with me in some of its examples. The Virgin Mary is the perpetual type of people who, intrusted with any great and sacred interest, identify their own lives. with that interest and care for it conscientiously; but who, by-and-by, when the interest begins to manifest its own vitality and to shape its own methods, are filled with perplexity. They cannot keep the causes for which they labor under their own care. As his mother asked of Jesus, so they are always asking of the objects for which they live, "Why hast thou thus dealt with us?" Such people are people who have realized responsibility more than they have realized God. Just as Mary felt at the moment when she asked this question, that Jesus was her son more than that he was God's Son, so there is a constant tendency among the most earnest and conscientious people, to feel that the causes for which they live and work are their causes, more than that they are God's causes, and so to experience something which is almost like jealousy, when they see those causes pass beyond their power and fulfill themselves in larger ways than theirs. For such people, often the most devoted and faithful souls among us, it seems to me that there must be some help and light in this story of Jesus and his mother.

The first and simplest case of the experience which I want to speak of, is that which comes nearest to the circumstances of our story. It comes in every childhood. It comes whenever a boy grows up to the time at which he passes beyond the merely parental government which belonged to his earliest years. It comes with all assertion of individual character and purpose in a boy's life. A boy has had his career all identified with his home where he was cradled. What he was and did, he was and did as a member of that household. But by-and-by there comes some sudden outbreak of a personal energy. He shows some disposition, and attempts some task distinctively his own. It is a puzzling moment alike for the child and for the father. The child is perplexed with pleasure which is almost pain to find himself for the first time doing an act which is genuinely his own. The father is filled with a pain which yet has pride and pleasure in it to see his boy doing something original, something which he never bade him do, something which, perhaps, he could not do himself. The real understanding of that moment, both to child and father, depends upon one thing upon whether they can see in it the larger truth that this child is not merely the son of his father, but also is the son of God. If they both understand that, then the child, as he undertakes his personal life, passes not into a looser, but into a stronger, responsibility. And the father is satisfied to see his first authority over his son grow less, because he cannot be jealous of God. It is a noble progress and expansion of life, when the first independent venture of a young man on a career of his own, is not the willful claim of the prodigal:

Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me," but the reverent appeal of Jesus: "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"

Let this serve for an illustration. It is the scene which, recurring in every household, as a boy claims his own life, is constantly repeating the experience of the household of Nazareth. And now all responsible life, all life intrusted. with the care of any of God's causes, has this same sort of correspondence with the life of the mother of Jesus. There can be no higher specimen of responsibility than she exhibits. She is intrusted with the care of him who is to be the Saviour of the world. And that responsibility she accepts entirely. She is willing to give up everything else in life, to be absorbed and worn out in the task of supreme privilege which God has given her. There comes no trouble or lack in the degree of her readiness for labor or for pain. But the quality of her self-sacrifice shows its defect elsewhere. She is not able to see where the limits of her work must be. She is not able to stop short in her devout responsibility, when the task passes beyond her power, and her son begins to deal directly with his father.

The danger of

Compare with her, in the first place, that person with whom we are familiar in all the history of Christianity, whom we see about us constantly — the champion of the Faith, the man who counts it his work in life to maintain and protect the purity of the belief in Christ. It is a noble task for a man to accept. It is filled with anxiety. The faith for which the man cares is beset with many dangers. It costs him sleepless nights and weary days. He incurs dislike; he excites hostility by his eager zeal. To all this he is fully equal. many a stout champion of truth comes quite at the other end. There comes a time when God, as it were, takes back into his own keeping that faith over which he has bidden his disciples to stand guard. The truth begins to show a vitality upon which the believer has not counted. It puts itself into new forms. It develops new associations. No wonder that he is troubled. No wonder that, unless he is a large and thoughtful man, thoroughly reverent of truth as well as thoroughly devoted to the truths which he has held, he grudges truth in some way the larger freedom which it is claiming for itself, and almost opposes its development.

Take an example. A good man has for years counted himself a champion of the often denied and insulted justice of God. He has been ready to maintain it everywhere. Against all weak representations of God as a being all indulgence, he has asserted that God must punish wickedness. That truth he has supported, as he has conceived it, in its simplest, crudest form physical, unending punishment. Suppose the day comes when that faith claims for itself a free and more spiritual meaning; when men's souls become aware that in the

world to come, as in this world, the punishment of sin must be bound up in sin itself; when not the agonies of Hell, but the degradation of the moral nature, stands out as the dreadful thing. No wonder that at first, the surprised believer is almost dismayed. His faith, over which he has stood guard so faithfully, seems to be slipping away from him. His faith seems to be playing him false. He is bewildered, as Mary was when Jesus for the first time began to show his personal will and ways. But by-and-by the time came when she rejoiced in it, no doubt. "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it," she ordered the servants at the marriage in Cana. By that time she had learned to trust her Son far out of her own sight, to look to his own self-development with perfect confidence. And so the believer, and the champion of belief, comes in the course of time to rejoice when his belief outgrows him; when what he has to stand guard over is seen to be, not the special form in which a dogma has been conceived, but the spirit to which knowledge can come, and to which it must come always more spiritually and richly; not the truth, but truthfulness.

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It does seem to me that this is what many a believer needs to learn to-day. His faith seems to be slipping away from him. Truths will not remain the definite and docile things they used to be. His doctrine opens into some deeper form. He turns to the doctrine he has held and says to it, "Why have you dealt thus with me?" Why will you leave me?" And the answer is, “I must be about my Father's business." Truth is God's child. Truth must be what God wills, not what the believer wills. It is a blessed day for the believer when he learns this, and thenceforth only waits to see what new forms God will give his faith from year to year, and then is ready to follow it into whatever new regions God will send it forth to seek.

* * *

Mary learned two things about her Son that day in the temple, things which she had known before, but which became perfectly and permanently clear to her there. One was, that his life, was mysteriously larger than her own. The other was, that God was over and behind her, caring for that life for which she had been caring. The largeness and mystery of her Son's life and the fatherhood of God to him, those two things she learned there, and thenceforth they were part of her life always. She never can have forgotten them again. They must have made all the future service that she rendered to him at once more faithful and more calm and more sacred. And my dear friend, you, too, must learn these truths about the life of any man whom you are trying to help, any man who seems to be committed to you by God, or you cannot really help him as he needs. You must know the mystery of his life and his sonship to God.

Ah, how God sometimes teaches us those things about some one whom we are trying to guide and aid. We have undertaken our task very flippantly and

narrowly. "Well, this is my man," we say, "I do not see who else can help him, and so I will. I will patronize him. I understand him; I see what is to be made out of him; I will make him this, and this,"-laying some fine plan down in our mind. "This is what he shall be," and so you take your scholar into your school; your companion into your company; what you call your friend into what you call your friendship. The time must come, if you are ever really going to be of deepest use to that man, when, out of something which he says or does, these two truths come to you about him, that he is larger in his nature, more mysterious than you can grasp, and that he is the son of God, led by his Father, over and above your care. *

But we must not stop here. There is a yet deeper and closer care laid upon a man than his care for his brother, and that is the care of himself, of his own soul. And there too the truth applies which we have won out of our story of Jesus and his mother. There too it is true that a man cannot execute his responsibility aright unless in that for which he is responsible he sees something mysterious, and a child of God.

A man's care for himself! How strange it is! How a man seems to separate his life; to stand off, as it were, and gaze at his own life with criticism and anxiety. It is the commonest of all experiences with all thoughtful people. "Know thyself," says the old proverb; as if the knower and the known were genuinely two, distinct from one another. Keep thy heart with diligence" says Scripture, as if the heart and the heartkeeper were separate. The will and wisdom stand guard over the conscience and the character.

A man who is really thoughtful, who has risen to the capacity of such selfcare, praises himself, and blames himself, with a more even-handed justice because with a more intimate and conscientious knowledge, than that with which he judges of the lives of other men. He is to himself like something outside of himself with whose conditions nevertheless all his own fortunes are inextricably bound up. Therefore he lays out plans for his own treatment. He says: "I will make myself this or that." He says, "I will bring myself to my best in this or that way." And then, as he tries to carry out his plans, he becomes aware that on this self of his which he considered so entirely his own, in his own power, some other force besides his own is working. He finds himself the subject of some other will and wisdom, some other education than his own. His plans for his own life are overruled and interfered with. He meant to educate his self by self-indulgence; this other force, below his own, sweeps his self off into distress and deprivation. He meant to live in self-complacency; the deeper force plunges him into mortification and shame. It is as if the wind thought that it was ruling the waves which it tossed to and fro, but gradually became aware