To understand how wisely things were ordered, we must give a glance to what would have been the result of the most obvious and apparently “the most natural” course. Our Lord’s brethren recommended that He should go and show Himself and teach at Jerusalem. I have shown the ill effects this would have had on the training of the disciples; I will now say a word on the way in which it would have affected the Church. If Jerusalem had been the seat of teaching, the disciples there, instead of numbering “a hundred and twenty,” would have been a large body. Possibly they might have offered armed resistance to the apprehension of our Lord; and the whole moral of the action would have been lost if they had. But passing this by, if a large body of disciples dwelling at Jerusalem had claimed our Lord as peculiarly their own, the universality of His work would have been obscured. The Church at Jerusalem might have dwelt more on His being their particular Founder and Bishop than on His being the Redeemer of the World. Again, How would it have been with the authority of the Twelve? Those who had sat at His feet and listened, just as the Apostles had done, might have hesitated when He was gone to acknowledge the Twelve as the _founders_ of the Church; for the Church, they would have said, began with themselves. More than this, practical evils would have come about; for these original disciples, regarding themselves as the depositaries of tradition, would have recalled every practice of their Lord,—for instance the way in which He had given thanks at meat, or ordered service in prayer, as well as His practice as to the Sabbath and fasting,—these would have been passed down as Divinely sanctioned, and the externals of religion would have been stereotyped as thoroughly as though they had been a new Ceremonial Law, like that from which He desired to release mankind. Moreover the body of believers who had personally known our Lord, would have constituted a kind of ecclesiastical aristocracy; and distinctions—respect of persons—would have been introduced from the first. What actually happened was far more consistent with the general tenour of Christ’s plan so far as we can make it out. The few original disciples at Jerusalem were lost in the crowd who were added to the Church after the day of Pentecost, and the Apostles ruled with unquestioned authority from the first.