If we regard the Gospels in the light of memoirs of our Lord’s actual life upon earth, it may seem strange that so few occasions are noticed in which we are shewn our Lord dealing with the business of ordinary life. Whenever we do find Him forced to take part in any secular proceeding, He is uniformly careful to avoid such decisive action as would establish an authoritative precedent in regard to things which might be left to men to manage. Some people are now disappointed at His not having furnished a wholly new and perfect scheme of human society. So far is He from doing this, that He will not even put patches upon that which He found existing. God had supplied men with faculties to frame social institutions for themselves, and these faculties Christ would leave free to work. If He had interposed to set the world right by absolute power, it might have been asked, Why this had not been done before? and, Whether it was owing to accident that the world had been let to go wrong? Living among the people as our Lord did, He must commonly have conformed to Jewish usages. He could hardly have performed any act without coming into contact with their ways. If the particulars of every little occurrence in His private life had been set down, perhaps we might have realised, what we now hardly perceive, that in the Gospel we are reading of Jewish life in Galilee two thousand years ago. This absence of what is called “local colour” is partly due to the omission of small particulars. An outline can be more general and more universal than a picture of minute elaboration; and the portraiture of our Lord would have lost much of its singular character of belonging to every age as its own, if the draughtsman’s attention had been distracted from what was characteristic, in order to present every detail with equal care.