ow he had done something
without asking her about it--as it were, had taken his life into his
own hand. It was a critical point in the friendship of this mother and
her child. It is a critical moment in the friendship of any mother and
her child when the child begins to think and act for himself, to do
things without the mother's guidance.

The answer of Jesus is instructive: "I must be about my Father's
business." There was another besides his mother to whom he owed
allegiance. He was the Son of God as well as the son of Mary. Parents
should remember this always in dealing with their children,--their
children are more God's than theirs.

It is interesting to notice what follows that remarkable experience of
mother and child in the temple. Jesus returned with his mother to the
lowly Nazareth home, and was subject to her. In recognizing his
relation to God as his heavenly Father, he did not become any less the
child of his earthly mother. He loved his mother no less because he
loved God more. Obedience to the Father in heaven did not lead him to
reject the rule of earthly parenthood. He went back to the quiet home,
and for eighteen years longer found his Father's business in the common
round of lowly tasks which made up the daily life of such a home.

It would be intensely interesting to read the story of mother and son
during those years, but it has not been written for us. They must have
been years of wondrous beauty. Few things in this world are more
beautiful than such friendships as one sometimes sees between mother
and son. The boy is more the lover than the child. The two enter into
the closest companionship. A sacred and inviolable intimacy is formed
between them. The boy opens all his heart to his mother, telling her
everything; and she, happy woman, knows how to be a boy's mother and to
keep a mother's place without ever startling or checking the shy
confidences, or causing him to desire to hide anything from her. The
boy whispers his inmost thoughts to his mother, and listens to her wise
and gentle counsels with loving eagerness and childish faith--

"Her face his holy skies;
The air he breathes his mother's breath,
His stars his mother's eyes."

Not always are mother and boy such friends. Some mothers do not think
it worth while to give the time and thought necessary to enter into a
boy's life in such confidential way. But we may be sure that between
the mother of Jesus an