home and school his youth had been made familiar.  Nor is it difficult to appreciate his surprise, when Joseph and Mary, only after long searching for him, at last found him in the temple, for he felt that it was the most natural place in which he could be found.  In his wondering question to Mary, “Did not you know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke ii. 49), there is a premonition of his later consciousness of peculiarly intimate relation to God.  The question was, however, a sincere inquiry.  It was no precocious rebuke of Mary’s anxiety.  The knowledge of himself as Son of God was only dawning within him, and was not yet full and clear.  This is shown by his immediate obedience and his subjection to his parents in Nazareth through many years.  It is safe, in the interpretation of the acts and words of Jesus, to banish utterly as inconceivable anything that savors of the theatrical.  We must believe that he was always true to himself, and that the subjection which he rendered to Joseph and Mary sprang from a real sense of childhood’s dependence, and was not a show of obedience for any edifying end however high.

70.  That question “Did not you know?” is the only hint we possess of Jesus’ inner life before John’s call to repentance rang through the land.  Meanwhile the carpenter’s son became himself the carpenter.  Joseph seems to have died before the opening of Jesus’ ministry.  For Jesus as the eldest son, this death made those years far other than a time of spiritual retreat; responsibility for the home and the pressing duties of trade must have filled most of the hours of his days.  This is a welcome thought to our healthiest sentiment, and true also to the earliest Christian feeling (Heb. iv. 15).  John the Baptist had his training in the wilderness, but Jesus came from familiar intercourse with men, was welcomed in their homes (John ii. 2), knew their life in its homely ongoing, and was the friend of all sorts and conditions of men.  After that visit to Jerusalem, a few more years may have been spent in school, for, whether from school instruction, or synagogue preaching, or simple daily experience, the young man came to know the traditions of the elders and also to know that observance of them is a mockery of the righteousness which God requires.  Yet he seems to have felt so fully in harmony with God as to be conscious of nothing new in the fresh and vital conceptions of righteousness which he found in the law and prophets.  We may be certain that much of his thought was given to Israel’s hope of redemption, and that with the prophets of old and the singer much nearer his own day (Ps. of Sol. xvii. 23), he longed that God, according to his promise, would raise up unto his people, their King, the Son of David.