Trying to Correct a Prophet
By Adelaide D. Wellman
THE prophet was very aged, and very feeble, and almost blind; and the strange thing he did may have been attributed to one or more of these causes. Joseph had been very particular to place the elder of his two sons at the right of their grandfather, and the younger at the left, in order that the aged man might put his right hand on the head of the elder boy, and thus give him preeminence. But instead, the prophet crossed his arms, and laid his right hand on the younger boy. The boy's father apparently thought that the patriarch's dimness of sight had caused him to mistake Manasseh for Ephraim, and he essayed to correct the supposed error. Not only did he state to Jacob which was the elder of the boys, but in his anxiety to remedy what seemed to him a lamentable blunder, he even took hold of the venerable man's hand, and lifted it from Ephraim's head, to place it upon the head of Manasseh. But he encountered unexpected resistance. Though the prophet specially loved this son, and though he even realized that Joseph had himself received miraculous revelations of the will of God, yet with the dying seer these considerations counted for nothing compared with the delivery of the message divinely committed to him.5 In reply to Joseph's statement, he said, "I know it, my son: I know it." His seemingly queer course had not been due to a misapprehension. Though his eyes were dim, he possessed more than human perception. And future generations testified that Jacob did not err when he signified that the younger of Joseph's sons would excel the older. If we could understand fully the reason for every manifestation of the mind of the Infinite, verily we must be wiser than Egypt's prime minister. But to claim such wisdom would be to prove our lack of it. Rather let us acknowledge that we are neither qualified nor authorized to censor the messages sent from heaven to earth, nor are we warranted in concluding that any feature which is not clear to our finite minds, is due to the defective faculties of the prophet.