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1. The Epiphany before us is, in the first place, that of the two lives, the seen and the unseen, the relative and the personal, the human relationship to the Divine. Let us try to place ourselves in imagination in those Temple precincts, and picture the entrance of the distressed and bewildered mother after two days and nights of weary and watchful searching. Regardless of His mother's anxiety, He has been sitting in the Temple courts. "Son, why hast Thou thus dealt with us?" was a natural question; and it fell not on a deaf ear, but on an unupbraiding conscience. "How is it that ye sought Me?" The rebuke is turned back upon herself. "Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business?" (Original: "In the things of My Father." I prefer here the Authorized Version to the Revised.) It was a hard stern lesson for the heart of the mother. She lives only in Him; but He has now another life, and another being. Such is her first lesson in the mystery of the two lives, the twofold relationship. This lesson we have all to learn for ourselves, and to learn also for one another. What a unity does this give to the human being, to have a life above this life, a business, a home, a Father, away from the desultoriness, the dissipation, which are so wearying and deteriorating to all that is the man in us. "My Father," — a word of concentration, a word significant of the gathering into one of all the interests and affections which before were scattered abroad. This the one purpose of all education with the name, to make real to the young life this spiritual sonship; and this the one principle of all true human dealing, so to recognize in one another the secret of the Divine relationship, that we neither seek to engross for ourselves hearts which belong to another, nor run any risk of seducing from their rightful allegiance those whom God has appropriated to His own possession. Yet, secondly, of Him who has just spoken of this as a matter of course, that He shall be absorbed in His Father's business, it is written in the other half of the text that, "He went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them." We are brought here into the very heart of the great mystery — God manifest in the flesh. And this is all that is told us of the boyhood of the Saviour — this and one brief hint besides, as to the occupation of His time in manual labour. This, then, as to its outward shape and form, was His Father's business; the inner life went on unknown and unnoticed. He was growing all this time in wisdom; but the one feature of the thirty years is the SUBJECTION. All else is taken for granted — the industry and the piety and the beautiful example — and this only is dwelt upon. "He was subject unto them." "He humbled Himself," St. Paul writes, as the characteristic of the whole of His earthly life — "He humbled Himself, and became obedient." From this beginning it was but a natural process to the long self-repression of the village-home and the drudging workshop; thence to the baptism in Jordan, and the temptation in the desert; thence into the homeless unrests of the ministry, the scorn and rejection of men, the dulness and coldness even of His own, and at last the agony of Calvary, and the shameful death of the cross. Though He was a Son, yet He "learned obedience by the things which He suffered." After Him let us struggle, living the life of faith which realizes the Father in heaven, feeling it His business as our business which makes the knowledge of Him our one submission, and suffers no other allegiance to interfere or compete with this; yet, on the other hand, counts no human subordination, and no personal sacrifice misplaced or undignified, may it but reproduce in faintest reflection the great Epiphany when "He went down with them," &c. "Let your light so shine before men," &c.

(Dean Vanghan.)

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KJV: And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?

WEB: He said to them, "Why were you looking for me? Didn't you know that I must be in my Father's house?"