st be in the things of my father?' The plural article
implies the English _things_; and the question is then, What _things_
does he mean? The word might mean _affairs_ or _business_; but why the
plural article should be contracted to mean _house_, _I_ do not know. In
a great wide sense, no doubt, the word _house_ might be used, as I am
about to show, but surely not as meaning the temple.

He was arguing for confidence in God on the part of his parents, not for
a knowledge of his whereabout. The same thing that made them anxious
concerning him, prevented them from understanding his words--lack,
namely, of faith in the Father. This, the one thing he came into the
world to teach men, those words were meant to teach his parents. They
are spirit and life, involving the one principle by which men shall
live. They hold the same core as his words to his disciples in the
storm, 'Oh ye of little faith!' Let us look more closely at them.

'Why did you look for me? Did you not know that I must be among my
father's things?' What are we to understand by 'my father's things'?
The translation given in the authorized version is, I think, as to the
words themselves, a thoroughly justifiable one: 'I must be about my
father's business,' or 'my father's affairs'; I refuse it for no other
reason than that it does not fit the logic of the narrative, as does the
word _things_, which besides opens to us a door of large and joyous
prospect. Of course he was about his father's business, and they might
know it and yet be anxious about him, not having a perfect faith in that
father. But, as I have said already, it was not anxiety as to what might
befall him because of doing the will of the Father; he might well seem
to them as yet too young for danger from that source; it was but the
vague perils of life beyond their sight that appalled them; theirs was
just the uneasiness that possesses every parent whose child is missing;
and if they, like him, had trusted in their father, they would have
known what their son now meant when he said that he was in the midst of
his father's things--namely, that the very things from which they
dreaded evil accident, were his own home-surroundings; that he was not
doing the Father's business in a foreign country, but in the Father's
own house. Understood as meaning the world, or the universe, the phrase,
'my father's house,' would be a better translation than the authorized;
understood as meaning the poor, miserable,