the musical notes of the birds, the happy voices of the little children, the murmur of the brooks, the bright tints of the flowers, the welcome rain-how all were eloquent of God to the heart of Jesus Christ at Nazareth! And this we see in aftertimes when He uses all this in illustrating His teaching. Little dared He venture to exercise His power over men's minds; yet He was the faithful friend, He was the kind fellow-workman, He was the pleasant companion of a restful hour, He was the soothing consoler of an afflicted household-all this He was as true man, no less certainly than He was Mary's true Son. If nature was His open book of God, and if life with men was His daily duty, so was God's written word His constant meditation. Our joy in reading the divine pages of the Old Testament is greatly enhanced by the certainty that Jesus read them daily with the tenderest piety. Who has ever read the Old Testament as Jesus read it? He was a perfect Hebrew in race and in religion, and the Hebrew blood and faith were inseparably joined to the Book. In every hero and every great happening He saw Himself prefigured. But Jesus took no sides in the miserable divisions of His people. He scorned the puerile subtilty of the Pharisees; His great soul detested their formalism. He spurned the polished materialism of the Sadducees. The fatalistic errors of the Essenes, as well as their false asceticism, He condemned. He was a perfect Israelite in being simply Himself. His soul was fed by God through every medium of divine life-reason, revelation, nature, communion with men and women, especially Mary and Joseph, the natural teachers of His youth, having always the ineffablę privilege of immediate intercourse with the divine nature with which He was personally one. As a man He was entirely human; but wholly original was His mental and moral force. When He began to teach, all could understand, none could quite master His doctrine-it fed at the same time that it stimulated the soul's appetite for truth. He spoke the thoughts of eternity in the words of time. And thus it was that Jesus waited at His home, neither hurried nor sluggish, but just where and when and how the Father willed. Such a being as Jesus can afford to wait, for He knows that when He begins He shall succeed. He who patiently waits God's hour is, when that hour strikes, as strong as God. In There can be no doubt that it is to the mother of Jesus that we owe the simple and entrancing story of the birth and early days of the Saviour. She had laid up in her heart everything that happened, and gave it with those sweet touches of guileless nature, those loving accents of unfathomed maternal love, which make the narrative in Luke and Matthew the unique poem of Heaven's wooing and winning the hearts of men. after years, when Mary had shared with the Apostles the gift of the Holy Ghost. they must many a time have gathered about her and urged her to repeat again and again the divine narrative of the infancy of Jesus, and His hidden life at Nazareth. These accounts were distinctly remembered and carefully noted, and afterwards embodied in the Gospels. JOHN THE BAPTIST PREPARES THE WAY FOR JESUS. Matt. iii. 1-10; Mark i. 2-6; Luke iii. 1-14. THE moral revolution which John the Baptist wrought among the Jewish people is a fact of history, and is witnessed no less by Josephus than by the Evangelists. It was as sudden and dramatic as it was salutary. He emerged from the desert of Judea alone and unheralded, but as he began to preach penance for sin on the banks of the Jordan his words shook men's hearts like the voice of thunder-" a voice crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord." Multitudes flocked to hear him. His personality was in itself a powerful sermon. His clothing was a scanty garment of camel's hair fastened by a leathern girdle. His hair and beard had never been cut, his head and feet always bare. He was about thirty years old, but the life of a hermit, in silence and prayer and bodily 121 |