to be proud of; and though at present held under a foreign yoke, it resented the indignity, and was sustained by the confident expectation in the immediate future of the achievement of a universal monarchy, which should last so long as the world endured. The consciousness of a great ancestry and a great destiny is no mean help to the formation of greatness of character.

These Sacred Books, then, and these traditions, and these national sentiments, afforded the material of the education of a Jewish youth. The Rabbis discouraged the study of Gentile learning. It was an innovation, and an evidence of unusual freedom of thought, when Gamaliel, a little later, allowed and encouraged the Jewish youth to read the Greek and Latin writers. But Greek was the common language of commerce in Galilee in the time of which we are speaking; Greek civilisation and literature had been disseminated all over the East, and no intelligent, thoughtful person could well be ignorant of the great outlines of Greek teaching.

We have abundant evidence that our Lord had a familiar, thorough, and profound knowledge of the Sacred Books; there is no reason to think that He was less acquainted with the Greek language and Greek thought than Peter and John and James, who wrote their Epistles in Greek.

Then we must bear in mind what manner of child

He was whose training and education we are considering. When we say that He possessed every human faculty in perfect and harmonious development, we are saying that He was a child of great genius and of unexampled "many-sidedness"; when we add that He was as perfect in affections and in will as in intellect, we recognise that we have no deductions to make for the flaws of temper, and the waywardnesses which so often reduce great genius to sterility. We have a vast genius, a perfect moral character, and firm will, untainted by any hereditary or acquired imperfection; and quickened and invigorated by the grace of God to the keenest edge and finest temper. We have our human nature in the highest possible manifestation of what man is capable of being. It is the Child of the highest endowments and noblest promise which the race ever bore, who is thus growing up, in silence and obscurity, in the home of Joseph, in the mountain village of Nazareth.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SON OF THE LAW."

N the course of our study of the Gospels we arrive now at a fact of the most remarkable kind.

We have seen how fully the history of the Nativity, with the group of events around it, is related-the Annunciation and Birth of the Forerunner, the Annunciation to the Virgin, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Shepherds, of the Magi, the Circumcision, the Presentation, the Flight into Egypt, the Return to Nazareth. We shall see hereafter at what length the history of the three years' ministry is told, the Discourses, Parables, Miracles, Life. Lastly, the history of the Passion and Death is related in continuous and minute detail.

In contrast with this, we find, between the history of the Nativity and the history of the Ministry, a space of thirty years of our Lord's life which the Evangelists leave almost an entire blank.

Not quite a blank; for that point of the Sacred Life when childhood ends and responsibility begins is marked by one incident, which is recorded. More

over, the period of childhood, on one side of that incident, and the period of manhood on the other, are each summed up in a sentence.

The incident is the visit to Jerusalem at twelve years old. The sentence which sums up the childhood is that which we considered in the last chapter:"The child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him" (Luke ii. 39-40), and the sentence which sums up the manhood is this, "And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man,"which will occupy us in the next chapter.

It is this incident of the visit to Jerusalem which we have now to consider. St. Luke relates it as follows:

"Now His parents went up to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover. And when Jesus was twelve years old they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the Feast" (Luke ii. 41, &c.).

There is a time in a boy's life when the mind. begins to look abroad beyond the circle of home, when the affections begin to bud, and the will to assert itself; in short, when the boy develops into the young man. It was the custom of the Jews, when their boys attained this age, to carry them up to Jerusalem at one of the feasts. There they were presented to the Rabbis, in one of the chambers of the Temple, to be questioned as to their religious

knowledge, and further instructed in it. Then they were brought into the Temple, to take part in its solemn worship. And from that time they entered upon all the obligations, and were entitled to all the privileges, of adult members of the commonwealth of Israel.

This formal admission of the youthful Jew into the full privileges of the covenant was not based upon any commandment of the law. It was an ecclesiastical regulation which those "who sat in Moses' seat" had made, or it was a religious custom which had gradually grown up, out of a conviction of its practical usefulness for edification. Our Lord's obedience to it, therefore, assumes an important significance. In his circumcision, we saw he submitted to the first precept of the law, and accepted the obligation to obey the whole law; but here he dutifully observes an ecclesiastical regulation, and so sets us the example of that deference to lawful ecclesiastical authority which he afterwards broadly enunciated in the sentence:-"The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat: All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do" (Matt. xxiii. 2, 3).

This, then, was the purpose for which, when Jesus was twelve years old, his parents brought him up to Jerusalem. It was such a crisis in the spiritual life as Confirmation and First Communion are with us, and this, perhaps, would have been enough to account