The central Presbyterian. [volume] (Richmond, Va.) 1856-1908, 1880-07-14
TIE INSPIRED ARTLSEs

OAIlSG Was Cullu ike the resi- OF US.
Did he play like other children? Did
he cry? Did he go to school like other
Jewish children? Did he read books
When he reached the period of youth,
how did he pass the time? He must
have been doing something during these
thirty years which he lived before he en-
tered on his public ministry. What did
his neighbors in Nazareth think of him
Only once, when he was twelve years
old, we meet him among the doctors in
the temple. And Mark makes the peo-
pie In the synagogue at Nazareth inquire,
Is not this the carpenter?
This is all we know of the first thirty
years of his life-the glimpse we get of
him in the temple at the age of twelve,
and the fact that he worked as car
penter.
Looking at the gospels merely as hu-
man compositions, there is a wonderful
artistic delicacy in this reserve about the
childhood and youth of Jesus. If one
writer had treated his subject in this
way-the biography of Jesuit might
have appeared accidental. But each of
the four biographies manifests the same
reticence. 1t is to be remembered that
they were drawing the portrait of God
man; how well they succeeded has been
acknowledged by the universal voice of
mankind-by Rousseau, Bonaparte, and
Renan, as well as by those more nearly
in sympathy with him. Now they all
decline 10 lift the veil from his childhood.
If they had not been writing as they
were moved by the Holy Ghost, they
would never have put this restraint on
themselves. Their imagination could not
possibly have been held in check, nor
would they have been willing to with
hold what would have been SO full of in
terest from their readers. And, accord
ingly, III the numerous apocryphal Cos
pels, some of which appeared in the
second century, we find the writers of
them attempting to supplement the true
gospels in this respect, and they give us
number of incidents pertaining to the
early childhood of Christ, telling us how
miraculous influence proceeded from
the very water in which he washed, from
the towels which he used, and from the
bed on which he slept; how he trans
formed his playmates into goats and
changed balls of clay into birds; how
the trees and the beasts and idols bowed
down in alteration before him; how he
dried up stream of water with a word,
healed the sick, and raised the dead !;
how he learned the Greek alphabet, ETC.,
etc.
We at once perceive the gulf between
the simple and truth-like touch which
the true evangelists give his childhood
in that scene in the temple with the doc
tors, and that conversation with his
mother, when he said" Visit We not that
/ must be about my Fathers business ?"
between this on the one hand and the
unnatural and grotesque exaggeration
which the wonder-mongers of the early
Church fell into when they undertook to
produce picture of a superhuman child
hood, perfectly pure and sinless, and al
ways in keeping with the properties of
such an impossible conception, except as
realized by the Divine child himself.
The Eyangelists not only refrain from
telling US anything about the childhood
of. Jesus, they are also silent about his
tastes and his habits, his familiar con-
versation, his dress, his personal appear
ance, his intercourse with his brothers
and sisters, how he subsisted, where he
slept, what he ate, whether he ever
laughed or smiled-they do tell us once
that he wept