results will be extorted from even those horrible crimes of Joseph’s brethren. Even the devil’s wickedness in which he exults as availing to frustrate God’s plans and to shake his throne, he will find at length to his everlasting confusion and shame, has been made, by the over-mastering wisdom, power, and love of God, to subserve the very cause he thought to break down, and to break down every thing he had vainly hoped to build up! For is not God wiser and mightier than the devil? The final result of the conflict will prove it.――――But it is in place here to note that this story of Joseph’s brethren and of God’s over-ruling hand in their case was shedding some rays of light on these previously dark problems, and therefore was indicating progress in the revelations of God and of his ways with sinful men. Nor let us overlook this one other point――that the case evinces the consummate skill of God in managing the free moral activities of men without the least infringement upon their free agency and moral responsibility. We see this in the way they went into their sin――purely of their own free purpose――after their own envious and proud heart, although God had purposes to answer by means of this very sin. We see it still more, if possible, in the means he used to bring them to repentance; how he put his great hook into their jaws and brought them down to Egypt; took the pride out of them; pressed them with one calamity after another till they came to feel very weak before Almighty God; aroused their long slumbering consciences and kept their thought upon that long past, almost forgotten crime against Joseph――till at length they seem to have become thoroughly penitent. Only by legitimate means and influences, and only by such a use of these as still left their moral activities under their own responsible control――were these grand results reached.――――Thus we may take lessons in the masterly skill with which God’s agencies interwork with man’s, effective to the result he proposes because God is more and mightier than man. * * * * * III. Taking a broader range of view, we may next study the purposes of God _in locating the birth of the Hebrew nation in the land of Egypt_. Since God’s purposes never come to nought but are always accomplished perfectly, the ends he has in view being surely secured, it is safe to reason backward from known results to original purposes. It would amount practically to the same thing if we were to ask――What great results were actually secured by locating his people in Egypt when and as he did; by shaping their history as he did, and by bringing them out at length with his high hand and outstretched arm?