ii8 ALWAYS AT HOME
of the authoritative voice of His Church, that He set His thoughts to work for themselves. He indeed asked questions. He set free His inquiring spirit, but He did it facing the fulness of the responsibility, bringing His inquiries into the light of the best learning, laying out His mind at the feet of them who sat in Moses' seat. And not only asking questions, but hearing also. He listened ; He heard. Ah ! young hearts, aglow with new- found powers, with new-won liberty, is that your case? How often, in the excitement of asking our first questions, have we forgotten that there is any need to hear at all what others are saying! How often, in the sudden discovery of our own inde- pendence, we seem to be cut loose from every bond that binds us to others ; above all, that binds us to the past ! The wonder of thinking for ourselves seems to dismiss, to put out of court, what others have thought. It appears to depose all old authorities. All men before us seem to us to have been dreaming until we arrived on the scene. Now at last the truth is out, and their day is over.^ ^ It is observed — so far as inquiry is able to look back at this distance of time — that at his being a schoolboy he was an early questionist, quietly inquisitive, " why this was, and that was not, to be remembered ? Why this was granted, and that denied ? " This being mixed with a remarkable modesty, and a sweet serene quietness of nature, and with them a quick apprehension of many perplexed parts of learning, imposed then on him as a scholar, made his master and others to believe him to have an inward, blessed, Divine light, and therefore to consider him to be a little wonder. For in that, children were less pregnant, less confident and more malleable, than in this wiser but not better age.^
(2) The Temple was the place of teaching. Is it improper to say that even then He had something to teach the doctors ? He both heard them and asked them questions. There would be no more impropriety in the questionings of a child than there would be in a modern Bible class. It was no doubt unusual for boys of His age to join in the conversation at such times, but it is evident that the doctors were not displeased by His intervention, and were surprised, not by the fact that He addressed them, but by the freshness and force of what He said. We cannot be wrong in thinking that the startling effect of His words would be due,
^ H. S. Holland, Pleas and Claims, 185. ^ Izaak Walton, Life of Richard Hooker,
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not to any display of precocious learning, but to the simplicity and directness of His questions and answers.
In after years He taught often in the Temple. Many of the lessons Jesus taught during the period to which He referred when He said to those who came to apprehend Him, " I was daily with you in the temple teaching" (Mark xiv. 49), are probably un- recorded, but there is in the New Testament quite a rich treasury of words that He uttered in the Temple at different periods. ^
^ I will say no more of Irving's boyhood. He must have sat, often enough, in Ecclefechan Meeting-house along with me, but I never noticed or knew; and had not indeed heard of him till I went to Annan School, and Irving, perhaps two years before, had left for College. I must bid adieu also, to that poor Temple of my Childhood ; to me more sacred at this moment than perhaps the biggest Cathedral then extant could have been. Eude, rustic, bare, no Temple in the world was more so ; but there were sacred lambencies, tongues of authentic flame from Heaven, which kindled what was best in one, what has yet not gone out.^
^ All other teachers' words become feeble by age, as their persons become ghostly, wrapped in thickening folds of oblivion ; but the progress of the Church consists in absorbing more and more of Christ, in understanding Him better, and becoming more and more moulded by His influence.^
(3) And the Temple was a place of worship. He called it on one memorable occasion a house of prayer. He spoke in one of His parables of two men who went up to the Temple to pray. And after the Ascension, Peter and John went up to the Temple to pray.
But a Christian place of worship is not a temple, it is a Father's house. That was what our Lord Himself felt about the Temple ; He gave it a deeper, richer name — " my Father's house." Nothing is more distinctive of New Testament religion than this phrase, nothing distinguishes New Testament from Old Testament conceptions of religion better than the difference that there is in a Father's house and a Temple. We come to God's house, if we are Christian men, to worship, not an awful and distant God, but One who is near and intimate and loving as a father. Not only
' H. Tliorne, Notable Sayings of the Great Teacher^ 63. 2 Carlyle, Beminiscences, ii. 15. ' A. Maclaren, The Holy of Holies.