Here we find one main thing wherein the Lord differs from us:  we are not at home in this great universe, our father’s house.  We ought to be, and one day we shall be, but we are not yet.  This reveals Jesus more than man, by revealing him more man than we.  We are not complete men, we are not anything near it, and are therefore out of harmony, more or less, with everything in the house of our birth and habitation.  Always struggling to make our home in the world, we have not yet succeeded.  We are not at home in it, because we are not at home with the lord of the house, the father of the family, not one with our elder brother who is his right hand.  It is only the son, the daughter, that abideth ever in the house.  When we are true children, if not the world, then the universe will be our home, felt and known as such, the house we are satisfied with, and would not change.  Hence, until then, the hard struggle, the constant strife we hold with Nature—­as we call the things of our father; a strife invaluable for our development, at the same time manifesting us not yet men enough to be lords of the house built for us to live in.  We cannot govern or command in it as did the Lord, because we are not at one with his father, therefore neither in harmony with his things, nor rulers over them.  Our best power in regard to them is but to find out wonderful facts concerning them and their relations, and turn these facts to our uses on systems of our own.  For we discover what we seem to discover, by working inward from without, while he works outward from within; and we shall never understand the world, until we see it in the direction in which he works making it—­namely from within outward.  This of course we cannot do until we are one with him.  In the meantime, so much are both we and his things his, that we can err concerning them only as he has made it possible for us to err; we can wander only in the direction of the truth—­if but to find that we can find nothing.

Think for a moment how Jesus was at home among the things of his father.  It seems to me, I repeat, a spiritless explanation of his words—­that the temple was the place where naturally he was at home.  Does he make the least lamentation over the temple?  It is Jerusalem he weeps over—­the men of Jerusalem, the killers, the stoners.  What was his place of prayer?  Not the temple, but the mountain-top.  Where does he find symbols whereby to speak of what goes on in the mind and before the face of his father in heaven?  Not in the temple; not in its rites; not on its altars; not in its holy of holies; he finds them in the world and its lovely-lowly facts; on the roadside, in the field, in the vineyard, in the garden, in the house; in the family, and the commonest of its affairs—­the lighting of the lamp, the leavening of the meal, the neighbour’s borrowing, the losing of the coin, the straying of the sheep.  Even in the unlovely facts also of the world which he turns to holy use,