There must have been in this man “a soul of goodness” of rare efficacy in resisting influences to ill. His position must have offered temptation to exaction. This was corrupting, but the steady and persistent effect of feeling himself despised must have been more so even than this. He was hated not only as the tax-gatherer, but also as having accepted the service of the foreign oppressors of the land. However justly the publican might have striven to act, it would be taken for granted that he was endeavouring to fleece those who came into his hands; and a man soon becomes what people about him will have it that he is. Now and then, however, in all positions, we come across natures which run counter to the influences around them, or which by a happy chemistry decompose the evil and turn its elements to good. Everything in the publican’s calling fostered the love of gain; and to be able to save enough to give it up and live down ill report was his only hope. But Matthew breaks with his means of subsistence totally and at once. At one word of our Lord he throws all away without a moment’s thought, and joins the little band of followers which was being drawn into closer attendance on our Lord. This man surely had “salt in himself.” St Matthew has left us his Gospel. We learn from this which way his thoughts lean, and we see that he was not of that type of mind most commonly associated with the idea of the Apostle of a new creed. He was probably not very young and his views were formed and fixed: his national sympathy was intense. God was to him, first of all, the God of Israel, and he regarded our Lord as the Messiah, after the type which Jewish hopes and fancies had fashioned for themselves. In all that occurred he saw the reproduction of what was narrated in the old books; and the burden “Now this was done that the Scripture might be fulfilled” runs through all his writings. Here then, some might say, we have a man chosen as a witness and promulgator of a faith which is to be universal, yet this man’s sympathies flow only along one narrow channel, and he is wedded to old ways of reading the mind of God. He was however a guileless, God-fearing, high-hearted man; and it could not but strengthen the cause to have among the Apostles one who could enter into the minds of those who looked for the consolation of Israel in the old Hebrew way. The first function of the Apostles,—one on which I shall soon speak pretty fully—was that they were to bear _witness_ of Christ. This was set forth in that which, so to say, was their charter of incorporation. “Ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judæa and Samaria and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.”(149) Now the more varied the characters of the witnesses the stronger would be the case when they agreed.