infinitely memorable as furnishing us with the first recorded words of the Lord Jesus:

"Why is it that ye were seeking me? Did ye not know that I must be about my Father's business?"

This answer, so divinely natural, so sublimely noble, bears upon itself the certain stamp of authenticity. The conflict of thoughts which it implies; the half-vexed astonishment which it expresses that they should so little understand him; the perfect dignity, and yet the perfect humility which it combines, lie wholly beyond the possibility of invention. It is in accordance, too, with all His ministry-in accordance with that utterance to the tempter, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God," and with that quiet answer to the disciples by the well of Samaria, "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to finish His work." Mary had said unto Him, "Thy father," but in His reply He recognises, and henceforth He knows, no father except His Father in heaven. In the "Did ye not know," He delicately recalls to them the fading memory of all that they did know; and in that “I must," He lays down the sacred law of self-sacrifice by which He was to walk, even unto the death upon the cross.

"And they understood not the saying which He spake unto them." They even they-even the old man who had protected His infancy, and the mother who knew the awful secret of His birth-understood not, that is, not in their deeper sense, the significance of those quiet words. Strange and mournful commentary on the first recorded utterances of the youthful Saviour, spoken to those who were nearest and dearest to Him on earth! Strange, but mournfully prophetic of all his life:-"He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not."

And yet, though the consciousness of His Divine parentage was thus clearly present in His mind-though one ray from the glory of His hidden majesty had thus unmistakably flashed forth-in all dutiful simplicity and holy obedience "He went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them."

CHAPTER VII.

THE HOME AT NAZARETH.

Such, then, is the "solitary floweret out of the wonderful enclosed garden of the thirty years, plucked precisely there where the swollen bud, at a distinctive crisis, bursts into flower."

But if of the first twelve years of His human life we have only this single anecdote, of the next eighteen years of His life we possess no record whatever save such as is implied in a single word.

That word occurs in Mark vi. 3: "Is not this the carpenter?"

We may be indeed thankful that the word remains, for it is full of meaning, and has exercised a very noble and blessed influence over the fortunes of mankind. It has tended to console and sanctify the estate of poverty; to ennoble the duty of labour; to elevate the entire conception of manhood, as of a condition which in itself alone, and apart from every adventitious circumstance, has its own grandeur and dignity in the sight of God.

1. It shows, for instance, that not only during the three years of His ministry, but throughout the whole of His life, our Lord was poor. In the cities the carpenters would be Greeks, and skilled workmen ; the carpenter of a provincial village-and, if tradition be true, Joseph was "not very skilful "-can only have held a very humble position and secured a very moderate competence. In all ages there has been an exaggerated desire for wealth; an exaggerated admiration for those who possess it; an exaggerated belief of its influence in producing or increasing the happiness of life; and from these errors a flood of cares and jealousies and meannesses have devastated the life of man. And therefore Jesus chose voluntarily "the low estate of the poor "--not, indeed, an absorbing, degrading, grinding poverty, which is always rare, and almost always remediable, but that commonest lot of honest poverty, which, though it necessitates self-denial, can provide with ease for all the necessaries of a simple life. The Idumæan dynasty that had usurped the throne of David might indulge in the gilded vices of a corrupt Hellenism, and display the gorgeous gluttonies of a decaying civilisation; but He who came to be the Friend and the Saviour, no less than the King of All, sanctioned the purer, better, simpler traditions and customs of His nation, and chose the condition in which the vast majority of mankind have ever, and must ever live.

2. Again, there has ever been, in the unenlightened mind, a love of idleness; a tendency to regard it as a stamp of aristocracy; a desire to

delegate labour to the lower and weaker, and to brand it with the stigma of inferiority and contempt. But our Lord wished to show that labour is a pure and a noble thing; it is the salt of life; it is the girdle of manliness; it saves the body from effeminate languor, and the soul from polluting thoughts. And therefore Christ laboured, working with His own hands, and fashioned ploughs and yokes for those who needed them. The very scoff of Celsus against the possi bility that He should have been a carpenter who came to save the world, shows how vastly the world has gained from this very circumstance-how gracious and how fitting was the example of such humility in One whose work it was to regenerate society, and to make all things new.

3. Once more, from this long silence, from this deep obscurity, from this monotonous routine of an unrecorded and uneventful life, we were meant to learn that our real existence in the sight of God consists in the inner and not in the outer life. The world hardly attaches any significance to any life except those of its heroes and benefactors, its mighty intellects, or its splendid conquerors. But these are, and must ever be, the few. One raindrop of myriads falling on moor or desort or mountain-one snowflake out of myriads melting into the immeasurable sca-is, and must be, for most men the symbol of their ordinary lives. They die, and barely have they died, when they are forgotten; a few years pass, and the creeping lichens eat away the letters of their names upon the churchyard stone; but even if those crumbling letters were still decipherable, they would recall no memory to those who stand upon their graves. Even common and ordinary men are very apt to think themselves of much importance; but, on the contrary, not even the greatest man is in any degree necessary, and after a very short space of time

"His place, in all the pomp that fills

The circuit of the summer hills,

Is that his grave is green."

4. A relative insignificance, then, is, and must be, the destined lot of the immense majority, and many a man might hence be led to think, that since he fills so small a space-since, for the vast masses of mankind, he is of as little importance as the ephemerid which buzzes ont its little hour in the summer noon- -there is nothing better than to eat, and drink, and dic. But Christ came to convince us that a relative insignificance may be an absolute importance. He came to teach that continual excitement, prominent action, distinguished services, brilliant success, are no essential elements of true and noble

life, and that myriads of the beloved of God are to be found among the insignificant and the obscure. "Si vis divinus esse, late ut Deus," is the encouraging, consoling, ennobling lesson of those voiceless years. The calmest and most unknown lot is often the happiest, and we may safely infer that these years in the home and trade of the carpenter of Nazareth were happy years in our Saviour's life. Often, even in His later days, it is clear that His words are the words of one who rejoiced in spirit; they are words which seem to flow from the full river of an abounding happiness. But what must that happiness have been in those earlier days, before the storms of righteous anger had agitated his unruffled soul, or His heart burned hot with terrible indignation against the sins and hypocrisies of men? "Heaven," as even a Confucius could tell us, "means principle;" and if at all times innocence be the only happiness, how great must have been the happiness of a sinless childhood! "Youth," says the poet-preacher, "danceth like a bubble, nimble and gay, and shineth like a dove's neck, or the image of a rainbow which hath no substance, and whose very image and colours are fantastical." And if this decription be true of even a careless youth, with what transcendently deeper force must it apply to the innocent, the sinless, the perfect youth of Christ ? In the case of many myriads, and assuredly not least in the case of the saints of God, a sorrowful and stormy manhood has often been preceded by a calm and rosy dawn.

5. And while they were occupied manually, we have positive evidence that these years were not neglected intellectually. No importance can be attached to the clumsy stories of the Apocryphal Gospels, but it is possible that some religious and simple instruction may have been given to the little Nazarenes by the sopherím, or other attendants of the synagogue; and here our Lord, who was made like unto us in all things, may have learnt, as other children learnt, the elements of human learning. But it is, perhaps, more probable that Jesus received His early teaching at home, and in accordance with the injunctions of the Law (Deut. xi. 19), from His father. would, at any rate, have often heard in the daily prayers of the synagogue all which the elders of the place could teach respecting the Law and the Prophets. That He had not been to Jerusalem, for purposes of instruction, and had not frequented any of the schools of the Rabbis, is certain from the indignant questions of jealous enemies, "From whence hath this man these things?" "How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" There breathes throughout these questions the Rabbinic spirit of insolent contempt

He

for the am ha-aretz (or) or illiterate countryman. The stereotyped intelligence of the nation, accustomed, if I may use the expression, to that mummified form of a dead religion, which had been embalmed by the Oral Law, was incapable of appreciating the divine originality of a wisdom learnt from God alone. They could not get beyond the sententions error of the son of Sirach, that "the wisdom of the learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure." Had Jesus received the slightest tincture of their technical training he would have been less, not more, effectually armed for putting to shame the supercilious exclusiveness of their narrow erudition.

6. And this testimony of His enemies furnishes us with a convincing and fortunate proof that His teaching was not, as some would insinuate, a mere eclectic system borrowed from the various sects and teachers of His times. It is certain that He was never enrolled among the scholars of those Scribes who made it their main business to teach the traditions of the fathers. Although schools in great towns had been founded eighty years before, by Simon Ben Shatach, yet there could have been no Beth Midrash or Beth Rabban, no vineyard" or "array" at despised and simple Nazareth. And from whom could Jesus have borrowed ?-From Oriental Gymnosophists or Greek Philosophers? No one, in these days, ventures to advance so wild a proposition. From the Pharisees? The very foundations of their system, the very idea of their religion, was irreconcilably alien from all that He revealed.-From the Sadducees? Their epicurean insouciance, their "expediency" politics, their shallow rationalism, their polished sloth, were even more repugnant to true Christianity than they were to sincere Judaism.-From the Essenes? They were an exclusive, ascetic, and isolated community, with whose discouragement of marriage, and withdrawal from action, the Gospels have no sympathy, and to whom our Lord never alluded, unless it be in those passages where He reprobates those who abstain from anointing themselves when they fast, and who hide their candle under a bushel.— From Philo, and the Alexandrian Jews? Philo was indeed a good 'man, and a great thinker, and a contemporary of Christ; but (even if his name had ever been heard-which is exceedingly doubtful-in so remote a region as Galilee) it would be impossible, among the world's philosophies, to choose any system less like the doctrines which Jesns taught, than the mystic theosophy and allegorising extravagance of that "sea of abstractions" which lies congealed in his writings.From Hillel and Shammai? We know but little of them; but although, in one or two passages of the Gospels, there may be a con