t in the wild under the open sky,
did the stars never speak to him, as to Hebrew psalmist and Roman
Virgil?

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers.
The moon and the stars which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man, that thou visitest him?
(Psalm 8:3-4.)

It is a question men have to meet and face; and if we can trust
Matthew's statement, an utterance of his in later years called out
by the sneer of a Pharisee, shows how he had made the old poet's
answer his own:--

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise
(Matt. 21:16).

If this were a solitary utterance of his thought upon Nature, it
might be ranked with one or two pointed citations he made of the
letter of the Old Testament; but it is safe, perhaps, to take it as
one of many indications of his communion with God in Nature. The
wind blowing in the night where it listed--must we authenticate
every verse of the Fourth Gospel before we believe that he listened
to it also and caught something? At any rate, in later years, when
his friends are over-driven and weary, quiet and open-air in a
desert place are what he prescribes for them and wishes to share
with them--surely a hint of old experience (Mark 6:31).

But now let us turn back to Nazareth, for, as the Gospel reminds us,
there he grew up. "The city teaches the man," said the old Greek
poet Simonides; and it does, as we see, and more than we sometimes
realize. Jesus grew up in an Oriental town, in the middle of its
life--a town with poor houses, bad smells, and worse stories,
tragedies of widow and prodigal son, of unjust judge and grasping
publican--yes, and comedies too. We know at once from general
knowledge of Jewish life and custom, and from the recorded fact that
he read the Scriptures, that he went to school; and we could guess,
fairly safely, that he played with his school-fellows, even if he
had not told us what the games were at which they played:--

At weddings and at funerals,
As if his life's vocation
Were endless imitation.

Sometimes the children were sulky and would not play (Luke 7:32).
How strange, and how delightful, that the great Gospel, full of
God's word for mankind, should have a little corner in it for such
reminiscences of children's games! We cannot suppose that he had