fathomable in its depth of consciousness, so 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 ?”1

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

It might mean "in

1 ἐν τοῖς τοῦ πατρός μου, sc. πράγμασιν (Luke ii. 49). my father's house;" but the other rendering is wider and better. Cf. 1 Tim. iv. 15; Gen. xli. 51, LXX.

THEY UNDERSTOOD NOT.

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of those quiet words. mentary on the first recorded utterance 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."1

Strange and mournful com

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."

1 John i. 10, 11. It should be rather "unto His own home (eis rà idia), and His own people (oi dio) received Him not."

CHAPTER VII.

THE HOME AT NAZARETH.

Avgávwv katà tò koivdv åπávтwv åvepúπwv.—JUST. MART. Dial. c. Tryph. 88.

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."1

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 ?" 2

1 Stier, i. 18.

2 It is, no doubt, on dogmatical grounds that this was altered into "the son of the carpenter" in the later MSS., though not in a single uncial. Some were offended that the Lord of All should have worked in the shop of a poor artisan; but how alien to the true spirit of Christianity is this feeling of offence! Origen, indeed, says (c. Cels. vi. 36) that nowhere in the Gospels is Jesus himself called a carpenter; but this is probably a mere slip of memory, or may only prove how early the Christians grew ashamed of their Divine Master's condescension, and how greatly they needed the lessons which it involves. That even the carpenter's son became a term of reproach among the Gentiles, is clear from the story of Libanius's question to a Christian during Julian's expedition into Persia, "What is the Carpenter's Son doing now?" The Christian answered, “He is making a coffin ;" and soon came the news of Julian's death. The omission of Joseph's name in Mark vi. 3 has been universally accepted as an indication that he was dead; otherwise we might suppose that something

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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.1 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 absorb

contemptuous was intended by only mentioning the mother's name (see Ewald, Gram. Arabica, ii. 4, note). For this reference I am indebted to Mr. C. J. Monro.

1 Arab. Gosp. Inf. xxxviii. Unfortunately, Pagan writers do not add one single fact to our knowledge of the life of Jesus (Tac. Ann. xv. 44; Plin. Epp. x. 97; Suet. Claud. 25; Lucian, De Mort. Peregr. 11; Lamprid. Alex. Sev. 29, 43). A few passages in the Vera Hist. of the PseudoLucian are probably meant to ridicule Gospel narratives, and a few passages in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, and the Life of Pythagoras by Jamblichus-the "cloudy romances of Pagan sophists" -are perhaps intended by way of parallel. Jewish writers are just as barren. Josephus and Justus of Tiberias passed over the subject with obvious and unworthy reticence. The Talmudists simply preserved or invented a few turbid and worthless calumnies.

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ing, degrading, grinding poverty, which is always rare, and almost always remediable, but that commonest lot of honest poverty, which, though it necessitates selfdenial, 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,1 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.2 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

1 Philo. in Flac. 977 f.

2 To the Greeks and Romans all mechanical trade was Báravoos, i.e., mean, vulgar, contemptible, and was therefore left to slaves. The Jews, with a truer and nobler wisdom, enacted that every boy should learn a trade, and said with R. Juda b. Ilai, "the wise," that "labour honours the labourer." Saul was a tentmaker. Up to the age of forty, R. Johanan, son of Zakkai, afterwards president of the Sanhedrin, was, like Mahomet, a merchant; the Rabbis Juda and Menahem were bakers; R. Eliezer, supreme president of the schools of Alexandria, was a smith; R. Ismael, a needle-maker; R. Joza Ben Chalaphta, a tanner. (Sepp, § 19; Ginsburg, in Kitto's Cyclop., s. v. "Education"). The rabbis even assumed and rejoiced in the titles of R. Johanan, the shoemaker; R. Simon, the weaver, &c. Labour and learning were, in the eyes of the rabbis, good antidotes against sinful thoughts (Pirke Abhôth, fol. 2, 2).—Even the Rabbis, however, were not far enough advanced to honour labour without learning, and, as we shall see hereafter, they spoke contemptuously of uneducated artisans and common tillers of the soil (vid. infra, p. 89).