The legends which relate to the boyhood of Jesus carry back with a violent or confused sense the acts of his manhood. Thus he is represented more than once as willing the death of a playmate, and then contemptuously bringing him to life again. A favorite story grossly misconceives the incident of Christ with the Doctors in the temple, and makes him turn his schoolmaster into ridicule. There are other stories, the incidents of which are not reflections of anything in the Gospels, but are used to illustrate in a childish way the wonder-working power of the boy. Here is one which curiously mingles the miraculous power with the Saviour’s doctrine of the Sabbath:— “And it came to pass, after these things, that in the sight of all Jesus took clay from the pools which he had made, and of it made twelve sparrows. And it was the Sabbath when Jesus did this, and there were very many children with him. When, therefore, one of the Jews had seen him doing this, he said to Joseph, ‘Joseph, dost thou not see the child Jesus working on the Sabbath at what it is not lawful for him to do? For he has made twelve sparrows of clay.’ And when Joseph heard this, he reproved him, saying, ‘Wherefore doest thou on the Sabbath such things as are not lawful for us to do?’ And when Jesus heard Joseph he struck his hands together, and said to his sparrows, ‘Fly!’ and at the voice of his command they began to fly. And in the sight and hearing of all that stood by he said to the birds, ‘Go and fly through the earth, and through all the world, and live.’ And when those that were there saw such miracles they were filled with great astonishment.” It is interesting to note how many of these stories connect the child with animals. The passage in Isaiah which prophesied the great peace in the figure of a child leading wild beasts had something to do with this; so had the birth of Jesus in a manger, and the incident of the entry into Jerusalem: but I suspect that the imagination scarcely needed to hunt very far or very curiously for suggestions, since the world over childhood has been associated with brute life, and the writers of the Apocryphal Gospels had only to make these animals savage when they would illustrate the potency of the childhood of Jesus.