66.  The physical growth incident to Jesus’ development from boyhood to manhood is a familiar thought.  The intellectual unfolding which belongs to this development is readily recognized.  Not so commonly acknowledged, but none the less clearly essential to the gospel picture, is the gradual unfolding of the child’s moral life under circumstances and stimulus similar to those with which other children meet (Heb. iv. 15).  The man Jesus was known as the carpenter (Matt. xiii. 55).  The learning of such a trade would contribute much to the boy’s mastery of his own powers.  Far more discipline would come from his fellowship with brothers and sisters who did not understand his ways nor appreciate the deepest realities of his life.  Without robbing boyhood days of their naturalness and reality, we may be sure that long before Jesus knew how and why he differed from his fellows he felt more or less clearly that they were not like him.  The resulting sense of isolation was a school for self-mastery, lest isolation foster any such pride or unloveliness as that with which later legend dared to stain the picture of the Lord’s youth.  Four brothers of Jesus are named by Mark (vi. 3),—­James, and Joses, and Judas, and Simon,—­the gospel adds also that he had sisters living at a later time in Nazareth.  They were all subject with him to the same home influences, and apparently were not unresponsive to them.  The similarity of thought and feeling between the sermon on the mount and the Epistle of James is not readily explained by the influence of master over disciple, since the days of James’s discipleship began after the resurrection of Jesus.  In any case there is no reason to think that the companions of Jesus’ home were uncommonly irritating or in any way irreligious, only Jesus was not altogether like them (John vii. 5), and the fact of difference was a moral discipline, which among other things led to that moral growth by which innocence passed into positive goodness.  If the home was such a school of discipline, its neighbors, less earnest and less favored with spiritual training, furnished more abundant occasion for self-mastery and growth.  The very fact that in his later years Jesus was no desert preacher, like John, but social, and socially sought for, indicates that he did not win his manhood’s perfection in solitude, but in fellowship with common life and in victory over the trials and temptations incident to it (Heb. ii. 17, 18).

67.  Yet he must have been familiar with the life which is in secret (Matt. vi. 1-18).  He who in his later years was a man of much prayer, who began (Luke iii. 21) and closed (Luke xxiii. 46) his public life with prayer, as a boy was certainly familiar not only with the prayers of home and synagogue, but also with quiet, personal resort to the presence of God.  It would be unjust to think of any abnormal religious precocity.  Jesus was the best example the world has seen of perfect spiritual health, but we must believe that he came early to know God and to live much with him.