^ Bishop Stubba.
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has been heard before, but how many of us are sufficiently superior to the conventional and artificial distinction of modern society really to believe in the honourableness of handicraft ? If people believe in it, why are they so anxious to escape from it ? Why is it that apprenticeship in all trades is dropping out of vogue, and that nearly all the youths who leave our schools prefer to seek a miserable clerkship rather than to earn an honourable maintenance by manual toil, and that girls prefer almost anything to domestic service ?
^ In the north of Holland, and about five miles from Amsterdam, there is a shipbuilding and manufacturing town called Zaandam ; and in that town a very humble old house is carefully preserved in which a carpenter lodged for a time more than two hundred years ago. Visitors to Zaandam go to see that old house; it is on record that in the year 1814 it was visited by Alexander I., the Czar of Eussia. That Emperor went to see it because the carpenter who had Lived in it in 1697, and for whose sake the house is still preserved, was no less a personage than one of his own predecessors — Peter the Great, the creator of the modern Eussian Empire.^
4, Jesus tlie carpenter is an example to all^ood workmen — The conviction cannot be too forcibly urged that the only dishonourable employments are immoral or dishonest ones. The man who makes an honest plough or table is as honourable as the man who makes a poem or a sermon, and he may be as much of a gentleman. "No work can degrade you unless you first degrade your work." It is not work, but bad work- manship, that is disgraceful. We know the kind of ploughs and tables, windows and doors, the Carpenter of Nazareth made ; and unfortunately we know, only too well, the kind of thing many a modern carpenter puts into suburban villas, and calls it a door or a window-frame. Such carpentering is degrading, but it is the scamping and not the work that is low. You may not know much of Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ; but every bit of honest work is an imitation of Christ.2
^ A recent writer on Japan says : " If you visit Kyoto to order something from one of the greatest porcelain makers in the world — one whose products are better known in London and ^ C. Jordan, ' J. Halsey.
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Paris than even in Japan — you will find the factory to be a wooden cottage in which no English farmer would live. The greatest maker of cloisonne vases, who may ask you fifty pounds for something five inches high, produces his miracles behind a two-storied frame dwelling, containing perhaps six small rooms. The best girdles of silk made in Japan, and famous throughout the empire, are woven in a house that cost scarcely one hundred pounds to build." Eobes of immaculate righteousness, delicate and radiant character, and miracles of goodness at which other worlds marvel, are still produced in some of the mean byways and obscure surroundings of the world. " Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven." ^
5. But Sis work was not only good ; it was the work of self- sacrifice. — A famous English painter, Mr. Holman Hunt, gave to the world in 1873 a great religious picture, representing Jesus in the workshop at the close of the day. When we look at it, we see that the earthen floor is well covered with shavings, which have come from the planing bench near where Jesus stands. Close by the bench is a trestle of native form ; and the large hand-saw has been left in the wood, not yet cut through. Jesus has thrown out His arms as He yawns in weariness ; and His shadow formed on the wall in the level evening sunlight, as it is seen with alarm by His mother Mary, looks like that of a man crucified. Mr. Holman Hunt has called this picture " The Shadow of Death."
IL
Jesus had Beothers and Sisters.-
Are there not some of us to whom it never occurred before that Jesus had brothers and sisters just, as we have ? Indeed, everything that is human in the life of Jesus is to some of us more or less unreal. We accept the statements of theology concerning His humanity, but with a certain mental reserve. Even when one of the sacred writers himself tells us " He was tempted in all points like as we are," we doubt whether he quite meant all he said ; and to some of us, it is to be feared, tha temptation in the wilderness is little more than a scenic display.
» T. G. Selby.
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We cannot think of Jesus as boy and man, as son and brother, entering like others into ordinary human relationships. We must needs picture Him with a halo of unearthly light about His head, and, as Professor Eendel Harris has recently pointed out, even a writer like Dean Farrar cannot speak of the " boy " Jesus without printing the word with a capital B, as if to suggest that He was never like other children. The truth is, many of us are Apollinarians without knowing it.^