tudes of emotion; in so far as he spake, thought, acted differently in different periods of his career, and a changed hue of soul came over him, and threw across the world before him a brighter or a sadder shade; so far is he the ideal and picture of the mind of Man. His self-variations are altogether human.

The casual vicissitudes of feeling in Christ, his alternations of anxiety and hope, of rejoicing and of tears, have often been appealed to, as traces of his having had a like nature with our own. The appeal is just; and shows us that he was impressed, as we are, by those outward incidents, which may make the morning happy and the evening sad. But, besides these accidental agitations, which follow the complexion of our external lot, there is a far more important set of changes, which the affections and character undergo from internal causes; which occur in regular succession, marking and characterizing the different periods of mental, if not of physical life; and constitute the stages of moral development through which the noblest minds visibly pass to their perfection. The incidental fluctuations of emotion raised by the good or evil tidings of the hour, are but as the separate waves which the passing wind may soothe to a ripple or press into a storm but the seasonal changes of character, of which I now

speak, are rather the great tidal movements of the deep within us, depending on less capricious forces than the transient gale, and bearing on their surface the mere film of tempest or of calm. The succession is distinctly traceable in the mind of Christ, making his life a model of moral progression the most impressive and sublime. He thus becomes in a new sense the representative of our duty, our visible and outward conscience: revealing to us not only the end to which we must attain, but the successive steps by which our nature reaches it; the process as well as the result; the natural history of the affections which belongs to the true perfection of the will. He is the type of the pure religious life; all its developments being crowded, by the rapid ripening of his soul, into his brief experience: and we read in the gospel a divine allegory of humanity, symbolical of those profound and silent changes, of passion and speculation, of faith and love, through which a holy mind rises to its most godlike

power.

I propose to follow Jesus through the several periods, so far as they appear, of his outward and inward history; and to show the correspondence between their order and the successive stages of growth in a religious and holy soul.

The only incident recorded of the childhood of

Jesus strikingly commences the analogy between his nature and ours, and happily introduces him to us as the representative of the great ideas of duty and God within the soul. The annual pilgrimage from his village to the holy city, which had hitherto been the child's holiday, full only of the wonder and delight of travel, seized hold, on one occasion, of deeper feelings, which absorbed him with their new intensity. The visit which had become conventional with others, appeared at once with its full meaning to him and with the surprise of a fresh reverence, he turned from the gay streets and the sunny excursion, and the social entertainment, to the quiet courts of the temple, where the ancient story of miracle was told, and the mystery of prophecy explained. Eager to prolong this new and solemn interest, he missed, you will remember, the opportunity of travelling back with the caravan of Nazareth: and when told by his parents, on their return in quest of him, 'Thy father and mother have sought thee sorrowing,' he replied, with a tone not altogether filial, 'Know ye not that I must be about my Father's business?'

The answer is wonderfully expressive of the spirit of young piety, taking its first dignity as an independent principle of action in the mind. The lessons of devotion are, for a long time, adopted

passively, with listening faith; the great ideas dwindling, as they fall from the teacher's lips, to the dimensions of the infant mind receiving them. When the mother calls her children to her knees to speak to them of God, she is herself the greatest object in their affections. It is by her power over them that God becomes Venerable; by the purity of her eye that he becomes Holy; by the silence of the hour that he becomes Awful; by the tenderness of her tones that he becomes Dear. That the parents bend, with lowly look and serene result, before some invisible Presence, is the first and sufficient hint to the heart's latent faith; which therefore blends awhile with the domestic sympathies, simply mingling with them an element of mystery, and imparting to them a deeper and less earthy colouring. But the thoughts which constitute religion are too vast and solemn to remain subordinate. They are germs of a

nurture, must burst

growth, which, with true into independent life, and overshadow the whole soul. When the mind, beginning to be busy for itself, ponders the ideas of the infinite and eternal, it detects, as if by sudden inspiration, the immensity of the relations which it sustains to God and immortality: the old formulas of religious instruction break their husk, and give forth the seeds of wonder and of love; every thing that seemed be

fore great and worthy is dwarfed; and human affinities and duties sink into nothingness compared with the heavenly world which has been discovered. There is a period, when earnest spirits become thus possessed; disposed to contrast the grandeur of their new ideal with the littleness of all that is actual; and to look with a sublimated feeling, which in harsher natures passes into contempt, on pursuits and relations once sufficient for the heart's reverence. At such a crisis it was that Jesus gave the answer to his parents; when his piety first broke into original and self-luminous power, and not only took the centre of his system, but threatened to put out those lesser and dependent lights which, when their place is truly understood, appear no less heavenly. He spake in the entranced and exclusive spirit of young devotion. Well then may we bear with the rebukes which this earnest temper is sometimes impelled to administer: for by a mental necessity, all strong feeling must be exclusive, till wisdom and experience have trained it; till the worth of many things has been ascertained; till God is seen, not sitting aloof from his creation to show how contemptible it is, but pervading it to give it sanctity; till it is found how much that is human is also divine. None learned this so soon or so profoundly as Jesus.