"Unthinking, idle, wild, and young,

I talked and laughed, and danced and sung."

He

But how soon the awful shadow fell upon His brow! And yet, although His parents did not understand Him, and although He had gained full comprehension of His destiny, He went down into Nazareth, and was subject unto them. went their messages, did their work, humbled Himself, as if this episode at Jerusalem had never been. Between His mother and Himself there was the true love that is built upon reverence. She reverenced Him. "She kept all those things, and pondered them in her heart." She knew the awful secret of His birth; and although the thought of His greatness had been somewhat obscured by her long ministrations to the weakness and helplessness of His childhood, it could not be forgotten again; it had been brought to mind too sharply for that. After this crisis in His history He went home, and lived in peaceful solitude in the silence of the retired village,

"Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.”

The great use of this incident is to teach that Jesus Christ from His earliest years was conscious of His purpose. Without such a record as this

we might have fancied that the consciousness of His life-work began with its execution. We are taught that it was not so, and that the years of silence were spent in consciousness of those powers which were to be exercised in the brief, intense years of His public ministry. He was developed by the influences of home, of nature, of the Holy Scriptures, and, above all, by the Spirit of His Father working in Him.

CHAPTER III.

The Silent Years of Jesus, and the Silent Building of the Temple.

"There was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building."

"There is a day in spring,

When under all the earth the secret germs
Begin to stir and glow before they bud;

The wealth and festal pomps of midsummer

Lie in the heart of that inglorious day,

Which no man names with blessing, though its work
Is blest by all the world."

M. S.

HERE are no fewer than eighteen years of

THE

the life of Christ of which we have no record, except what is contained in the words, "Is not this the carpenter?" It was said in His public life, "Never man spake like this man;" but we, with the Temple story fresh in our memory, may well say, "Never man kept silence like this man." We know what He could do, and how He could teach, and yet the whole history of His

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T

doings and teachings for these long years is summed up in the one word "carpenter." This strange silence reminds us of another strange silence. When the Temple of Solomon was being built, it grew silently: from the hands of the workmen who were gathered together, not a sound was heard. The Temple rose

"As Ilion like a mist rose into towers."

Jesus Christ likened Himself to the Temple. He spake of the Temple being destroyed and raised in three days, meaning thereby the temple of His body that was to fall in death, but to be built again fairer in the resurrection. And it is written in ancient prophecy, that He should sit a priest upon His throne, and build a temple to the Lord. So perhaps we may connect the two silences,— the silent growing of Solomon's Temple, and the silent years of Jesus. Perhaps the old builders, who had so much reverence in them, if we may judge from their work, thought that the noise and hammering, that might be fit enough for ordinary work, did not beseem the building of a holy temple to the Lord, which should grow, like the works of God's own building, in solemn silence. The great thought then before us is that Jesus

grew in silence. Not merely the eighteen years, but we may say the whole thirty years, was a time of profound, hardly-broken silence. God's house was being built there, down at Nazareth, in the stillness.

We may consider the silence in three aspects. It was a time of restraint, a time of growth, and a time of preparation.

1. It was a time of restraint. We might have said suffering, for in one sense the word would be true, but the other word perhaps expresses the truth more nearly, a time of self-denial, a time of obedience, manifesting itself in various ways. And, first of all, it manifested itself in the poverty of Jesus. Joseph was a carpenter in a provincial village, and Jesus shared his lot in life. They did not live in abject poverty; still they were poor, with nothing to spare for luxuries and superfluities, and nothing, probably, to store up for the future. Jesus in His after life looked a sterner poverty in the face, but He was poor now. There is a peculiar fitness about this. Jesus Christ came to save the world, and, under any conceivable condition of things, poverty must be the lot of the great majority of human beings. It is so now; it probably must be so forever.