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

Excerpt

The Young Man Who Was a Favourite Son

Which would you say is the harder to bear, adversity or prosperity? I am not sure. If I were a betting man I would not know on which horse to put my money.

The Bible says, "The destruction of the poor is their poverty." The narrowness and the meagreness of their lives, the lack of access to the highest interests seems to drive them oftentimes into the coarser forms of indulgence which are their undoing. The Bible also says, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." The millionaire who strives to be thoroughly Christian in all his attitudes and actions, in the secret desires which rule his own soul and in the relations he sustains to his fellow men by reason of his wealth has a hard task. In every great city you will find the sons of millionaires falling down or flinging themselves away in thoughtless dissipation where the sons of toil are standing up and making good.

Here, for example, was a young man who was born on the sunny side of the street. He was the son of a rich man, and the favourite son. He was handsome—"It came to pass that Joseph was a goodly person and well favoured." He was habitually well dressed—"His father gave him a coat of many colours," which there in the Orient marked him as a young man of style. He had a vivid imagination and was a good talker. He was a young man of parts and his story was so interesting to those early Hebrews that here in the Book of Genesis thirteen full chapters are given to his personal history.

Let me notice three points in his career—first, his early unpopularity. You do not have to know Hebrew to understand why he was not as popular as Santa Claus. He was his father's favourite, which is a heavy load for any child to bear. He lived in a family where there were four sets of children. His father had married two wives, Rachel who was handsome because he loved her, and Leah who was "tender-eyed," the Scripture says, because she was the daughter of his employer at that time and it was good business. There were also children who had been born to the two housemaids, according to the easy customs of that far-off time and place. Joseph was the son of Rachel, the favourite wife, and her favourite son. He wore the signs of this parental popularity in the gay coat of many colours. It was almost inevitable that he should become vain and overbearing.

He was also a talebearer. He looked down with unconcealed contempt upon his half-brothers who were the sons of the housemaids. "When Joseph was with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah he brought unto his father their evil report."

The tattler in the school and the squealer on the street come in, justly perhaps, for the contempt of their fellows. And whatever allowance may be made for exceptional situations, the instinct which brands the talebearer as mean is mainly wholesome. It was One who knew what was in man who said, "Why beholdest thou the mote in thy brother's eye and considerest not the beam in thine own eye?...