Furthermore those who do not wish to change themselves, because they do not understand the news, or believe themselves already perfect, will attack the converters and accuse them before tribunals. Representatives of wealth and of the old law will be cruel to the poor who are teaching the new law to the poor. The rich are not willing to concede that their wealth is dangerous poverty; the scribes are not willing to admit that their learning is only deadly ignorance.... “They will scourge you in their synagogues.... But when they deliver you up, take no thought of how or what ye shall speak.” Jesus is sure that the poor fishermen, though they have never studied in the schools of eloquence, will find for themselves great words in their hour of accusation. One thought, when it is a great thought and profoundly fixed in the heart, engenders of itself all the derivatory and accessory thoughts, and with them perfect form in which to express them. The arid-hearted man who has nothing in himself, who has faith in nothing, who does not feel, burn, and suffer, though he may have studied long with the sophists of Athens and the rhetoricians of Rome, is incapable of improvising one of those powerful and illuminating answers which trouble the conscience of the hardest judges. They are to speak therefore without fear and without hiding anything of what has been taught them. “What I tell you in darkness that seek ye in light, and what ye hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops.” With these words Jesus does not ask his Disciples to be more daring than he has been. He has spoken in the darkness, that is obscurity; He has spoken to them, to His first faithful followers, but what He has said to them along deserted roads and in solitary rooms they are to repeat as He Himself has given them the example, on open squares of cities before crowds of people. He has whispered the truth into their ears, because the truth at first might alarm those not prepared for it, and because there were so few of the Disciples that there was no need to cry aloud. But this truth must be cried out now from the heights, in order that all may hear it, in order that there may be no one to say on that Day that he has not heard it. Men can kill the body of the man who spreads the truth abroad, but they cannot kill his soul; from the death of a single body thousands of new souls will be born into life. But not even your body will die, because there is One who protects it. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.” The birds of the air who do not sow, do not die of hunger; you who do not carry even a staff shall not die at the hands of your enemies.