The training of the Apostles fitted them admirably, as has been said above, for witnesses who should carry credit with the world; it brought them, by the road of personal devotion to a visible Master, unto Faith in an unseen God; it endowed them with wonderful endurance, it taught them the patience whereby they might “win their souls;”(310) it educated their intuitions to discern God’s ways and recognise God’s whisper in the voice which spake at their hearts. But they were destitute of eloquence and of many of the gifts with which the founder of a sect would have been careful to see that those were furnished who were to take His place; and this omission only becomes intelligible when we find that the deficiencies are supplied by Christ’s presence with them, and by the Spirit from on high. What was most important of all was, that no act or word of Christ’s should seem to shut out from their share in Him any section of mankind. Agreeably with this, He never proclaims Himself the Jewish Messiah. No Greek or Roman would have listened for a moment to one who declared Himself the especial prophet of the Jews. Though of the “house and family of David,”(311) He will accept no advantage on this score. He repudiates for the Redeemer of the world the title of “Son of David,”(312) which from its nature was based on legitimacy and must rest on the veracity of genealogical rolls. The Apostles were to divine the nature of His Personality by long and close intercourse(313) with Him, more than by canvassing claims or interpreting texts. When His disciples ask to be taught to pray, “as John also taught his disciples,”(314) He gives them a prayer very unlike what John would have given, for it contains not a word of that petition for blessing upon Israel, which, in any prayer that an Israelite offered, contained, to his mind, the gist of the whole. This prayer too was offered, not to the “Lord God of Israel” or the “God of their Fathers,”—as Jewish prayers(315) were; there was not a word in it, echoing their boast that God was peculiarly their own—but every human being is emboldened by it to turn to God as his Father in Heaven. In all this, however, our Lord never loosens the bonds of Israelite life. He proceeds always in a positive and not a negative way; without removing the Kingdom of Israel from view, He lets it dissolve, as it were, into the Kingdom of God.