In the good providence of God, however, the youth was taken from that pit, in which he was to have been buried alive, and sent to a distant country, there to be the saviour of not a few, in a temporal sense. To cover their wickedness, his brothers next resolved to show to their father Joseph’s coat of tartan, dipped in the blood of a kid, as if he had been devoured by ravenous beasts.—Their brother might become a slave; their father’s heart might be torn with anguish; their own souls might be deeply stained with sin piled above sin;—but what of all these, when men are bent on indulging their evil and malignant passions? Let misery be heaped upon misery, yet men will not be diverted from their iniquity. But wicked as their deeds were, and an outrage at once against a father and a brother, and, above all, against their God, he who makes the wrath of man to praise him employed that wrath remarkably to work out his purposes in this case. And he is doing the same at this hour. Think of the miseries, spread over many years of agony, inflicted by fierce persecutors on the Christians of Madagascar in our day, and then mark how they increase in number notwithstanding. Think of the bloody massacres in India, the martyrdoms of native Christians there, with the butchery of all who wear the Christian name; and yet mark how that is overruled to rouse the churches to spread the truth in that dark-souled land. Think, above all, of the Cross of Jesus,—of the woes which were there endured, with all the malignant passions which nailed the Redeemer to the tree; and then see how God can make our wickedness promote his own glory,—can bring joy out of anguish, and life out of death, and blessings unutterable out of the very curse (Gal. iii. 13). CHAPTER II. JOSEPH SOLD TO THE ISHMAELITES. We have just seen that Joseph’s brethren, moved by envy, sold him to some Ishmaelite merchants, by whom he was carried into Egypt, and there sold as a slave. Regardless of their brother’s cries, and deaf to all that affection might whisper, the future patriarchs would make him the victim of their hatred; and it is deeply instructive to notice how many sins are contained in this one transaction. 1. There was a sin committed by brothers against a brother. The ties of nature were outraged. Affection was trampled in the dust,—it was in truth cast into the pit beside Joseph,—it had no power in the hearts of those hating and hateful men. Surely such a case occurring in the Bible so soon after the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, was designed by God to show us the terrible ravages wrought by sin in the soul. Just as war, with its bloody work, has often deflowered the fairest regions of the earth, does fierce passion waste the soul of man.