But though Peter’s heart may have acquitted him of cowardly forsaking his Master,—though he knew that he would, if need were, have gone with him to prison and to death,—yet he felt that this denial was, in words—though only in words—a falling away from perfect loyalty; it made clear to him, as it may have been meant to do, the weakness of his character in the way of yielding to impulse, and awakened floods of self reproach. He went out and wept bitterly; but no trace appears afterwards of a loss of self respect, or of his feeling it possible that he could be in disgrace with his Master; in fact his part in his Master becomes all the greater, owing to his having needed that He should wash his feet. These two miracles of instruction then, the prediction of Peter’s denials and the withering of the fig tree, were an assurance to the disciples that our Lord still retained His superhuman power, and that whether He should drink of the cup or put it away, up to the last, rested entirely with Him. These powers of His could not be displayed to the people without hindrance to the accomplishment of that Baptism with which He “had to be baptised;” even the working of miracles of healing might so have moved the crowd that they would have risen in His defence.(330) The Apostles, however, were to be rendered sure that these powers remained what they had ever been and that they were, for them, in operation still; so that they might never doubt but that, amid all the apparent defeat, it was with the voluntary sufferer on the Cross that the real Victory—the moral Victory lay. CHAPTER XIII. THE LESSONS OF THE RESURRECTION. When contemplating the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ, we have little attention to spare for the subordinate personages in the scene. The effects of these manifestations, in working changes in the hearts and minds of the witnesses, are put out of sight by the brilliancy and intrinsic grandeur of the manifestations themselves, and by the momentous character of their direct consequences, universally affecting mankind. But the transformation in temper, in views, and in habits of mind which converted the Apostles of the Gospels into the Apostles of the Acts—a transformation to me otherwise inexplicable—was consummated and clenched by the hours of hard trial and bitter anguish of that Sabbath day, when there was nothing to be done but to mourn and to wonder; as well as by the burst of gladness when the Risen Lord appeared to the eleven. Throughout all the Post-Resurrection interval, during which the Apostles felt that He was close by and might at any time appear—indeed that any stranger accosting them might turn out to be He—the changes which had been wrought were taking lasting hold.