Page:Spiritual Reflections for Every Day in the Year - Vol 1.pdf/331

 conjugal union begun here, becomes the source of all that is pure and blissful in eternity! To break this by the impurities of adultery, is to sin against heaven, and to sin against heaven is to sin against God, for the Lord, as to His Love and Wisdom, is the of angelic life! "How then (aid Joseph) can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?"

There is also a certain spiritual or religious sense involved in this history, which shews the utter impossibility of Joseph complying with the impure desires of his tempter; for had he done so, the scripture law of representation, by which spiritual states of mind, respecting the reception and conjunction of truth and good from the Lord in the soul, would have been entirely, in this instance, overthrown and destroyed. Egypt is mentioned in Scripture to denote a state of bondage, when the mind is bound down to mere earthly knowledge, closed against that higher truth which opens heaven to the soul. Out of this bondage we are all, like the Israelites, called to make our march to the land of promise—to that state of goodness and wisdom, where all that is mentally sweet and delightful, as the milk and honey of Canaan, flows abundantly for ever. Potiphar, as an Egyptian, represented mere natural truth, and the wife of Potiphar is the affection or love of that truth. It is a love, not for spiritual truth which connects with heaven, but for natural that connects only with the world. Now, as Jehovah is said to be with Joseph, so he is the representative of that Truth in immediate connection with Divine Love, thus Truth from the Divine altogether holy, which can never be conjoined to a mere earthly affection, de-