habit of the household, for Joseph. His reply carries her back to the thought of Him who was really His Father; to the day when it was said to her, "Therefore that Holy Thing that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God."

We have here, then, the record of his consciousness of his own Divinity; and we may suppose the first intimation he had given of his consciousness of it. Are we to suppose that Mary and Joseph had told the child of the miraculous conception and the wondrous birth? These are not subjects we talk to children about. Are we to suppose that they had filled his mind with ambitious dreams by telling him that he was marked out by all the wonders which surrounded his birth to be the Messiah? If we think of the education which Queen Victoria and Prince Albert gave their children we shall see that it is the wise aim of those whose children are born to high destinies to bring them up modestly and naturally; we suppose, therefore, that this was the first intimation which Jesus, now that he had crossed the line which divides boyhood from manhood, gave of his consciousness of his own true parentage.

Ah! what thoughts must have been awakened in the hearts of Mary and Joseph. Twelve long years had elapsed since that wondrous time, and its memories were not forgotten, indeed, but had faded into the background of their uneventful life. All

that long time no new wonders had happened; the infant had grown into a sweet and holy child, a pure and noble boy, but their life had been bounded by the mountain valley of Nazareth, and nothing had broken its calm tenor. The apocryphal gospels, indeed, talk of the miracles of the childhood of Jesus, and the wonders which surrounded him, but they are clearly the inventions of the natural human taste for the marvellous; and we mention them only because they make more striking, by contrast, the fact of the thorough naturalness of the real childhood of the Lord.

"They understood not the saying which he spake unto them." They knew that he was the son of the miraculous conception, they believed that he was the destined Messiah, but they did not (in all probability) know that he was divine. This ignorance of theirs helps us, again, to realise the perfect humanness of his childhood. They knew that his conception had been miraculous, they believed in his great future destinies, but meantime there was no great present awe to interfere with the perfect naturalness of their relations to him.

I

CHAPTER XIV.

THE OBSCURE LIFE.

E went down with them and came to Nazareth and was subject unto them. (But his mother kept all these sayings in her heart), and Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man" (Luke ii. 51, 52). He went down to Nazareth with them.

Not only the infancy and boyhood, from birth to twelve years old, but also the early manhood, from twelve to thirty, those years when the character is being fully formed and settled, were spent in the seclusion of the mountain village. Let us try to realise what that obscure life at Nazareth was like.

And first of all we have to clear away some misapprehensions which commonly exist in the English mind, naturally regarding that life from the standpoint of its own prepossessions, with respect to the supposed poverty, and lowly social condition, and ignoble calling, of the holy family.

If the ordinary better-class English Christian would be perfectly candid he would confess that he never quite overcomes the painful impression produced on

his mind by the fact that our Lord was born among "the lower classes"; the fact carries with it, to his mind, a presumption of inferiority of race. And after all that can be said about it, the fact remains that there is something in pedigree, and that the "well born" have by nature a more refined organisation than the "low born." In other words, to be of the lower classes carries with it a presumption of inferior natural endowments, and therefore of inferior capacity for the attainment of the highest type of refined humanity. The English people are supposed to be made up of an inferior conquered and a superior conquering race. The upper classes are supposed to represent the fiery chivalrous refined Norman, and the lower classes the slow and heavy Saxon. The truth is that the two races have long since so thoroughly intermingled, that the distinction of race does not practically exist among us; but the feelings and habits belonging to such a distinction of race have to a great extent survived, and it is still largely taken for granted that the lower classes are of a naturally inferior race and type.

But, however it may be in England, there was nothing of this distinction of race, or of this feeling between the upper and lower classes, in Jewish society. They were all of one blood. They all claimed Abraham as their father. One Jew was of one tribe and another of another, but the progenitors of the

tribes were twelve brothers. The noble and the vinedresser, the great lady and the gleaner in the barley field, were all of the same blood. We can perhaps best understand this state of society by comparison with the highland clans; the chief of a great clan. was recognised as a noble among nobles, but all the men of his clan were his cousins, and, by birth, of as good blood, and as proud of their good blood, as he. The nearest approach to an aristocratic caste among the Jews at this time was the priestly family, which was supported by the labours of the rest of the people, and whose chief had been the virtual ruler of the nation from the return from the captivity to the time of Herod. The only other family which could put forth any hereditary claim to special distinction was the family of David, which had been the royal family of Judah down to the captivity, and from which, moreover, the Messiah was to be born.

But Joseph and Mary and Jesus were of the family of David; and, if we do not misunderstand the genealogy of St. Matthew, Jesus was the representative of the family, and not only David's son, but David's heir. That their pedigree, as of the house of David, was well known and recognised is evident from the fact that they went up to Bethlehem to be enrolled at the census "because they were of the house and lineage of David." That little family of Nazareth, though poor and obscure, was at least of