FIRST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY.
This Sunday commemorates the manifestation of our Lord's glory for
the second time in the Temple. In His infancy that glory had been
revealed to the faithful souls who waited for the loving-kindness of the
Lord in the midst of His Temple, and they had seen the Epiphany of that
Sun of Righteousness whose Light was to lighten the Gentiles, and to be
the glory of God's people Israel. Twelve years afterwards the childhood
of the Holy Child Jesus was to reveal the same glory to all who had faith
to behold it, during that visit to the Temple when He sat among the doctors
and fulfilled the words, "I have more understanding than My teachers." Among those teachers
may have been Nicodemus and Gamaliel, and the rays which were shed from
the Light of the Divine understanding at which they marvelled, may have
fallen on their minds with a vivifying power which afterwards made the
one fit to receive the first full revelation of the truth respecting new
birth into Christ, and the other to be the teacher of St. Paul, by whom
the Light of Christ was so marvellously spread abroad among the Gentiles.
