The words, '_show thyself to the world_,' were doubtless used by these brethren of Christ in a very broad, vulgar sense. Jerusalem was the great world to them; there all Jews met; there were the learned men who decided what others were to think and believe; there were the rulers of the people. But they had used the right word. A Mantuan, speaking of great Rome, and wondering what he should do there, would not have been more correct in calling _that_ the world, than these Galilæans were in giving the name to the city of David. The Italian metropolis might, in one sense, be the centre of the world's government and the world's wickedness; the Cæsar might be the world's god. But a society which was organized on the confession of a living and true God--which had retained its organization, and believed in _that_ instead of in Him--is more exactly the world, in the sense in which the world is opposed to God, than the Roman society, or any other existing at that time, could possibly be. Jesus, therefore, adopts the expression of His kinsmen in answering them. '_Then Jesus said unto them, My time is not yet come: but your time is alway ready. The world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil. Go ye up unto this feast: I go not up yet unto this feast; for my time is not yet full come. When He had said these words unto them, He abode still in Galilee._' There is a greater sense of loneliness and oppression in this language, than in any which we have met with thus far,--the loneliness which comes from being altogether misunderstood; the oppression which comes from a work to be fulfilled, which those whom it was meant to bless would abhor. The Son of Man feels all the difference between those '_whose time was alway ready_,'--who could go up to the feasts whenever it pleased them, merely with the expectation of meeting friends, and mixing in a crowd,--and Him who had the straitening consciousness of a message which He must bear, of a baptism which He must be baptized with. And the Son of God feels that He is to bear witness of a Father to a world which was created by Him, and did not know Him--which longed to rid itself of the sense of His Presence--which conceived of Him as a tyrant and an enemy. The world cannot hate those who fancy that the business of a divine Prophet is to persuade it to admire him and follow him. The world must hate those who tell it that the Creator of all good and truth is close to it,--that it has no good apart from that Creator,--that its works will always be evil while it is not owning Him. The world must hate Him in whom the glory of the central and eternal Good and Truth shone forth as in an '_only-begotten Son, full of grace and truth_.'