What is true of each of us beyond all question—what every man who walks with open eyes and open heart knows to be true of himself—must be true also of Christ. And so, though we may reject the stories of the clay birds, which he modeled as a child, taking wing and bursting into song round him, (as on a par with St. Francis’ address to his sisters, the swallows, at Alvia, or the flocks in the marshes of Venice, who thereupon kept silence from their twitterings and songs till his sermon was finished), we cannot doubt that in proportion as Christ was more perfectly in sympathy with God’s creation than any mediæval saint, or modern naturalist, or man of science, he had more power than they with all created things from his earliest youth. Nor could it be otherwise with the hearts and wills of men. Over these we know that, from that time to this, he has exercised a supreme sway, infinitely more wonderful than that over birds and beasts, because of man’s power of resistance to the will Christ came to teach and to do, which exists, so far as we can see, in no other part of creation. I think, then, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that he must have had all these powers from his childhood, that they must have been growing stronger from day to day, and he, at the same time, more and more conscious of possessing them, not to use on any impulse of curiosity or self-will, but only as the voice within prompted. And it seems the most convincing testimony to his perfect sonship, manifested in perfect obedience, that he should never have tested his powers during those thirty years as he did at once and with perfect confidence as soon as the call came. Had he done so his ministry must have commenced sooner; that is to say, before the method was matured by which he was to reconstruct, and lift into a new atmosphere and on to a higher plane, the faith and life of his own nation and of the whole world. For it is impossible to suppose that the works which he did, and the words he spoke, at thirty—which at once threw all Galilee and Judea into a ferment of hope and joy and doubt and anger—should have passed unnoticed had they been wrought and spoken when he was twenty. Here, as in all else, he waited for God’s mind: and so, when the time for action came, worked with the power of God. And this waiting and preparation must have been the supreme trial of his faith. The holding this position must have been, in those early years, the holding of the very centre of the citadel in man’s soul, (as Bunyan so quaintly terms it), against which the assaults of the tempter must have been delivered again and again while the garrison was in training for the victorious march out into the open field of the great world, carrying forth the standard which shall never go back.