Our Lord, then, will have, among His immediate followers, minds of every sort. He does not pick out those only who are most after His own heart, nor does he mould men into one fashion, so that they should think on all points alike. We cannot have freedom among human beings without diversity. St Matthew, we perhaps say, had old world views; but it may have been just because of these, that he was the most fit Apostle for the Eastern world. There would be crowds of men whom he would understand and who would understand him, but whose minds would have been closed to the utterances of Paul. The vineyard to which Christ called his labourers was the whole world; it contained vines of every stock growing on every soil. It was well then, that there should be labourers bred in various schools of husbandry, and that each should work in the fashion in which he felt he could do it best. Another point to be noted about the call of St Matthew is this: The choice of a publican was a practical proof to the other disciples, as it is to the Church for ever, that Christ is in no way a respecter of persons. The two pairs of brethren who followed our Lord may have been startled at the call of Matthew, for they no doubt looked on publicans as their countrymen did; and this act of our Lord’s taught them, more forcibly than any words could have done, that with Him outward circumstance went for nothing and the inward man was all in all. In this call of Matthew the spirit of universality which belongs to the Christian Church is folded up like the embryo in the seed. Our Lord makes no comment on this call; nor do we hear of any murmurs from the disciples, who had by this time learned that our Lord was wiser than they, as Peter had found when he let down the net. Shortly before the call of St Matthew a miracle occurred, the cure of the sick of the palsy, when our Lord’s renown was at its height—a miracle at the performance of which “there were Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by, which were come out of every village of Galilee and Judæa and Jerusalem.”(150) The presence of these strangers bears on what follows. Hitherto we have read of no contest or conflict in Capernaum; but these Pharisees conceived misgivings about the movement they had come to see. This hostility was very different from that of the Sadducees in Jerusalem, who, regarding the movement as an insane delusion likely to bring things about their ears, set themselves remorselessly to root it out. But the Pharisees do not seem at first to have borne our Lord any personal hatred, but only to have been uneasy about the new teaching which went too far for them, and did not follow the course which they had expected.