herit with the Father.

All the dangers of Jesus came from the priests, and the learned in the
traditional law, whom his parents had not yet begun to fear on his
behalf. They feared the dangers of the rugged way, the thieves and
robbers of the hill-road. For the scribes and the pharisees, the priests
and the rulers--they would be the first to acknowledge their Messiah,
their king! Little they imagined, when they found him where he ought to
have been safest had it been indeed his father's house, that there he
sat amid lions--the great doctors of the temple! He could rule all the
_things_ in his father's house, but not the men of religion, the men of
the temple, who called his father their Father. True, he might have
compelled them with a word, withered them by a glance, with a
finger-touch made them grovel at his feet; but such supremacy over his
brothers the Lord of life despised. He must rule them as his father
ruled himself; he would have them know themselves of the same family
with himself; have them at home among the things of God, caring for the
things he cared for, loving and hating as he and his father loved and
hated, ruling themselves by the essential laws of being. Because they
would not be such, he let them do to him as they would, that he might
get at their hearts by some unknown unguarded door in their diviner
part. 'I will be God among you; I will be myself to you.--You will not
have me? Then do to me as you will. The created shall have power over
him through whom they were created, that they may be compelled to know
him and his father. They shall look on him whom they have pierced.'

His parents found him in the temple; they never really found him until
he entered the true temple--their own adoring hearts. The temple that
knows not its builder, is no temple; in it dwells no divinity. But at
length he comes to his own, and his own receive him;--comes to them in
the might of his mission to preach good tidings to the poor, to heal the
broken-hearted, to preach deliverance, and sight, and liberty, and the
Lord's own good time.

_JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN._

And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his
custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up
for to read. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet
Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was
written, 'The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath an