The national leader., 1889-06-15

boy, the wind Hurrylng HIS hair over His sun
Drowned forehead, standing on a hill top
looking off upon Lake Tiberias, on which at
one time according to profane history are
not four hundred, four thousand ships. Au-
thors have taken pains to say that Christ was
not affected by these surroundings, and that
He from within lived outward and independ-
ent of circumstances. So far from that be-
being that ever walked the earth,
and if a pale invalids weak
finger could not touch His robe without
strength going out from Him, these mountains
and seas could not have touched His eye with
out irradiating His entire nature with their
magnifcence. Warrant that He had mounted
and explored all the fifteen hillsaround Naza-
reth, among them Hermon with its crystal
coronet of perpetual snow, and Carmel and
Tabor and Gilboa, and they all had their
sublime echo in after time from the Olivetic
pulpit.
And then it was not uncultivated grandeur.
These hills carried in their s>ns or on their
backs gardens groves, orchards, terraces,
vineyards, cactus, sycamores. These out
branching foliages did not have to wait for
the floods before their silence was broken, for
through them and over them and in circles
round them and under them were pelicans,
were thrushes, were sparrows, were night
ingales, were larks, We're quails, were
blackbirds, were patridges, were bulbuls.
Yonder the white focks of sheep showed
down over the pasture lands. And
yonder the brook rehearses to the peb-
bles its adventures down the rocky shelving.
Yonder are the oriental homes, the housewife
with pitcher on the shoulder entering the
door, and down the lawn in front children
reveling among the flaming fora. And all
this spring and song and grass and sunshine
and shadow woven into the most exquisite
nature Unat ever bn athed or wept or sung or
suffered. Through studying the sky between
the hills Christ had noticed the weather
signs, and that a crimson sky at night meant
dry weather next day, and that a crimson sky
in the morning meant wet weather before
night. And how beautifully He made use of
it in after years as He drove down upon the
pestiferous Pharisee and Sadducee by crying
out /: "When it is evening ye say it will be
fair weather, for the sky is red, and in the
morning it will be foul weather to-day, for
the sky is red and lowering. o, ye hypo-
critics, ye can discern the face Of the sky, but
can ye not discern the signs of the times"
By day, as every boy has DONE He watched the
barnyard fowl at sight of over-swinging hawk
cluck her chickens under wing and in after
wears He said 80, Jerusalem, Jerusalem
How often would I have gath
cred thee as hen gathereth her chickens
under her wingw By night He had noticed
His mother by the plain candle light which,
as ever and anon it was snutfed and the re-
moved wick put down on the candlestick,
beamed brightly through all the family
sitting room as His mother was mending His
garments that had been torn during the days
wanderings among the rocks or bushes, and
years afterward it all came out in the
smile of the greatest sermon ever preached.
Neither do men light candle and put it
under bushel but in candleStick and it
giveth light to all who are in the house.
Let your light SO shine" Some time when
His mother In the autumn took out the clothes
that had been put away for the summer He
noticed how the moth miller flew out and the
coat dropped apart ruined and useless, and so
twenty years after He enjoined: Lay up for
yourselves treasures in heaven where neither
spent among birds and flowers they
all caroled and bloomed again fifteen
years after as He cries out: "Behold the
fowls of the air" Consider the lilies" A
great storm one day during Christ's boyhood
blackened the heavens and angered the
rivers. Perhaps standing in the door of the
carpenters shop He watched it gathering
louder and wilder until two cyclones, one
sweeping down from Mount Tabor and the
other from Mount Carmel, met in the valley
of Esdraelon and two houses are caught IN the
fury and crash goes the one and triumphant
stands the other, and He noticed that one had
shifting saEd for foundation and the other
an eternal rock for basis; and twenty
years after He built the whole scene into a
peroration OF flood and whirlwind that seized
His audience and lifted them into the heights
of sublimity with the two great arms of pa
thos and terror, which sublime words I
render, asking you as far as possible to for
get that you ever heard them before: "Who-
soever heareth these sayings of Mine, and
doeth them, l will hken him unto a
wise man, which built his house
upon a rock; and the rain descended, and
the foods came and the winds blew, and
beat upon that house; and it fell not; for it
was founded upon rock. And every one
that heareth these sayings of Mine, and doeth
them not, shall be hkened unto a foolish
man, which built his house upon the sand; and
the rain descended, and the floods came,
and the winds blew, and beat upon that
house; and it fell; and great was the fall
of itn
Yes, from the naturalness, the simplicity,
the freshness of His parallels and SMILES and
metaphors in manhood discourse know that
He had been a boy Of the fields and had bathed
in the streams and heard the nightingale's
call, and broken through the fowery hedge
and looked out of the embrasures of the for
tress and drank from the wells and chased
the butterflies which travellers say have al
ways been one of the fitting beauties of that
landscape, and talked with the strange peo-
pie from Damascus and Egypt and Sapphoris
and Syria, who in caravans or on
foot passed through His neighborhood,
the dogs barking at their ap-
proach at SundoWn. AS aIuerWard he WaSa
perfect man, in the time of which speak He
was perfect boy. with the spring of boys.
foot, the sparkle of boys eye the rebound.
of boys life and just the opposite of those
juveniles who sit around morbid and un-
elastic old men at ten. I warrant He was
able to take His own part and to take the part
of others. In that village of Nazareth ! am
certain there was what is found in all the
neighborhoods of the earth, that terror of
children. the bully, who seems born to strike
to punch to bruise, to overpower the less
muscular and robust. The Christ who after
ward in no limited terms denounced hypo-
critic and Pharisee, / warrant, never let such
juvenile villain impose upon less vigorous
childhood and yet go unscathed and unde-,
Tended. At ten years He was in sympathy.
with the underlings as He was at thirty and
+l,irtu- +l,.oa ,s.a-nt no further i1lsnired