Lord, whether that union was congenital, according to the catholic view, or whether it took place after birth, and, as some independent thinkers have believed, in this baptismal hour, we are plainly led to infer that this baptismal unction of the Spirit was, in fact, the qualifying power for His great work. Now, till this is given, He must abide privately at Nazareth.

But as Jesus Himself was not yet ripe for the great work, so neither (2.) was the time ripe. In all great and successful movements there will be found a conjunction between the outward circumstances of the time, and the inward qualification and call of chosen instruments. In the providence of God the hour comes as well as the man. The hour was not yet come. John, the fore-runner, was yet preaching; he must finish his work; then Jesus will enter on the scene. Thus it was. One of the last actions of John was to baptise Jesus. Immediately Jesus is led up of the Spirit to be tempted in the wilderness. During the forty days of the temptation the faithful ministry of the Baptist is suddenly cut short-the voice crying in _the_wilderness, "prepare ye the way of the Lord," is silenced. Jesus hears that John is cast into prison; this circumstance, taken in conjunction with His own recently received anointing of the Spirit, marks the arrival of the long expected hour, and Jesus now comes forth, "preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand." (Mark I., 14, 15.) Thus we see how wisely was arranged the succession of events in that momentous period, and how perfectly the Saviour recognized and honoured His heavenly Father's will, in thus waiting till the fulness of the time was come. He knew, what we must sometimes learn to know, that the waiting and the working were both alike from God; and that He was no less doing the will of His Father that sent Him, while quietly cherishing high thought and holy feeling in the privacy of Nazareth, than when, the time for action being arrived, He came forth of that privacy, in a blaze of benevolence and truth upon the world.

"They also serve, who only stand and wait."

Thus instructive do we find the private life of our Lord to have been, while, yet unmanifested to the world, He dwelt in a small, disreputable town among the hills of Galilee.

In taking leave of this interesting theme, we may observe (1.) that in this obscure origin of our Lord, and in His lowly life at Nazareth, we see an instructive fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. This is noticed by St. Matthew: "He came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth; that it might be fulfilled

which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene." Some have found a difficulty in this saying of Matthew, inasmuch as there is no such prediction found in any of the prophets as that which here he seems to quote. But the difficulty vanishes when we observe that Matthew does not adduce this as the saying of any particular prophet, but as a summarised statement, (so to speak) of the sense and spirit of many prophecies. "By the prophets." The allusion is, no doubt, to all those prophecies which foretold for the Messiah a lowly extraction and mean condition in life, a lot of privation, humiliation, and suffering, so different from the worldly pomp and splendour of earthly rulers and deliverers. The spirit of such prophecies is all condensed into this" He shall be called a Nazarene." And when we think of the earthly life of our blessed Lord, as being up to thirty years of age that of a poor carpenter in Nazareth, a city the very name of which was a reproach because of the rude character of its people, we cannot but marvel at the strange and exact fulfilment of predictions, which, in their nature, were such as the human mind itself would never have originated.

2. This obscure and outwardly rude life of our Lord at Nazareth, serves moreover to illustrate the really divine character of His wisdom and His power. How, indeed, should any merely human mind, surrounded from early infancy by circumstances which could only operate as hindrances to expansion and spiritual elevation,-how could such a mind, so circumstanced, have ever even conceived so glorious, so sublime a purpose in life as that which Jesus of Nazareth attempted? "Our Lord's design to establish upon the earth a kingdom of souls was an original design. Remark, as bearing upon this originality, our Lord's isolation in His early life. His social obscurity is, in the eyes of thoughtful men, the safeguard and guarantee of His originality. He mingled neither with great thinkers who could mould educated opinion, nor with men of gentle blood who could give its tone to society; He passed those thirty years as an under-workman in a carpenter's shop; He lived in what might have been the depths of mental solitude and social obscurity; and thence He went forth, not to foment a political revolution, nor yet to found a local school of evanescent sentiment, but to proclaim an enduring and world-wide kingdom of souls, based upon the culture of a common moral character, and upon intellectual submission to a common creed."-(Liddon's Bampton Lectures, Lecture 3.) The only true explanation of this mystery is that given by our Lord Himself, in the temple at Jerusalem, when the Jews

enquired the secret of His wisdom-" Whence hath this man letters, having never learned?" He answered them and said"My doctrine is not Mine, but His that sent Me."

3. We may turn this subject to our profit, by observing, that there will be much of the Nazareth element-much of separation, isolation, and retirement-in the life of every really great and good man. As the trees, to bear fruit upward, must draw materials for fruitfulness from roots deep hidden in the soil; and as the river, to run fertilising through the land, must be fed from springs in the retired heart of mighty mountains, so every great, instructive, and beneficent public life before men, must find the sources of its strength and usefulness in the exercises of private thought and devotion. Our Lord felt the need of such exercises, after His entry upon public life. How often do we read of Him, that He departed into a desert place alone; He went up into a mountain apart to pray, and when the evening was come He was there alone; He went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. Thus it will ever be every truly good and abidingly fruitful life before men, will have its background of retired thought and prayer. Unfed from sources such as these, the stream of spiritual and beneficent activity will soon run dry. The heart will soon exhaust itself in labour, that is not oft replenished by secret communion with God. In this age of incessant hurry and outward action, we need to be reminded of this.

"The world is too much with us: late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."

No really great and solid character will ever be built up within us, unless we can afford to be sometimes alone: where in meditation we can commune with our own hearts, where in reading we can commune with the written thoughts of the wise and good of our own species, and especially where in prayer we may commune with the mind and heart of God.

We would not have any good man lead the life of a recluse; all have their work to do in the world, and the world deeply needs them all. But that we may do that work well, that we may store up within ourselves reserves of spiritual holy force, that shall make our movements among men a source of blessing to them, we must have our Nazareth, our desert place alone, our mountain apart, where we may feed our sonls with pure and lofty thought. The benefit of seasons of affliction is chiefly this; that then the activities of life are laid aside, and we are driven in upon ourselves, to examine, meditate, and pray.

From such a season of affliction, so employed, the good man emerges like a giant refreshed, still feeble it may be in body, but with spiritual strength renewed. Let us then remember in this tumultous age, when the commercial, social, and political activities of life are so much developed, that, though it is not good for man to be alone, yet it is good for him to be often alone. For it is in closet reading, closet musing, closet prayer, that man becomes rich to bless his fellows when he moves among them. The retirement of Nazareth is the necessary prelude and accompaniment of the public life of activity and well-doing.

ART. V. THE ORIGIN OF REVOLUTIONS IN PUBLIC OPINION.*

IT has become a favourite generalization of a class of thinkers, of late, to regard the whole world of man as an individual passing through several successive periods of development or character; from the ignorance and imbecility of infancy, through the hopefulness and credulity of childhood, the passion and poetry of youth, to the sterner practical ambition of manhood, and the final positive convictions and well-defined knowledge and contented despair of old age. Whenever an hypothesis similar to this is entertained and elaborated by philosophers who disallow any information superior to the deductions of the human reason, the final stage of human development is depicted, not as an era of hopeful, joyous anticipation, but as a cold passionless reign of science, in which men shall have learned the power of all material and mental laws, and obeying them shall present what they deem a perfected manhood, which, like a perfected vegetation, shall pass through its appointed rounds and die away, without any hope or fear not necessary to its complete development in this, its only known existence.†

But others, who do not discard man's chief glory, his religious nature, and who accept the logical deduction that this nature proves the existence of the supersensual and the eternal, still adopt the generalization of the gradual growth of the race, but anticipate in the last era the co-reign of science and faith,

*From the American Methodist Quarterly Review.

+ See the Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, last chapter.

both efficient and harmonious, and each with its well-defined powers, under whose joint domain man shall obey all the laws of the present life, and thereby become qualified for graduation into a higher order of existence.

All who entertain the idea of development, common to both of these parties, see in the history of man, already past, several successive stages, in each of which some one race has been dominant, and has gradually assumed the empire of the world.

During its infancy all its parts were in common growing, and common credulousness appeared, like the blossoms of spring, beautiful, and often desired again when gone, but really fruitless, and to maturer minds insipid. The hopefulness of childhood too was universal in its reign, and spontaneous in its inception. But in manhood the races diverge in nature. The Hebrews, in the early manhood of the human race, taught the sublime doctrine of the unity of the Supreme Being, to all the world; the Greeks, in a maturer intellectual manhood, carried poetry and the love of the beautiful to a supreme place in the affections of the world; the Romans enthroned order; Christianity initiated the empire of love; while modern Europe presents man emancipated from the follies of youth and the ambition of early maturity, and has demonstrated the power of science, which promises in its reign to subject all other powers to its control and limit them to their just spheres; while America in particular claims the attention of the world by demonstrating that even the masses of mankind, hitherto regarded first as slaves, and next as helpless immortals to be protected, are really capable of self-government, self-purification, and growth.

Now whether this theory be regarded simply as a convenient hypothesis, by which the facts of history may be classified, or as a genuine expression of an actual law, though false, it may be convenient and useful to the honest student of history and

man.

The theory also presupposes what we may concede to be an evident fact, that men have been accustomed to move in masses, not only literally and bodily, but mentally and morally. The history of the world is not the history of individuals, but of classes and of epochs. We are not dealing with imaginations, but with positive well-defined entities, when we speak of the Egyptian civilization, Babylonian and Persian despotism, the Grecian æsthetics and culture, the Macedonian ambition, the Roman order and imperiousness, (each for its time dominant in the civilized world,) the reconstruction of society by Christianity after the disintegration of the Roman