Christ’s intimations of the future wear the appearance of being given, less to communicate fore-knowledge than that when the event came to pass the hearers might feel that Christ had “told them before:”(309) if He had thought good He would have made the lessons plainer. It may have helped to sustain the Apostles during the terrible hours when their Master lay in the grave, to turn to these words of forecast and from them to gather that all was being carried forward towards a purpose preordained of God. It is true that our Lord had told the Apostles again and again what the end was to be, but they could not believe that He would permit His enemies to prevail, and our Lord hardly seems to expect that they would take His words as literal truth. If, during the last days, they had really believed that He was about to perish on the cross, they would have been paralysed with anguish and dismay, and the last lessons would have fallen on the ears of men who were prostrated and stunned. That our Lord’s action was suited to what did actually happen, and not to what was likely to happen after the judgment of men, appears also in another way. The Apostles, both in themselves and in virtue of their training, were exactly adapted to the part which came into their hands, but they were by no means of the sort which the leader either of a political or a religious movement would have picked out to carry it forward when He should die. They were not men to fascinate crowds and lead them whither they would, they were not men to discover that aspect of a dogma which should commend itself to the understandings of their hearers. They had no skill in policy, no experience in government or in organising bodies of men; their strength lay not in their talent but their truth. If they had possessed brilliant capacity, and all or any of the qualities named above, the danger of disunion or of there being as many different followings as there were Apostles (see 1 Cor. i. 12) would have been thereby increased. We read in History or Philosophy of great men who have left empires or systems for their chosen successors to maintain. Did such successors keep free from dissension and disruption in the way that those did whom Jesus chose and trained? Did any such body answer its purpose as the Apostles did?