enter into such an unsuitable alliance; so they said to the multitude. Yet mere dust and smoke that, which they raised to cover their real motives and base ends. The envy, from whose evil eye no excellence is a protecting charm, and which, rending asunder the most sacred ties, refuses to spare a brother, was at the bottom of the discontent. For while Aaron and Miriam held such language to the people, masking their selfish passions under a fair pretence of patriotism and piety, listen to them in their tent, how different their language to each other, Hath the Lord indeed spoken only by Moses? hath he not spoken also by us?

Looking at such cases, what else was to be expected from the men of Nazareth, a place of proverbially bad repute, than that they should grudge Jesus his honors, and hate him for his success? He had emerged from deep obscurity into a fame that filled every mouth with his works, and embraced within its widening circle all the land. He had become famous; and they had not. It did not matter that that was not his fault. They felt themselves grow less as he grew greater, and they could not brook that; such as were stars among them, or wished to be thought so, were bitterly mortified to find themselves extinguished in the light of this rising sun. Therefore they hated Christ, giving him ground to complain, A prophet is not without honor but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.

Let me turn your attention to one occasion when this feeling, which had been grumbling like a pent-up volcano, burst forth most insolently, most offensively. Our Lord was teaching in the synagogue of Nazareth -teaching with that strange, wonderful, divine wisdom, which in its very dawn, when the child was but twelve

years old, astonished the gray divines and subtlest lawyers of the temple; and which not only made unprejudiced hearers hang on his gracious lips, but compelled his enemies to confess, Never man spake like this man. On the occasion to which I refer, envy gnawed like a canker-worm, at the heart of his townsmen. What business had he to reach an eminence they might aspire to, but could never attain? Hopeless of that, although they could not rise to his height, they might perchance pull him down to their own level. They will try. And so, at the close of his discourse, when we might have expected them to praise God for the wisdom that had dropped from his lips, and to congratulate Mary on her son, and their native town on an inhabitant whose name would render Nazareth famous to the latest ages, they cast about for something which, by detracting from his glory, might gratify their spleen. They had nothing to say against either the matter or the manner of the discourse; both were perfect. Nor had they a whisper to breathe against the life and character of the speaker. A circumstance worthy of note! For it is one of the finest testimonies borne to our Lord's lofty and holy life, that the thirty years which he spent in a small town-where leisure always abounds, and scandal is often rife, and every man's character and habits are discussed in private circles, and dissected by many cutting tonguesdid not furnish them with the shred of an excuse for whispering an ill word against him. His life resembled a polished mirror, which the foulest breath cannot stain, nor dim beyond a passing moment. What a noble testimony to Jesus Christ! Holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, envy found no way to vent its malice and spit its venom at him, but by a taunt she

drew from his humble origin and poor relatives. As if it were not an honor to rise above the circumstances of our birth, as if a man's ascent by one step above his original condition, fairly, honestly, and honorably won, were not more a matter of just pride, than a descent traced from the proudest ancestry, they said, Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?-whence, then, hath this man all these things?

Extending from his early youth into the years of mature manhood, there is a great blank in our Lord's history. Eighteen years of his life stand unaccounted for; and that blank, looking as dark as the starless regions of the sky, tradition, usually so fertile in invention, has not attempted to fill up. How often have I wondered and tried to fancy what Jesus did, and how he passed the time between his boyhood, when he vanishes from our sight, and his thirtieth year, when he again appears upon the stage to enter on his public ministry? Thanks to his townsmen's envious sneer, or, rather, thanks to Him who permitted the insult, and thus has made the wrath of man to praise him, their insolent taunt throws a ray of light into the deep obscurity. Their question, Is not this the carpenter? not, as at another time, the carpenter's son, but the carpenter himself, suggests to us the picture of a humble home in Nazareth, known to the neighborhood as the carpenter's, and under whose roof of thatch Jesus resided with his mother-in all probability then a widow, and, like many a widow since then, cheered by the love and supported by the labors of a dutiful son. I have no doubt that holy angels, turning their wings away from lordly mansions and the proud palaces of

kings, often hovered over that peaceful home, as still they, who are ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation, do over the humblest abodes of piety. But, so far as this world and its inhabitants were concerned, Jesus passed his days in contented obscurity, unnoticed and unknown, save to the neighbors, whose esteem he could not fail to win by his pure life, and gentle temper, and holy manners. He was to grow in favor with God and man. All Nazareth regarded him as a paragon of human virtues, and many a mother pointed to Mary's son as the pattern her own lads should copy.

How wonderful it is to transport ourselves back, in fancy, some eighteen hundred years, to that small town; and on asking, with the Greeks, to "see Jesus," to be conducted to a humble dwelling, where chips of wood, and squared logs, and unbarked trunks of trees lying about, in the oak, and olive, and cedar, and sycamore that had fallen to his axe, point out "the carpenter's." By the door, and under a bowering vine, which, trained beneath the eaves over some rude trellis-work, forms a grateful shade from the noon-day sun, a widow sitsher fingers employed in weaving, but an expression in her face and eye which indicates a mind engaged in far loftier objects, thoughts deeper, holier, stranger, than a buried husband, and a widow's grief. She rises, lifts the latch, and, stooping, we enter that lowly door; and there, bending to his work, we see the carpenter--in him the Son of the Most High God! Time was, when he set his compass on the deep; time was, when he stood and measured the earth; and now, with line, and compass, and plane, and hatchet, the sweat dropping from his lofty brow, he who made heaven and earth, and the sea. and all that in them is, in the guise of a

common tradesman, bends at a carpenter's bench. How low he stooped to save us!

The world was once astonished to see a king stoop to such work. The founder of the Russian empire left his palace and capital, the seductive pleasures and all the pomp of royalty, to acquire the art of ship-building in the dockyard of a Dutch sea-port. He learned it, that he might teach it to his subjects; he became a servant that he might be the better master, and lay in Russia the foundations of a great naval power. Nor has his country been ungrateful; her capital, which bears his name, is adorned with a monument to his memory, massive as his mind; and she has embalmed his deathless name in her heart and in her victories. Yet, little as many think of Jesus, lightly as they esteem him, a far greater sight is here. There, in a king becoming a subject that his subjects might find in him a king, there was much for men; but here, there is much both for men and angels to wonder at, and praise through all eternity. The Son of God stoops to toil. What an amazing scene! Henceforth, let honest labor feel itself ennobled; let no man, whatever rank he has attained, blush for the meanness of his origin, or be ashamed of his father's trade; let the sons of toil lift their heads before the overweening pride of birth or wealth, and feel themselves stand taller on the earth; let the idle learn to do some good in this world, and turn their brains and hands to some useful purpose; above all, there let sinners behold a marvelous, most affecting exhibition of the condescension and love of God. This carpenter of Nazareth is He whom the apostle calls "the first-born of every creature ;" and "by him," he adds, "were all things created that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible,