And yet no one has been able to dispense with these pupils and followers, nor even to wish to. For the great man is so foreign to the multitude, so distant, so alone, that he needs to feel some one near him. He cannot teach without the illusion that some one understands his words, receives his ideas, transmits them to others far away before his death and after his death. This wanderer who has no home of his own needs a friendly hearth. To this uprooted man who cannot have a family of his own flesh and blood, the children of his spirit are dear. The prophet is a captain whose soldiers spring up only after his blood has soaked into the ground, and yet he longs to feel a little army about him during his life-time. Here is one of the most tragic elements in all greatness: disciples are repugnant and dangerous, but disciples, even false ones, cannot be dispensed with. Prophets suffer if they do not find them; they suffer, perhaps more, when they have found them. A man’s thought is bound with a thousand threads to his soul even more closely than a child to a parent’s heart. It is infinitely precious, delicate, fragile, and the newer it is, the harder it is for other men to understand. It is a tremendous responsibility, a continued torture and suffering to confide it to another, to graft it on another’s thought, to give it into the hands of the man incapable of respecting it, this gift so rare, a thought new in human life. And yet every great man longs to share with all men what he has received; and to achieve this sharing with humanity is more than he can do single-handed. Then, too, vanity insinuates itself even in noble breasts: and vanity needs caressing words, needs praise, even offensive praise, needs assent, even verbal, consecration even from the mediocre, victories even if they are only apparent. Christ has none of this smallness of the great, and yet in order to share all the burdens of mankind, He accepted with the other trials of earthly life the burden of disciples. Before being tormented by His enemies, He gave himself over to be tormented by His friends. The priests killed him, once and once only; the disciples made Him suffer every day of their life with Him. The anguish of His passion would not have been completely intolerable if it had not included the desertion of the Apostles in addition to the Sadducees, the guards, the Romans, the crowd.