122 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 



The one incident we know that seems to contradict 

 this view, is the story of His discussion with the doctors 

 in the Temple. But does it really contradict it? He 

 forgets the time like any child. He is preoccupied with 

 a sense of the nearness of God, with an interest in 

 spiritual things ; but any one who has had much to do 

 with children of six to twelve years of age knows their 

 simple and heartfelt interest in these things ; their sense 

 of God's presence 1 . Is not this an instance of the same 

 thing, only at a somewhat later age, when the faith of 

 less perfect children is commonly dominated by the 

 vivid reality of the age of fighting and hunting instincts? 

 Though by the age of twelve in most the realisation of 

 the divine is somewhat overlaid by the pressing interests 

 of immediate life, this is not always so, and in One who 

 grew in grace as Jesus grew, it could not be so at all. 

 Was His interest more than the perfect example of the 

 wisdom, insight and love of a little child? Are we to 

 make Him different from all the rest of humanity, and 

 so to lose the gift which His true Manhood brought, by 

 attributing to Him a premature realisation of Divinity? 

 Is it not true to say that our inclination to do this is the 

 result of a mistaken piety which was so impressed with the 

 sinfulness of fallen man that in all reverence it wished to 

 place Christ as far away as possible from manhood as we 

 know it; a piety that has left those enduring memorials 

 in art and legend which still exercise so potent an in- 

 fluence? Is not this attitude also partly due to a belief 

 in the omniscience and omnipotence of God, commonly 

 not carefully thought out nor accurately defined? The 

 belief is in a sense true in the transcendent sphere, 

 though only in a sense as we have seen, but it cannot be 

 true of the Godhead immanent in time and matter, if 



1 Surely "hearing them and asking them questions" implies 

 listening to them and asking them questions childishly wise, not 

 posing them with mature dilemmas ? 



