such as the unjust judge, the false steward, the faithless labourers, he ignores the temple.  See how he drives the devils from the souls and bodies of men, as we the wolves from our sheepfolds! how before him the diseases, scaly and spotted, hurry and flee!  The world has for him no chamber of terror.  He walks to the door of the sepulchre, the sealed cellar of his father’s house, and calls forth its four days dead.  He rebukes the mourners, he stays the funeral, and gives back the departed children to their parents’ arms.  The roughest of its servants do not make him wince; none of them are so arrogant as to disobey his word; he falls asleep in the midst of the storm that threatens to swallow his boat.  Hear how, on that same occasion, he rebukes his disciples!  The children to tremble at a gust of wind in the house!  God’s little ones afraid of a storm!  Hear him tell the watery floor to be still, and no longer toss his brothers! see the watery floor obey him and grow still!  See how the wandering creatures under it come at his call!  See him leave his mountain-closet, and go walking over its heaving surface to the help of his men of little faith!  See how the world’s water turns to wine! how its bread grows more bread at his word!  See how he goes from the house for a while, and returning with fresh power, takes what shape he pleases, walks through its closed doors, and goes up and down its invisible stairs!

All his life he was among his father’s things, either in heaven or in the world—­not then only when they found him in the temple at Jerusalem.  He is still among his father’s things, everywhere about in the world, everywhere throughout the wide universe.  Whatever he laid aside to come to us, to whatever limitations, for our sake, he stooped his regal head, he dealt with the things about him in such lordly, childlike manner as made it clear they were not strange to him, but the things of his father.  He claimed none of them as his own, would not have had one of them his except through his father.  Only as his father’s could he enjoy them;—­only as coming forth from the Father, and full of the Father’s thought and nature, had they to him any existence.  That the things were his fathers, made them precious things to him.  He had no care for having, as men count having.  All his having was in the Father.  I wonder if he ever put anything in his pocket:  I doubt if he had one.  Did he ever say, ‘This is mine, not yours’?  Did he not say, ’All things are mine, therefore they are yours’?  Oh for his liberty among the things of the Father!  Only by knowing them the things of our Father, can we escape enslaving ourselves to them.  Through the false, the infernal idea of having, of possessing them, we make them our tyrants, make the relation between them and us an evil thing.  The world was a blessed place to Jesus, because everything in it was his father’s.  What pain must it not have been to him, to see his brothers so vilely misuse the Father’s house by grasping, each for himself, at the family things!  If the knowledge that a spot in the landscape retains in it some pollution, suffices to disturb our pleasure in the whole, how must it not have been with him, how must it not be with him now, in regard to the disfigurements and defilements caused by the greed of men, by their haste to be rich, in his father’s lovely house!