childhood that constitutes him a child, therefore the childness is of the divine nature.  The child may not indeed be capable of looking into the father’s method, but he can in a measure understand his work, has therefore free entrance to his study and workshop both, and is welcome to find out what he can, with fullest liberty to ask him questions.  There are men too, who, at their best, see, in their lower measure, things as they are—­as God sees them always.  Jesus saw things just as his father saw them in his creative imagination, when willing them out to the eyes of his children.  But if he could always see the things of his father even as some men and more children see them at times, he might well feel almost at home among them.  He could not cease to admire, cease to love them.  I say love, because the life in them, the presence of the creative one, would ever be plain to him.  In the Perfect, would familiarity ever destroy wonder at things essentially wonderful because essentially divine?  To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—­the most undivine of all moods intellectual.  Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.

Could we see things always as we have sometimes seen them—­and as one day we must always see them, only far better—­should we ever know dullness?  Greatly as we might enjoy all forms of art, much as we might learn through the eyes and thoughts of other men, should we fly to these for deliverance from ennui, from any haunting discomfort?  Should we not just open our own child-eyes, look upon the things themselves, and be consoled?

Jesus, then, would have his parents understand that he was in his father’s world among his father’s things, where was nothing to hurt him; he knew them all, was in the secret of them all, could use and order them as did his father.  To this same I think all we humans are destined to rise.  Though so many of us now are ignorant what kind of home we need, what a home we are capable of having, we too shall inherit the earth with the Son eternal, doing with it as we would—­willing with the will of the Father.  To such a home as we now inhabit, only perfected, and perfectly beheld, we are travelling—­never to reach it save by the obedience that makes us the children, therefore the heirs of God.  And, thank God! there the father does not die that the children may inherit; for, bliss of heaven! we inherit with the Father.

All the dangers of Jesus came from the priests, and the learned in the traditional law, whom his parents had not yet begun to fear on his behalf.  They feared the dangers of the rugged way, the thieves and robbers of the hill-road.  For the scribes and the pharisees, the priests and the rulers—­they would be the first to acknowledge their Messiah, their king!  Little they imagined, when they found him where he ought to have been safest had it been indeed his father’s house, that there he sat amid lions—­the