whose hopes rise from their own heart’s goodness, and not from their nation’s worth!  So obscure, so devout:  while the great ones sin, they pray; while the popular priests lead in worldliness, they retire into God’s hiding-places to intercede.  They have private paths into God’s Paradise:  they do not always see the cherubim with flaming sword.  God often calls them home before the stormy dawn of the evil day.  So they live and die, waiting for the consolation.

Consider, again, his HOLY FELLOWSHIP:  “the Holy Ghost was upon him.”  His heart became the ark of the Heavenly Dove, wandering over the grey waters; and to him was the olive leaf brought.  He looked past the face of the Rabbi and the priest, not contemptuously, but wistfully, wondering why he must:  he looked past them, and beheld in the dawning shadow a diviner Face.  He heard secrets which would be foolishness to others, even to frequenters of the Temple and to robed priests.  He thought of death peacefully; but that other Face always came, faintly but immutably, between him and the Last Shadow.  The Lord’s Christ first, death after.  What gracious ways God has of treating some of these simply-trusting children of His!  How graciously He orders the course of spiritual wants for them! “And the evening and the morning” are—­each day.

“And he came by the Spirit into the Temple.”  He required no ecclesiastical calendar, no book of the hours.  This obscure denizen of the sanctuary had a dial in his own soul, and the silent shadow on the figures came from no visible sun.  Be sure that there are men and women still, just, and fearing God, who anticipate the days of heaven, and almost win their dawning.  How often must Simeon have come, waiting:  and yet how fresh was his hope each time!  He fed on God’s disappointments; the unfulfilled was his hidden manna.

Consider his ONE GREAT DAY.  An obscure worshipper suddenly becomes the richest, most honoured man in all the world:  in his arms he holds God’s Incarnate Son.  Yesterday was a day of earth, tomorrow also may well be a day of earth:  but this, a day of heaven!  Alas! but only to him.  To others this, too, is a very day of earth.  Did some officiating priest watch the little group of peasant parents showing their first-born to an obscure worshipper?  And did he look, without a stain of contempt upon his vision?  And yet Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome, had no such gift and prize as the arms of that humble dreamer held.  Who would not have taken his place, had they known!  It is well to be reckoned God’s intimate, lest we miss the Child.

  “The sages frowned, their beards they shook,
    For pride their heart beguiled;
  They said, each looking on his book,
      ‘We want no child.’”

But Simeon had dwelt nearer God than they—­nearest God of all that came to the Temple that day.  And so God trusted him with His Best.