They are altered by their companionship with our Lord, insensibly, just as we see the complexion of a man's character alter by his being thrown into the constant society of a stronger nature. But Christ works on them no magical change. Our Lord never transforms men so as to obliterate their old nature, and substitute a new one; new powers and a new life spring up from contact with Him, but the powers work through the old organs, and the life flows through the old channels; they would not be the same men, or preserve their individual responsibility if it were otherwise. God's grace works with men, it is true, but it uses the organization it finds; and as much cultivation and [pg 005] shaping of the disposition is required for turning God's Grace to account, as for making the most of any other good gift.
Christ's particular care to leave the disciples their proper independence is everywhere apparent. They come to Him of their deliberate will. They are not stricken by any over-mastering impression, or led captive by moving words. They are not forced to break with their old selves; their growth in steadfastness comes of a better knowledge of their Lord, and the more they advance in understanding God's ways and therefore in believing, the stronger are the grounds of assurance which are granted to them; the more they have, the more is given them; the most attached are granted most.
Christ, we find, draws out in His disciples the desired qualities of self-devotion and of healthy trust in God, without effacing the stamp of the individual nature of each man. He cherishes and respects personality. The leader of a sect or school of thought is often inclined to lose thought of the individual in his care for the society which he is establishing, or to expect his pupils to take his own opinions ready made, in a block. He is apt to be impatient if one of them attempts to think for himself. His aim very commonly is
“To make his own the mind of other men,”
and a pupil who asserts his own personality, and is not content with reflecting his master's, is not of the sort he wants.
But our Lord was a teacher of a very different kind. He reverenced whatever the learner had in him of his own, and was tender in fostering this native growth. He was glad when His words roused a man into thinking on his own account, even in the way of objection. When the Syro-phœnician woman turns His own saying against Him, with the rejoinder, “Yes Lord, yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs,” He applauds her Faith the more for the independent thought that went with it. Men, in His eyes, were not mere clay in the hands of the potter, matter to be moulded to shape. They were organic beings, each growing from within, with a life of his own—a personal life which was exceedingly precious in His and His Father's eyes—and He would foster this growth so that it might take after the highest type.
Neither did He mean that what He told men should only be stored in their memories as in a treasure-house, there to be kept intact. They were to “take heed how they heard.” With Christ, the part that the man had to do of himself went for infinitely more than what was done for him by another. If men had the will and the power to turn to their own moral nutriment the mental food which was given them, it would be well; but if His words merely lay in their memories, without affecting them or germinating within them, then they were only as seeds falling on sterile spots.
The training of the disciples was partly practical, turning on what they saw our Lord do and were set or suffered to do themselves, and partly it came from what they heard. I want the reader to go along with me in marking how this training of the Apostles was adapted to generate the qualities which the circumstances of their situation demanded when Christ left the world; and it is in the practical part of the work that this is most readily traced.
The selection of the Apostles may serve as an instance of what I mean. They were to preach a gospel to the poor—the movement was to spread upward from below. This will be found to be the law of growth of great moral principles which have established their sway among mankind. The Apostles therefore were chosen from a class which, though not the poorest, had sympathies with the poor. Again the Apostles were to be witnesses of the resurrection to after times; it was important, therefore, that they should possess qualities which would make men trust them; had they been imaginative, had they been enthusiasts, this would have been a bar to the accepting of their evidence; but the Apostles were singularly literal-minded men, so little suspecting a metaphorical meaning in their Master's sayings, that when He told them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, they thought it meant that, having no bread with them, they would be constrained to eat some not made in [pg 008] the proper way. We see no exaggeration in them, no wild fervour, nothing that belongs to the religious fanatic. Our Lord never employs the force that such fanaticism affords; when He meets with what seems the result of emotion, as when the woman breaks out with “Blessed is the womb that bare thee,” He always brings back to mind that doing is more than feeling.
We shall have to note, moreover, the progressive way in which our Lord taught His followers self-reliance and faith, and the tender care with which He lets His hold of them go by degrees. Wandering along with our Lord, they grow into a capacity for marking greatness, and trusting themselves to a superior nature. When they are sent, two and two, through the cities of Israel, they learn to use responsibility, and to feel that His power could still protect them even when He was not by. They lacked nothing then, for Christ provided for them; but the time should come when they would complete their training and have real work to do, and then they would have to employ all gifts which had fallen to them. For the real conflict, both the purse and the sword are to be taken; prudence and judgment and courage must be brought into play in doing God's work as they are in doing that of every day life.