y as it is shocking. That he who in
manhood was "holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners" (Heb. vii.
26), could in youth, in a fit of ill-temper, strike a companion with death
and then meet remonstrance by cursing his accusers with blindness (Gospel
of Thomas, 4, 5); that he could mock his teachers and spitefully resent
their control (Pseudo-Matthew, 30, 31); that it could be thought worthy of
him to exhibit his superiority to common human conditions by carrying
water in his mantle when his pitcher had been broken (same, 33), or by
making clay birds in play on the Sabbath and causing them to fly when he
was rebuked for naughtiness (same, 27);--these and many like legends
exhibit incredible blindness to the real glory of the Lord. Yet such
things abound in the early attempts of the pious imagination to write the
story of the youth of Jesus, and the account of the nativity and its
antecedents fares as ill, being pitifully trivial where it is not
revolting.

59. How completely foreign all this is to the apostolic thought and
feeling is clear when we notice that excepting the first two chapters of
Matthew and Luke the New Testament tells us nothing whatever of the years
which preceded John the Baptist's ministry in the wilderness. The gospels
are books of testimony to what men had seen and heard (John i. 14); and
the epistles are practical interpretations of the same in its bearing on
religious life and hope. The apostles found no difficulty in recognizing
the divinity and sinlessness of their Lord without inquiring how he came
into the world or how he spent his early years; it was what he showed
himself to be, not how he came to be, that formed their conception of him.
Yet the early chapters of Matthew and Luke should not be classed with the
later legends. Notwithstanding the attempts of Keim to associate the
narratives of the infancy in the canonical and apocryphal gospels, a great
gulf separates them: on the one side there is a reverent and beautiful
reserve, on the other indelicate, unlovely, and trivial audacity.

60. The gospel narratives have, however, perplexities of their own, for
the two accounts agree only in the main features,--the miraculous birth in
Bethlehem in the days of Herod, Mary being the mother and Joseph the
foster-father, and Nazareth the subsequent residence. In further details
they are quite different, and at first sight seem contradictory. Moreover,
while Matthew sheds a halo of glory ove