"And when they saw Him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto Him,
Son, why has thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have
sought thee sorrowing. And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought
me? Know ye not that I must be in my Father's house?"
S. Mary and S. Joseph were proceeding on certain assumptions as to what
Jesus would do which turned out to be untenable. It is one of the
dangers of our religion--our personal religion--that we are apt to
assume too much which in the testing turns out to be unfounded. We reach
a certain stage of religious attainment, and then we assume that all is
going well with us. When one asks a child how he is getting on he
invariably answers: "I am all right." And the adult often has the same
childish confidence in an untested and unverified state of soul. We are
"all right"; which practically means that we do not care to be bothered
with looking into our spiritual state at all. We have been going on for
years now following the rules that we laid down when we first realised
that the being a Christian was a more or less serious matter. Nothing
has happened in these years to break the placidity of our routine. There
has never been any relapse into grievous sin; we have never felt any
real temptation to abandon the practice oL our religion.
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