est point
of advance into the Gentile world; and to the south the less smiling
aspect of these Samaritan hills foreshadows the dreariness of Judea
beyond, parched as by a burning wind of desolation and death." In the
midst of such scenes we are to understand that, with the physical growth,
and opening of mind, and moral discipline which filled the early years of
Jesus, there came also the gradual spiritual unfolding in which the boy
rose step by step to the fuller knowledge of God and himself.

69. That unfolding is pictured in an early stage in the story given us
from the youth of Jesus. It was customary for a Jewish boy not long after
passing his twelfth year to come under full adult obligation to the law.
The visit to Jerusalem was probably in preparation for such assumption of
obligation by Jesus. All his earlier training had filled his mind with the
sacredness of the Holy City and the glory of the temple. It is easy to
feel with what joy he would first look upon Zion from the shoulder of the
Mount of Olives, as he came over it on his journey from Galilee; to
conceive how the temple and the ritual would fill him with awe in his
readiness not to criticise, but to idealize everything he saw, and to
think only of the significance given by it all to the scripture; to
imagine how eagerly he would talk in the temple court with the learned men
of his people about the law and the promises with which in home and school
his youth had been made familiar. Nor is it difficult to appreciate his
surprise, when Joseph and Mary, only after long searching for him, at last
found him in the temple, for he felt that it was the most natural place
in which he could be found. In his wondering question to Mary, "Did not
you know that I must be in my Father's house?" (Luke ii. 49), there is a
premonition of his later consciousness of peculiarly intimate relation to
God. The question was, however, a sincere inquiry. It was no precocious
rebuke of Mary's anxiety. The knowledge of himself as Son of God was only
dawning within him, and was not yet full and clear. This is shown by his
immediate obedience and his subjection to his parents in Nazareth through
many years. It is safe, in the interpretation of the acts and words of
Jesus, to banish utterly as inconceivable anything that savors of the
theatrical. We must believe that he was always true to himself, and that
the subjection which he rendered to Joseph and Mary sprang from a real
sense of c