great doctors of the temple!  He could rule all the things in his father’s house, but not the men of religion, the men of the temple, who called his father their Father.  True, he might have compelled them with a word, withered them by a glance, with a finger-touch made them grovel at his feet; but such supremacy over his brothers the Lord of life despised.  He must rule them as his father ruled himself; he would have them know themselves of the same family with himself; have them at home among the things of God, caring for the things he cared for, loving and hating as he and his father loved and hated, ruling themselves by the essential laws of being.  Because they would not be such, he let them do to him as they would, that he might get at their hearts by some unknown unguarded door in their diviner part.  ’I will be God among you; I will be myself to you.—­You will not have me?  Then do to me as you will.  The created shall have power over him through whom they were created, that they may be compelled to know him and his father.  They shall look on him whom they have pierced.’

His parents found him in the temple; they never really found him until he entered the true temple—­their own adoring hearts.  The temple that knows not its builder, is no temple; in it dwells no divinity.  But at length he comes to his own, and his own receive him;—­comes to them in the might of his mission to preach good tidings to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance, and sight, and liberty, and the Lord’s own good time.

JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN.

And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up:  and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read.  And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias.  And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, ’The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.’  And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down.  And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.  And he began to say unto them, ’This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.’—­Luke iv. 14-21.

The Lord’s sermon upon the mount seems such an enlargement of these words of the prophet as might, but for the refusal of the men of Nazareth to listen to him, have followed his reading of them here recorded.  That, as given by the evangelist, they correspond to neither of the differing originals of the English and Greek versions, ought to be enough in itself to do away with the spiritually vulgar notion of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures.