word! See how
he goes from the house for a while, and returning with fresh power,
takes what shape he pleases, walks through its closed doors, and goes up
and down its invisible stairs!
All his life he was among his father's things, either in heaven or in
the world--not then only when they found him in the temple at Jerusalem.
He is still among his father's things, everywhere about in the world,
everywhere throughout the wide universe. Whatever he laid aside to come
to us, to whatever limitations, for our sake, he stooped his regal head,
he dealt with the things about him in such lordly, childlike manner as
made it clear they were not strange to him, but the things of his
father. He claimed none of them as his own, would not have had one of
them his except through his father. Only as his father's could he enjoy
them;--only as coming forth from the Father, and full of the Father's
thought and nature, had they to him any existence. That the things were
his fathers, made them precious things to him. He had no care for
having, as men count having. All his having was in the Father. I wonder
if he ever put anything in his pocket: I doubt if he had one. Did he
ever say, 'This is mine, not yours'? Did he not say, 'All things are
mine, therefore they are yours'? Oh for his liberty among the things of
the Father! Only by knowing them the things of our Father, can we escape
enslaving ourselves to them. Through the false, the infernal idea of
_having_, of _possessing_ them, we make them our tyrants, make the
relation between them and us an evil thing. The world was a blessed
place to Jesus, because everything in it was his father's. What pain
must it not have been to him, to see his brothers so vilely misuse the
Father's house by grasping, each for himself, at the family things! If
the knowledge that a spot in the landscape retains in it some pollution,
suffices to disturb our pleasure in the whole, how must it not have been
with him, how must it not be with him now, in regard to the
disfigurements and defilements caused by the greed of men, by their
haste to be rich, in his father's lovely house!
Whoever is able to understand Wordsworth, or Henry Vaughan, when either
speaks of the glorious insights of his childhood, will be able to
imagine a little how Jesus must, in his eternal childhood, regard the
world.
Hear what Wordsworth says:--
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our lif
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