This prophecy must have been a strange enigma to Mary. According to the prediction of the angel, her son was to be a triumphant king, to reign on the throne of his father David, to restore the old national prestige, and to make his people rulers over the whole earth. The great truth that the kingdom was not of this world, and the dominion a moral victory; that it was to be won through rejection, betrayal, denial, torture, and shameful death; that the Jewish nation were to be finally uprooted and scattered,--all this was as much hidden from the eyes of Mary as from those of the whole nation. The gradual unveiling of this mystery was to test every character connected with it by the severest wrench of trial. The latent worldliness and pride of many, seemingly good, would be disclosed, and even the pure mother would be pierced to the very heart with the anguish of disappointed hopes. Such was the prophecy of which the life of Mary was a long fulfillment. The slow perplexity of finding an entirely different destiny for her son from the brilliant one foretold in prophetic symbols was to increase from year to year, till it culminated at the foot of the cross. The next we see of Mary is the scene in the Temple where she seeks her son. It shows the social and cheerful nature of the boy, and the love in which he was held, that she should have missed him a whole day from her side without alarm, supposing that he was with the other children of the great family caravans traveling festively homeward from Jerusalem. Not finding him, she returns alarmed to Jerusalem, and, after three days of fruitless search, finds him sitting in the school of the doctors of the Temple. Her agitation and suppressed alarm betray themselves in her earnest and grieved words: "Son, why hast thou dealt thus with us? behold thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing." The answer of Jesus was given with an unconscious artlessness, as a child of heaven might speak. "Why did you seek me? Did you not know I would be at my Father's house?"[9] This was doubtless one of those peculiar outflashings of an inward light which sometimes break unconsciously from childhood, and it is said, "They understood not the saying." It was but a gleam of the higher nature, and it was gone in a moment; for it is said immediately after that he went down with them unto Nazareth, and was subject to them; but, it is added significantly, "his mother kept all these sayings and pondered them in her heart." Then came twenty years of obscurity and silence, when Jesus lived the plain, literal life of a village mechanic. "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?" they said of him when he appeared in the synagogue of his native village. [9] This is said by able critics to be the sense of the original.