The old-fashioned routine, it might have been said, of synagogue worship,
with its mechanical dulness and its mistaken interpretations of God's
word, its shallow and superficial and tedious traditional commentaries,
its formalism and vain repetitions; all this, whatever might have been
its value for the ordinary unenlightened Jew, how could it have been
necessary and what profit could there have been in it for the divinely
gifted Son of man?

So it might have been argued; so indeed it would seem men who consider
themselves enlightened sometimes argue in support of their own neglect of
the religious life.

But it may well make us more than doubtful as to the issue of any such
neglect, when we see the mind of Christ thus exemplified in His habitual
observance.

We all recognise His moral and spiritual superiority. Whether His spirit
has taken possession of our spirit or not, He stands out as our
undisputed guide to the practice of a good life.

In vision, in insight, in purity, in stainlessness, in all that we
reverence in human life and that good men strive to attain, we have no
model to set beside His example. All the more, then, this fact deserves
our notice, and calls us to follow Him, that we find Him, as His custom
was, in the synagogue on the Sabbath day. He was there Sabbath after
Sabbath listening to the provincial teacher, worshipping with the village
labourer, praying with the ignorant and the foolish, there as a matter of
life custom and for His soul's benefit.