FOREMOST amongst those who, wondering, had heard what the shepherds told, was she

whom most it concerned, who laid it up deepest in her heart, and brought to it treasured

stores of memory. It was the Mother of Jesus. These many months, all connected with

this Child could never have been far away form her thoughts. And now that He was hers

yet not hers - belonged, yet did not seem to belong, to her - He would be the more dear to

her Mother-heart for what made Him so near, and yet parted Him so far from her. And

upon all His history seemed to lie such wondrous light, that she could only see the path

behind, so far as she had trodden it; while upon that on which she was to move, was such

dazzling brightness, that she could scare look upon the present, and dared not gaze

towards the future.

At the very outset of this history, and increasingly in its course, the question meets us,

how, if the Angelic message to the Virgin was a reality, and her motherhood so

supernatural, she could have been apparently so ignorant of what was to come - nay, so

often have even misunderstood it? Strange, that she should have 'pondered in her heart'

the shepherd's account; stranger, that afterwards she should have wondered at His

lingering in the Temple among Israel's teachers; strangest, that, at the very first of His

miracles, a mother's fond pride should have so harshly broken in upon the Divine melody

of His work, by striking a keynote so different from that, to which His life had been set;

or that afterwards, in the height of his activity, loving fears, if not doubts, should have

prompted her to interrupt, what evidently she had not as yet comprehended in the fulness

of its meaning. Might we not rather have expected, that the Virgin-Mother from the

inception of this Child's life would have understood, that He was truly the Son of God?

The question, like so many others, requires only to be clearly stated, to find its emphatic

answer. For, had it been so His history, His human life, of which every step is of such

importance to mankind, would not have been possible. Apart from all thoughts of the

deeper necessity, both as regarded His Mission and all the salvation of the world, of a

true human development of gradual consciousness and personal life, Christ could not, in

any true sense, have been subject to His Parents, if they had fully understood that He was

Divine; nor could He, in that case, have been watched, as He 'grew in wisdom and in

favour with God and men.' Such knowledge would have broken the bond of His

Humanity to ours, by severing that which bound Him as a child to His mother. We could

not have become His brethren, had He not been truly the Virgin's Son. The mystery of the

Incarnation would have been needless and fruitless, had His humanity not been subject to

all its right and ordinary conditions. And, applying the same principle more widely, we

can thus, in some measure, understand why the mystery of His Divinity had to be kept

while He was on earth. Had it been otherw ise, the thought of His Divinity would have

proved so all-absorbing, as to render impossible that of His Humanity, with all its

lessons. The Son of God Most High, Whom they worshipped, could never have been the

loving Man, with Whom they could hold such close converse. The bond which bound the

Master to His disciples - the Son of Man to humanity - would have been dissolved; His

teaching as a Man, the Incarnation, and the Tabernacling among men, in place of the

former Old Testament Revelation from heaven, wo uld have become wholly impossible.