3. First of all, then, we have the fact stated. Apocryphal
histories of the infancy are full of marvellous tales ; but none of
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these is trustworthy, and nearly all are glaringly false. There are many blanks in the narratives we possess, but it appears that after the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, Joseph and Mary returned to Bethlehem, where, before long, the Magi found them living, not in the village inn where the Child was born, but in a private house, as Matthew incidentally mentions. When the wise men had departed to their unknown country, Jesus was carried into Egypt, whence, after the death of Herod, He was brought back into Palestine, and placed in one of the most beautiful and retired villages of the northern province. In Nazareth the Child grew up in quietude as a healthy, happy child, strong in body and in mind ; and men saw that grace, or rather, the beauty of God, the Divine beauty of holiness, was upon Him. This brief, but most significant, memorial contains in outline the story of twelve years, during which " the arm of the Lord " dwelt in the lowly home which His heavenly Father had chosen as the most suitable of all the homes then existent on the earth.
4. Next, we see that His growth was natural. Think for a moment of the difficulty of conceiving a childhood in which Deity and humanity should be united, with no injustice done to either element. It is one of the evidences of the truthfulness of the Gospel narrative that it presents a perfectly natural and har- monious life, neither impossible to man nor unworthy of God.
The moment we look outside our Gospels we see what havoc the imagination was bound to make in attempting to fill up the outline by the invention of details. The Apocryphal Gospels of the infancy endeavour to assert the union of Divine power with human childhood by a series of grotesque miracles. One day the child Jesus cures a serpent's bite by blowing on it, and kills the serpent by the same means ; another day He tames a whole den of lions, and leads them dry-foot across Jordan ; another day He makes birds out of clay and claps His hands and they fly away. St. Luke, on the contrary, while ever ready to record miracle in its proper place, takes pains to describe the holy childhood as a simple and natural growth alike of body and of mind, in due subjection to the restraints of home, free from precocity and yet not without strange intuitions, prophetic intimations of an
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unusual future, perplexing at the time but full of meaning in the light of later days.
Did angels hover o'er His head
What time, as Holy Scriptures saith,
Subject and dutiful He led
His boyhood's life at Nazareth?
Was there an aureole round His hair,
A mystic symbol and a sign, To prove to every dweller there,
Who saw Him, that He was divine?
Did He in childish joyance sweet,
Join other children in their play, And with soft salutation greet
All who had passed Him in the way?
Did He within the Eabbi's schools
Say "Aleph," "Beth," and " Gimel " mid The Jewish lads, or use the tools At Joseph's bench as Joseph did ?
And sometimes would He lay His head, When tired, on Mary's tender breast.
And share the meal her hand had spread, And in her mother-love find rest ?
We marvel — but we only know
That holy, harmless, undefiled. In wisdom, as in stature, so
He grew as any mortal child.
All power, all glory hid away
In depths of such humility, That thenceforth none might ever say
They had a lowlier lot than He!
And since the child of Nazareth
Set on it thus His seal and sign, Who — till man's sin hath marred it — saith
That childhood is not still divine!
1[ The Evangelists record no incidents of the childhood of Jesus which separate it from the childhood of other of the children of
86 THE GROWTH OF THE CHILD JESUS
men. The flight into Egypt is the flight of parents with a child ; the presence of the boy in the Temple is marked by no abnormal sign, for it is a distorted imagination which has given the unbiblical title to the scene — Christ disputing with the Doctors, or Christ teaching in the Temple. But as the narrative of the Saviour's ministry proceeds, we are reminded again and again of the presence of children in the multitudes that flocked about Him. The signs and wonders which He wrought were more than once through the lives of the young, and the suffering and disease of humanity which form the background in the Gospels upon which we see sketched in lines of light the outline of the redeeming Son of Man are shown in the persons of children, while the deeper life of humanity is disclosed in the tenderness of parents.^
II Luke the Evangelist speaks of the growth of the Son of Mary as he might have done of that of Samuel, the son of Hannah, or as Froude might of Martin Luther, the son of Margaret. It was gradual and natural, in body and mind, in its physical, mental, and spiritual characteristics. Every glimpse we get of the child, the boy, and the man, reveals the same full humanness. Neither boy nor man is abnormal. Nothing is artificial, mechanical, external : all is vital, natural, and inward. The mystery of His Origin and Nature notwithstanding, we must say, with Principal Fairbairn, " the supernatural in Jesus did not exist for Jesus, but for the world." 2