God-forsaken temple--no more
the house of God than a dead body is the house of a man--it is
immeasurably inferior.

It seems to me, I say, that the Lord meant to remind them, or rather to
make them feel, for they had not yet learned the fact, that he was never
away from home, could not be lost, as they had thought him; that he was
in his father's house all the time, where no hurt could come to him.
'The things' about him were the furniture and utensils of his home; he
knew them all and how to use them. 'I must be among my father's
belongings.' The world was his home because his father's house. He was
not a stranger who did not know his way about in it. He was no lost
child, but with his father all the time.

Here we find one main thing wherein the Lord differs from us: we are not
at home in this great universe, our father's house. We ought to be, and
one day we shall be, but we are not yet. This reveals Jesus more than
man, by revealing him more man than we. We are not complete men, we are
not anything near it, and are therefore out of harmony, more or less,
with everything in the house of our birth and habitation. Always
struggling to make our home in the world, we have not yet succeeded. We
are not at home in it, because we are not at home with the lord of the
house, the father of the family, not one with our elder brother who is
his right hand. It is only the son, the daughter, that abideth ever in
the house. When we are true children, if not the world, then the
universe will be our home, felt and known as such, the house we are
satisfied with, and would not change. Hence, until then, the hard
struggle, the constant strife we hold with _Nature_--as we call the
things of our father; a strife invaluable for our development, at the
same time manifesting us not yet men enough to be lords of the house
built for us to live in. We cannot govern or command in it as did the
Lord, because we are not at one with his father, therefore neither in
harmony with his things, nor rulers over them. Our best power in regard
to them is but to find out wonderful facts concerning them and their
relations, and turn these facts to our uses on systems of our own. For
we discover what we seem to discover, by working inward from without,
while he works outward from within; and we shall never understand the
world, until we see it in the direction in which he works making
it--namely from within outward. This of course we cannot do until we are