We can discern two kinds of good wrought by our Lord. In preaching to the multitude he was, then and there, bringing God’s light into the souls of men. In choosing and fashioning the disciples, He was providing for the future of His Church. The work which the Apostles should set on foot would spread over the earth and affect all future times, while our Lord could Himself touch but a single generation in a single spot. Those, however, who heard Him, carried to their homes a memory to last their lives; among them His Personality survived. If, afterwards, troubled questions arose about Him they would put them by, feeling that they had drunk at the source before the stream had got sullied on its way. When our Lord came into villages where He was known, people crowded to him from all sides, and the new delight of communion with God—the assurance that the whisper which told them that God cared for them was a true voice—beamed from the hearers’ faces and gladdened the Master’s soul. It was during this active ministry of our Lord, that the choice of the Apostles was made and the foundations of their education were laid. The differences in their minds and characters would be brought into prominence by the greater intensity of the lives they afterwards led; new capacities would peep out among those who, beholding the intense earnestness of our Lord, learned to be in earnest themselves. No defined line was as yet drawn between the multitude and the disciples. Those who were of the multitude one day, and chose to follow, might count as disciples on the morrow. Our Lord never wholly loses sight either of the multitude or of the disciples; but, while the former were His first care in the period embraced in this chapter, the disciples, and especially the apostles, will be so in that which will come before us in the next.(153) CHAPTER VIII. THE CHOOSING OF THE APOSTLES. In treating of the calling of the Apostles, we encounter the questions, “What led our Lord to surround Himself with a constituted body of this kind?” and, “In virtue of what qualities were its members chosen?” I am led to conclude that our Lord presaged that which actually came about, and provided for future needs which he foresaw; so precisely do the measures he takes meet what subsequent occasions required. The choice of the agents, moreover, is singularly happy with respect to the extraordinary part which was put into their hands; and it must be noted that this part was one which Jesus alone, and, if He had only been what some of His biographers represent, not even He could have contemplated: while for the parts, which, from the obvious prospects of the case it was likely they would have to play, they were not calculated at all. The apostles were not suited to advance a social or a political cause or to spread doctrinal views; but they were specially fitted, as I shall shew, to gain credence for facts which they could declare had passed before their eyes.