The inference from these passages would be the same which meditation on the whole subject would suggest, that in the great forty days between His Resurrection and Ascension our Lord instructed His Apostles perfectly in all which they needed to know concerning the kingdom of God for the execution of their office as God's ministers for its propagation. Under this head would fall the number and nature of the sacraments, their ritual—in short, the government of the Church as a spiritual society. Of the details which regarded these subjects, nothing was made known in the writings, of which even the first in time, the Gospel of St. Matthew, began to be published many years after the Church had been carried on in its appointed order. The simple statement of such a fact is enough to show that for the Christians themselves such details were not needed to be expressed in a writing which might fall into other than Christian hands; while to lay them open to the heathen empire, in the midst of which the Church was rising, would have constituted a gratuitous danger, and would have contradicted what we know to have been the discipline of discretion long practised during the era of persecution. It was precisely the polity of the Church at which the Roman State would take umbrage. Thus the powers which are requisite for establishing and perpetuating this polity were recorded as having been conveyed to the Apostles under general heads. The language used for this purpose has a terseness, a concentration, a sublimity which betokens the voice of a Sovereign, the fiat of a Legislator. It befits the Person of the Word in the construction of His divine work. It harmonises admirably with those eight words upon the Mount which sustain and reveal a whole fabric of divine philosophy and Christian life.