58. It is surprising that within a century of the life of the apostles, Christian imagination could have so completely mistaken the real greatness of Jesus as to let its thirst for wonder fill his early years with scenes in which his conduct is as unlovely as it is shocking. That he who in manhood was "holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners" (Heb. vii. 26), could in youth, in a fit of ill-temper, strike a companion with death and then meet remonstrance by cursing his accusers with blindness (Gospel of Thomas, 4, 5); that he could mock his teachers and spitefully resent their control (Pseudo-Matthew, 30, 31); that it could be thought worthy of him to exhibit his superiority to common human conditions by carrying water in his mantle when his pitcher had been broken (same, 33), or by making clay birds in play on the Sabbath and causing them to fly when he was rebuked for naughtiness (same, 27);--these and many like legends exhibit incredible blindness to the real glory of the Lord. Yet such things abound in the early attempts of the pious imagination to write the story of the youth of Jesus, and the account of the nativity and its antecedents fares as ill, being pitifully trivial where it is not revolting. 59. How completely foreign all this is to the apostolic thought and feeling is clear when we notice that excepting the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke the New Testament tells us nothing whatever of the years which preceded John the Baptist's ministry in the wilderness. The gospels are books of testimony to what men had seen and heard (John i. 14); and the epistles are practical interpretations of the same in its bearing on religious life and hope. The apostles found no difficulty in recognizing the divinity and sinlessness of their Lord without inquiring how he came into the world or how he spent his early years; it was what he showed himself to be, not how he came to be, that formed their conception of him. Yet the early chapters of Matthew and Luke should not be classed with the later legends. Notwithstanding the attempts of Keim to associate the narratives of the infancy in the canonical and apocryphal gospels, a great gulf separates them: on the one side there is a reverent and beautiful reserve, on the other indelicate, unlovely, and trivial audacity.