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His coat of many colours has been replaced by the dull gray of the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 rise