SECLUSION AND FELLOWSHIP.
Joseph is one of the chief of those illustrious men who have suffered for righteousness' sake, and consequently his life shows two phases of persecution to which all who stand up for the truth are liable. On the one hand he is disgraced by isolation, being thrust out from kith and kin; and (when he has struggled through those circumstances into honor and independence) he has then, on the other hand, to brave a second disgrace in association. The Israelites were shepherds, and belonged to a class loathed and feared by the Egyptians since the invasion by the Hykshos or “shepherd” kings; yet Joseph, inspired by justice and affection, voluntarily identifies himself with them—they were God's people—and takes a share in their disgrace, whilst he invests them with all that is transferable, of his own prestige.
Some, who have courage to stand alone in a right cause, have not that superlative courage to enable them to associate, themselves with a discredited people, for this is much more mortifying and humbling.
There is something of an appearance of heroism in standing alone against the world; there is nothing of such an appearance in being connected with a derided “faction,” but quite the reverse. There may be, however, a more lofty heroism in being so, for all that.
Erasmus had courage to publish the principles of the Reformation and satirize the priests; but he dared not associate himself with the humble, ignorant, and somewhat disorderly peasantry led by the Saxon miner's son. He said Luther was “too violent and extreme.” And the worst was it was, that this was quite true; Luther often was so, and so were his adherents. It is unfortunately too true that the contemptible few who hold the truth in any age are excessively open to attack, and are—like Israel's family—blemished with great sins, and inconsistencies, which their critics are swift to detect and exaggerate. Nevertheless they are the people of God, and His servant identifies himself with them. He says not only, “I will speak of Thy testimonies also before kings, and will not be ashamed,” but, “I am a companion of all them that fear Thee, and of them that keep thy precepts.” Yea, he eats for them the sin-offering in the holy place, and confesses, as the Messiah does in the sixty-ninth Psalm, their sins as his own. The world despises them cordially, but yet fears them, and never tires of chronicling their sins and caricaturing their infirmities; yet, strange to say, the gravest charge against them is a matter in which they are not only innocent, but commendable. The Egyptians hated them mainly because they were shepherds!
It is well to see the truth and declare it as Erasmus did; but how much nobler to be willing to calmly take the consequences of it and identify oneself with its disadvantages and associations. Thus did the courtiers, Joseph, Moses, Mordecai, Nehemiah, and others, sanction the cause of the persecuted and faulty people of God, and identify themselves with it.
How grateful was Paul to Onesiphorus, “for he oft refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chain, but when he was in Rome, he sought me out very diligently and found me!” Fancy that for a position of obscurity as well as dishonor. So John of Gaunt stood by Wycliff, and “three Bohemian gentlemen” by Huss, and Benjamin Franklin welcomed Whitfield, at a time when, as Cowper said of him, he was “Pilloried on infamy's high stage, And bore the petty scorn of half an age.” So Christ did not stand alone; He was the friend of publicans and sinners. His constant association was originally composed of a very few “ignorant and unlearned” laboring men and women. There may be then a further trial than having to stand alone for the truth; and a higher quality needed—in some cases—in being associated with others. The quality needed for the first position is courage; for the second, grace. You may not fear blows: do you fear derision?
When there is such a union of grace and strength, we have indeed a symmetrical disposition. When one has undergone injustice and persecution like Joseph, the mind is apt to be soured: strength alone would not enable it to retain its sweetness. The strong men stand at bay and defy the whole world; but combined strength and grace can stand just as resolutely and pray for the world. The stern, strong spirit of Raleigh is an instance of the first attitude. At his execution he writes a poem, in which he sends forth his soul to give the whole world “the lie “— “Go, tell the Court it glows, And shines like rotten wood; Go, tell the Church it shows What's good and Both no good: If Church and Court reply, Then give them both the lie.” He proceeds like this through all classes with bitter and withering irony: “Tell zeal it devotion, Tell love it is but lust, Tell time it is but motion, Tell flesh it is but dust; And wish them not reply, For that must give the lie.” And this defiance is sustained by an unconquerable faith in his own cause and principles: one that gives the lie he says, deserves stabbing; “Yet stab at thee who will, No stab the soul can kill.”
But that young wife, whose hitherto affectionate husband turned her out of doors because she had imbibed the doctrines of the Reformation, showed, I think, a spirit equally undaunted, but a loftier and more serene courage, “unmoved by poisoning, wrath unchanged in faith, unchilled in love.” She was torn on the rack and burnt to death, but left a noble legacy to us in that holy song which she composed and sang in Newgate prison— “Like as the armed knights, Appointed to the fielde, With this world wil I fighte, And faith shal be my shields.” What a martial ring there is in this! something like that part in Homer where Ulysses stands alone and undaunted, “the Greeks all fled, the Trojans coming on.” But here is something greater than Homer— “Yet, Lorde, I Thee desire, For that they doe to me; Let them not taste the hire Of their iniquitie.”
It is the difference between Zechariah and Stephen. It is the spirit of the new dispensation surpassing the old, as the blood of Christ apeaketh better things than that of Abel. Joseph had somewhat anticipated it, “Unmoved by wrath,......unchilled in love.”