“How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be in my Father’s courts, about his business?” Full of this new question and great wonder, Christ went home to the village in Galilee with his parents, and was subject to them; and the curtain falls for us on his boyhood and youth and early manhood. But as nothing but what is most important, and necessary for understanding all of his life which we need for our own growth into his likeness, is told in these simple gospel narratives, it would seem that this vivid light is thrown on that first visit to Jerusalem because it was the crisis in our Lord’s early life which bears most directly on his work for our race. If so, we must, I think, allow that the question, once fairly presented to the boy’s mind, would never again have left it. Day by day it would have been coming back with increasing insistency, gathering power and weight. And as he submitted it day by day to the God whom prophet and Psalmist had taught every child of the nation to look upon as “about his path and about his bed, and knowing every thought of his heart,” the consciousness must have gained strength and power. As the habit of self-surrender and simple obedience to the voice within grew more perfect, and more a part of his very being, the call must have sounded more and more clearly. And, as he was in all things tempted like as we are, again and again must his human nature have shrunk back and tried every way of escape from this task, the call to which was haunting him; while every succeeding month and year of life must have disclosed to him more and more of its peril and its hopelessness, as well as of its majesty. We have, then, to picture to ourselves this struggle and discipline going on for eighteen years—the call sounding continually in his ears, and the boy, the youth, the strong man, each in turn solicited by the special temptations of his age, and rising clear above them through the strength of perfect obedience, the strength which comes from the daily fulfilment of daily duties—that “strength in the Lord” which St. Paul holds up to us as possible for every human being. Think over this long probation, and satisfy yourselves whether it is easy, whether it is possible to form any higher ideal of perfect manliness.