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he receives his blessing-watches his deathbed-embalms his body-mourns for him threescore-and-ten days-and then carries him (as he had desired,) into Canaan to bury him, taking with him as an escort to do him honour "all the elders of Egypt, and all the servants of Pharaoh, and all his house, and the house of his brethren, chariots and horsemen, a very great company." How natural was it now for his brethren to think that the tie by which alone they could imagine Joseph to be held to them was dissolved, that any respect he might have felt or feigned for them, must have been buried in the Cave of Machpelah, and that he would now requite to them the evil they had done! "And they sent a message unto Joseph, saying, Thy father did command before he died, saying, so shall ye say unto Joseph, Forgive, I pray thee

now, the trespass of thy brethren and their sin, for they did unto thee evil." And then they add of themselves, as if well aware of the surest road to their brother's heart, "Forgive, we pray thee, the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father." In every thing the father's name is still put foremost, it is his memory which they count upon as their shield and buckler.

It is not the singular beauty of these scenes, or the moral lesson they teach, excellent as it is, with which I am now concerned, but simply the perfect artless consistency which prevails through them all. It is not the constancy with which the son's strong affection for his father had lived through an interval of twenty years absence, and what is more, through the temptation of sudden promotion to the highest estate-it is not the noble-minded

frankness with which he still acknowledges his kindred, and makes a way for them,

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shepherds" as they were, to the throne of Pharaoh himself—it is not the simplicity and singleness of heart, which allow him to give all the first-born of Egypt, men over whom he bore absolute rule, an opportunity of observing his own comparatively humble origin, by leading them in attendance upon his father's corpse, to the valleys of Canaan and the modest cradle of his race-it is not, in a word, the grace, but the identity of Joseph's character, the light in which it is exhibited by himself, and the light in which it is regarded by his brethren, to which I now point as stamping it with marks of reality not to be gainsaid.

XIII.

I WILL now follow the Israelites out of Egypt into the wilderness, on their return to the land from which their fathers had wandered, and which they, or at least their children, were destined to enjoy.

In the 10th chapter of Leviticus we are told that "Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire unto the Lord, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord." Now it is natural to ask, how came Nadab and Abihu to be guilty of this careless affront to God, lighting their censers probably from their own hearths, and not from the hallowed fire of the altar, as

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they were commanded to do. Possibly we cannot guess how it happened-it may be one of those many matters which are of no particular importance to be known, and concerning which we are accordingly left in the dark. Yet when I read shortly afterwards the following instructions given to Aaron, I am led to suspect that they had their origin in some recent abuse which called for them, though no such origin is expressly assigned to them. I cannot help imagining, that the offence of Nadab and Abihu was at the bottom of the statute, "do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou nor thy sons with thee, when ye go into the Tabernacle of the congregation, lest ye die-it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, and between clean and un

and

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