I. i. Nothing is more remarkable than the profound and holy reticence of the narrators. The mother of Christ, after His crucifixion, lived in the home of one of the Evangelists—the beloved disciple, St. John-and there is an indescribable touch of delicacy and brightness about the story of the Nativity as described by St. Luke which seems to mark that it was derived from the lips of the Virgin Mary. The existence of so many apocryphal attempts to reproduce the events of the Infancy shows how strong was the desire to penetrate the holy veil of reserve and silence. But it was not intended so to be. We are told of various events before His birth,—the Annunciation; the doubt of Joseph; the visit to Elisabeth; the enrolment in Bethlehem. We are told of the incidents which clustered about His earliest infancy,-the birth in the stable of the inn at Bethlehem; the humility of the manger-cradle. We have the exquisite verses which tell of the shepherds and the angel-song; the visit of the Magi; the Circumcision; the Nunc Dimittis of Simeon; the massacre of the Innocents; the flight into Egypt; the return in the reign of Archelaus; the retirement to provincial Nazareth of Galilee. These, however, are only attendant circumstances. But as regards the Child Christ Himself no word, no anecdote, is preserved beyond the sweet and simple fact that "He grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and We know that His early years as a little child were as the flower of roses and the spring of the year, and as lilies by the watercourses"; but we know no more. The spurious narratives surround his childhood in the house of the Galilean peasant with the blaze of portent and miracle. In reality-and this fact, little as we should a priori have expected it, is full of instruction -it was passed like any other childhood, distinguishable only by its wisdom and its innocency, as of a child who grew and waxed strong, becoming full of wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him. The silence is an elo man. 66 quent proof of the simple truthfulness of the Evangelists. They record nothing, because there was nothing special which it was essential to record. It was not meant that the holy veil of those secluded years should be uplifted, and therefore those who had witnessed them would not gratify a vain curiosity by giving rein to their imaginations in the invention of unreal scenes. And herein the Evangelists furnish an undesigned but very decisive proof of the authenticity of the things they did record. ii. We come next to Christ's early boyhood. Here again we have no stories of His companions, or of His home amusements, of His schooldays and His relations to parents and teachers, as in the spurious evangelists. All that we are told is the single anecdote of His visit to Jerusalem, with His parents, at the Passover, when He was twelve years old. In this case also all is surprising. Believing what the Evangelists did believe, that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God, if they had not been telling the simple unsophisticated truth, we should have found in their narratives the same assumptions of Omniscience and of Superiority over the assembled Rabbis which we find in the imaginary records. Even in many of the medieval and modern pictures of the scene Christ is represented rather as refuting and instructing the Rabbis and Pharisees, than as "sitting in the midst of them, both hearing them and asking them questions." In St. Luke's story we see, as incidentally as in the narratives of the Infancy, that the perfect Divinity of Christ in no way clashes with His perfect Humanity. He grew up like other boys, distinguished only by blameless innocence, and growing "in wisdom" no less than "in stature," and "in favour with God and man." iii. It is a curious circumstance that the only recorded utterance of the Son of God for thirty years should have been almost universally misunderstood. What Jesus said to His sorrowing parents was not "How was it that ye sought Me? Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business ?" The answer was far more simply natural, for the hour had not yet come when the Lord of Life had formally or publicly entered upon His mission. What He said (as was decisively proved by the Rev. Dr. Field of Norwich to the Revision Company of 1882) was, "Wist ye not that I must be in My Father's House?" Although the Temple had been degraded by priests, scribes, and Pharisees into a "a den of thieves," it remained to the last the favourite scene of the Lord's teaching, and it was in those hallowed, though now dishallowed, courts that He uttered, in later years, some of the Divinest addresses. The meaning of what He said to Joseph and His mother was not, "You might have kno that I should be engaged in furthering the work of God," but, "Strange that you should have sought Me sorrowing, and not have come first to the House of My Father, of which now for the first time I behold the glories and the worship." This, then, is the only sentence spoken by Christ for thirty years from His birth in the cradle to the beginning of His ministry-which has been preserved for us. It is but one short remark, called forth by the circumstances of the moment, when He had become what the Jews called "a son of the Covenant," or had been, as we should say, "confirmed." Further than this nothing is made known to us but one fact about His boyhood, and one about His youth and early manhood. iv. The rest of His boyhood is summed up in the clause that "He went with His parents, and came to Nazareth, and He was subject unto them." Even in this clause we have an implicit contradiction of the inventions of the apocryphal narratives in which the young Jesus is represented as a worker of superfluous and meaningless portents, and as assuming an wholly unbecoming tone towards His leaders and teachers. Our Lord in His addresses did not disdain to inculcate those rules of simple modesty and courtesy which add so much to the sweetness and dignity of life. In an age when reverence and the fearfulness of modest duty have, as a rule, vanished from the self-confident and too often disrespectful bearing of the young, it is a most needful lesson to us that, when the King of kings and Lord of lords was a boy at Nazareth, He was modest and obedient. This fact may serve to illustrate the words of the English poet-which do not sound irreverent to those who know how highly our Lord and His Apostles valued the virtue of èxiɛíxɛia, or "sweet reasonableness"-that the best of men That e'er wore earth about Him, was a sufferer; v. This calm, obscure life of uninterrupted labour revealed to the world the truth which it has never adequately grasped, that "a man's life consisteth not in the multitude of things which he possesseth"; and that all the things for which men most toil and moil, and sell their souls, and destroy themselves-wealth, luxury, pleasure, rank, fame, power, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of life—are but insignificant earthly accidents, which have nothing at all to do with the true riches and the true nobleness. They only affect the merest outside of life, and have no connection with its immortal dignity or true essence. humble poverty and obscurity of the life of Jesus in the workshop of the Galilean peasant reveals to us that blessedness is in the reach of all, and that a man, on whom the world may look down from the whole altitude of its inferiority as the humblest of mechanics, may yet be incomparably greater and happier than any king. 66 The vi. The single word which sums up all that we know of the outward facts of our Lord's life is found in the surprised questions of the Nazarenes, who, in accordance with the experience that a prophet has no honour in his own country, were offended in Him." "Is not this, they asked, the carpenter ?" (Mark vi. 3). Ignorant and biassed copyists have altered the reading into, "Is not this the son of the carpenter?" But there is no doubt as to the true reading, and it reveals to us the inestimably precious fact that Jesus earned with His own hands His daily bread. The value and significance of this fact are immense. It constitutes a correction of the immemorial and still continued pride and error of the world. The ancients utterly despised manual labour: to the Greeks it was vulgar (Bavavoos), to the Romans it seemed degrading. Such an expression as a "base mechanic" shows that, even for long centuries after the Dayspring had dawned upon the world, the haughty and the noble were far from having learnt that "labour honours the labourer." St. Paul felt it to be a subject not for humiliation but for honest pride that "his own hands had ministered to his necessities.” It is the lot of the vast majority of the human race that they have to earn their own living by the toil of their hands and the sweat of their brow. It is a blessing and a consolation to these unnumbered myriads to know that their humble and toilsome poverty was deliberately chosen for His own lot by 66 the Lord of life and all the worlds." vii. It was when Jesus "began to be about thirty years old" that, leaving the shop of the village carpenter, He obeyed the Divine call to enter upon His public ministry. For the brief three years and a half during which that ministry lasted, while we have abundant records of His life, there is not one which serves to gratify a merely superficial curiosity. To the early Christians the human Jesus was so utterly merged into the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, that they retained in their memories only those acts which were the signs of His Divine mission, or which involved the illustration of His doctrine. They did not preserve a single relic of His human life, which in the later ages of superstitious corruption would have been degraded into an idol or a fetish. They did not even care to indicate to future ages the exact localities of His birth, His transfiguration, His crucifixion, the grave where they laid Him, the mountain in Galilee where after His resurrection He appeared to His more than five hundred disciples. Nay, more, it is a supremely singular and almost unprecedented circumstance that every vestige even of tradition respecting the personal appearance of the Son of Man was so completely obliterated that it was a subject of controversy among the early Christians whether he was, as the Greek Fathers be |