It was, as we reckon it, in spring A. D. 9, that Jesus for the first time went up to the Paschal Feast in Jerusalem. . . . Glorious as a view of Jerusalem must have seemed to a child coming to it for the first time from the retirement of a Galilean village, we must bear in mind, that he who now looked upon it was not an ordinary child. Nor are we, perhaps, mistaken in the idea that the sight of its grandeur would, as on another occasion, awaken in him not so much feelings of admiration, which might have been akin to pride, as of sadness, though he may as yet have been scarcely conscious of its deeper reason.
But the one all-engrossing thought would be of the Temple. This, his first visit to its halls, seems also to have called out the first outspoken . . . thought of that Temple as the House of his Father. . . . Here also would be the higher meaning, rather than the structure and appearance, of the Temple, that would absorb his mind. . . . He had been so entirely absorbed by the awakening thought of his being and mission, however kindled, as to be not only neglectful, but forgetful of all around. Nay, it even seemed to him impossible to understand how they could have sought him, and not known where he had lingered. . . . That forgetfulness of his child-life was a sacrifice—a sacrifice of self; that entire absorption in his Father's business, without a thought of self, either in the gratification of curiosity, the acquisition of knowledge, or personal ambition—a consecration of himself unto God. . . . And yet this awakening of the Christ-consciousness on his first visit to the Temple, partial, and perhaps even temporary, as it may have been, seems itself like the morning-dawn, which from the pinnacle of the Temple the priest watched, ere he summoned his waiting brethren beneath to offer the early sacrifice.
—From "'The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah,"
