elopment
to which they had attained, for the Lord's expecting them not to be
anxious about him when they had lost him? Thousands on thousands who
trust God for their friends in things spiritual, do not trust him for
them in regard of their mere health or material well-being. His parents
knew how prophets had always been treated in the land; or if they did
not think in that direction, there were many dangers to which a boy like
him would seem exposed, to rouse an anxiety that could be met only by a
faith equal to saying, 'Whatever has happened to him, death itself, it
can be no evil to one who is about his father's business;' and such a
faith I think the Lord could not yet have expected of them. That what
the world counts misfortune might befall him on his father's business,
would have been recognized by him, I think, as reason for their parental
anxiety--so long as they had not learned God--that he is what he is--the
thing the Lord had come to teach his father's men and women. His words
seem rather to imply that there was no need to be anxious about his
personal safety. Fear of some accident to him seems to have been the
cause of their trouble; and he did not mean, I think, that they ought
not to mind if he died doing his father's will, but that he was in no
danger as regarded accident or misfortune. This will appear more plainly
as we proceed. So much for the authorized version.

Let us now take the translation given us by the Revisers:--'Wist ye not
that I must be in my father's house?'

Are they authorized in translating the Greek thus? I know no
justification for it, but am not learned enough to say they have none.
That the Syriac has it so, is of little weight; seeing it is no original
Syriac, but retranslation. If he did say '_my father's house_', could he
have meant the temple and his parents not have known what he meant? And
why should he have taken it for granted they would know, or judge that
they ought to have known, that he was there? So little did the temple
suggest itself to them, that either it was the last place in which they
sought him, or they had been there before, and had _not_ found him. If
he meant that they might have known this without being told, why was it
that, even when he set the thing before them, they did not understand
him? I do not believe he meant the temple; I do not think he said or
meant '_in my fathers house'_.

What then makes those who give us this translation, prefer it to the