all say as with one conscience, "in that we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear; therefore is this distress come upon us." This was something; it was much; but Joseph has still to go on with the _service_ of love. Had he consulted his _name_ at the first, when he remembered his dreams, he would have revealed himself at once, and stood forth as the honoured one in the midst of his confounded, humbled brethren. Had he now consulted his _heart_, he would have revealed himself, and been the gratified one on the bosom of his convicted, sorrowing brethren. But he consulted neither the one nor the other. _Love was serving_; and the husbandman of the soul has, at times, like the tiller of the ground, need of "long patience," and has to wait for the latter, as for the early rain. This was a happy and promising, because it was a _real_ beginning. But Joseph has yet to learn whether the heart of children and of brothers were in them, or whether they were still, as once they had been, reckless of a brother’s cries and of a father’s grief. He therefore exercises them still. Roughness and kindness, encouragements and alarms, challenges and feasts, favours and reproaches, all are used and made to work together. Though indeed all is much the same in the reckoning of a guilty conscience. Jesus is John the Baptist raised from the dead in the apprehensions of it. A shaken leaf is an armed host in its presence. Kindness and roughness alike alarm. They are afraid because they are brought into Joseph’s house. They fear where no fear is. But all is working repentance not to be repented of; and the fruit meet for this is soon to be brought forth. Joseph lays a plan for fully testing whether indeed a child’s heart and a brother’s heart were now in them.