Altar, Latin Church
We can never understand the depth and continuity of the religious life of the Jews without remembering that from the beginning a religious atmosphere surrounded the child of Jewish parents.
“These are the things by which a man enjoys the fruits in this world, but their possession continued for the next; to honor father and mother, pious works, peace-making between man and man, and the study of the law, which is equivalent to them all.” Devotion to the law constituted, in the esteem of the Jews, the chief aim in life. Jewish parents were more concerned to give their children a knowledge of the law than they were to leave them an earthly inheritance. Among the memorable sayings of the Talmud there is one to the effect that
“Knowledge of the law may be looked for in those who have sucked it in at their mother’s breast.” Of what the true mothers in Israel were can be known by studying the lives of the mothers of Zebedee’s children, and of Mark, of Dorcas, of Lydia, of Lois, of Eunice, and of Priscilla. There is no department of study that could be pursued with more profit at the present time than the national history of the Jews, especially as it respected the methods adopted by parents to bring up their children. The private and united prayers, domestic rights, weekly Sabbath, and the festive seasons were all employed with a reference to bringing up Jewish children in the knowledge of and with a true love for the lands, traditions, and institutions of their people. And it is true, even to this day, that the children of the Jews are better trained in the knowledge of the
Scriptures, and in the ordinances and customs of the Jewish Church, than the children of any other people on the earth. So during the thirty years our Savior spent in Nazareth, He was being trained as other Jewish children in the
Holy Scriptures, and all the rites and ceremonies of the Jewish Church.
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