Sermons to naval cadets by JND Author:John Neale Dalton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHRIST'S BOYHOOD. Third Sunday In Lent, March 24, 1878. Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with Gocf and man.—S. Luke ii. 52. These word... more »s have been selected for me by your chaplain, and he has asked me to preach to you upon them this morning one in that series of Lenten sermons which he has this year drawn out for our benefit. The subject chosen for us is ' Christ's example during His early life' as grounded on this particular text. These simple words are almost the only record we possess of that boyhood of the Saviour of the world ; they were written of Jesus when He was just about your age—between fourteen and fifteen, or a little more—and they seem to sum up for us very briefly nearly eighteen years of His life. Christ was hanged, you remember, on the Cross when He was about thirty- three, and the gospels, as we have them now, give us thestory of what He did and said, and of what befell Him during the short space of the last three years of His life only. At the beginning of two of the gospels, indeed, we read of His birth, and of the Shepherds and Eastern Kings around Him in His babyhood, and of Simeon and Anna folding Him in their aged arms, and crooning over the child amid the splendours of the Temple, and of His being borne far away from Palestine over the desert sands by His father and mother into Egypt, and then of their return to Nazareth. But after that, there comes a pause in the story—for these events concern His infancy, not His boyhood—and for the next ten years of His life nothing is shewn us, till S. Luke takes up the tale and writes of that pilgrim band of Galilean country-folk travelling up at Easter-tide to keep the great Spring Feast and holiday at Jerusalem, with the lad Jesus, then twelve years old or more, going along with them. A...« less