The social position of the Apostles was advantageous for the promulgating of a Faith which was to become universal. They belonged to the stratum in which the Centre of Gravity of Humanity lay. The small land owners and handicraftsmen in Galilee were in contact with people in different stations of life; they could talk with the rich and they could feel with the poor; they were on the border land between the learned and the ignorant, and had just enough knowledge to be able to get more when they wanted it. There was one truth, essential and vital to a Faith which was to exalt and dignify all mankind, which in the class from which the Apostles came was found growing with especial vigour as on its native soil. This truth was the surpassing value of a man as man,—the sanctity which clothes a human being who is made in the image of God. The sense of this truth is much keener among the poor than among the rich; it is the poor who are most scandalised if a human being is treated like a brute. The rich have wealth, dignities and the like, on which their thoughts rest with satisfaction. But when the poor man takes account of his condition he finds but one item on the credit side, and he makes the most of it: it is that “He too is a Man.” The upper class in Palestine had little mind for anything wider than a philosophical or political sect, and they treated the poor as if they had no souls. Christianity therefore could not have made its cradle with them, and the lowest class had little intelligence and no power of combination and would have been at once trodden under foot. Unless the Church had taken root in the lower middle class, it could hardly have spread as it did. That its earliest promulgators belonged to this class I will not suppose to have been a matter of mere chance. To proceed with the course of events. Our Lord having called to Him “whom He Himself would” and chosen the twelve, assigns to them their name. They are “Apostles,” men sent forth to preach. But it was not till the risen Christ appeared to the eleven in that upper chamber and said, “Peace be unto you; as my Father hath sent me even so send I you,” that they saw all that was meant by this name; viz. that Christ was the Apostle of His Father and that they were the Apostles of Christ. Our Lord on coming down with the Twelve from the mountain found a great gathering of people waiting for Him on a spot of level ground. St Luke’s account is this. “And he came down with them, and stood on a level place, and a great multitude of his disciples, and a great number of the people from all Judæa and Jerusalem, and the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon, which came to hear him, and to be healed of their diseases; and they that were troubled with unclean spirits were healed. And all the multitude sought to touch him: for power came forth from him, and healed them all.”(172)