end,—then your life cannot be a failure; its roots are in God, and its end shall be with God; from heaven you came, and to God you shall return.

[1] Preached on Sunday evening, October 20th, 1889, in St. John's Wood Presbyterian Church.