The thoughts of His followers were clinging to the last to the dream of earthly sovereignty. How difficult it is to get even the renewed and regenerated mind to understand and realise Heavenly things, and to wean it from what is of the earth earthy! He checks their presumption--He tells them these are questions which they may not pry into. There is to be no present fulfilment of these visions of millennial glory. That day and that hour are to be wrapt in unrevealed and impenetrable secrecy. The Church may not attempt rashly and inquisitively to lift the veil. She is not to know the _time_ of the Saviour's appearing, that she may live every day in the frame she would wish to be found in when the cry shall be heard, "Behold the Bridegroom cometh." The apostolic band are, in the first instance, to be cross-bearers, as He their Master was,--witnesses to His sufferings, earthen vessels, defamed, persecuted, reviled,--before they become partakers of His purchased happiness and bliss! Nevertheless, it was a grand and glorious mission He sketched out for them. How worthy of HIMSELF--of his loving, forgiving, unselfish Spirit--was the opening clause in that wondrous Missionary Charter He then put into their hands. Even at the moment when all the memory of Jewish ingratitude was fresh on His heart, He inserts a wondrous provision of mercy and grace. They were to proclaim His name through the wide world; but was JERUSALEM (the scene of His ignominy) to form an exception? Nay, rather they were to _begin there_! The Gospel-Trumpet was to be sounded in its streets. The assassins of Gethsemane, the murderers of Calvary were to listen to the first offers of pardon and reconciliation--"And He said unto them ... that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, _beginning_ at _Jerusalem_!" Precious warrant, surely, are these words to "the chief of sinners" to repair to this gracious Saviour. If even for "_the Jerusalem sinner_" there is mercy, can there be ground for one human being to despair?