3 Aug 1815

Jug. True

Ch. Jesus with the Doctors

4

they did or could understand it.

Here then we have a speech the import of which though so well known to those who at the distance of 18 centuries read it in print, was neither known nor by the speaker intended to be known by either of the two persons to whom it was addressed: like an aside speech in a play which though heard in the Galleries, remains not the less perfectly a secret to those who are standing in contact with the speaker on the stage.

Here though not of the nature of a miracle comes another wonder. To the child it was known that, whether he himself was or was not God, he was the son of God, or at any rate a son of God. His mother whose acquaintance with the subject had commenced before his, and who (Luke II. 19) ‘kept all these things and pondered them in her heart’, viz. the reputed visits of the wise men and the shepherds, how comes this his condition in life to be still a secret to her, and so to continue, even after she had received so broad a hint of it?

So again in regard to Joseph. Already, in the first of these his three recorded dreams, immediately upon that conception of his wife’s of which the birth of Jesus was the result (Matt. I.20) he had received from the Angel Gabriel by which he was so well satisfied that if the Holy Ghost was not her paramour at any rate she had not any other. He had seen the wise men with or without that star of Jesus's which was to useful to them: he had seen the shepherds who had seen the Angel by whom they had been informed that Jesus was the expected the annointed King, and Redeemer, or in a word the Christ. By his wife Mary by whom what on the occasion in question had passed between her and the Holy Ghost or whoever else was the father of her first born son must naturally speaking have been known with some degree of correctness by her whatsoever there was of supernatural in it could not but have been explained by her to her husband with correspondent correctness, were it only for the more compleat removal of that jealousy which under such circumstances could not but be understood, and which according to the narrative was actually entertained.