The Jewish notion of a Messiah, who would inaugurate a golden age of national glory and material enjoyment, was so engrained in the Israelite nature that only facts could drive it out. Our Lord never argues against it; if He beheld, in the course of coming events, a fact approaching, which would do more to dispel error than all the arguments in the world, this would explain His silence on these points. The awakening would not be without dangers. It is a perilous moment for a man, when the one dream, the one exalted hope, that has lifted him above selfish considerations is rudely dispelled; and God, whom he had thought to serve, seems to disregard him altogether. Then self and the world say, “We told you so; now give yourself to us? Our votaries will be found to have taken the right road after all.” Of all the temptations that assailed the Apostles this was perhaps the direst; but their loyalty to their Master, born of nearly two years’ daily fellowship, held fast. Even if He _were_ gone they could be true to His memory still, and that was something left. One lesson, which the Apostles could hardly help learning, would arise, in this way, out of the discomfiture of their hopes. They might ask themselves, on what this confident expectation of theirs, of a Messianic kingdom, rested by way of grounds. They would have to own that Christ had never spoken of it, but, indeed, had often given hints of what had really come to pass—hints which they had always quickly brushed aside. They had believed in this material Kingdom because everybody around them had done so. They had not formed any notion about it of their own selves; no movement of their own minds had gone towards forming the belief. They had imbibed it and that was all. Hence finding themselves deceived by trusting to a popular belief, there may have arisen in them a healthy mistrust of positiveness about the ways of God. Again, their disappointment might put them in a better direction for finding their way. “Some hope,” they might say, “assuredly Christ did hold out to us,” and the search after this hope might lead them to recollect that latterly they had heard little from Him of the Kingdom, and much of the future Life; He had told them that because He lived they should live also; and the conception of a Kingdom, not of this world, might arise in their minds, and take the place of that of the expected Supremacy of Israel, which was dissolving out of sight. Another effect of their affliction was that it drew them closer together. When a family, is orphaned by a heavy blow, what they first feel may be helplessness, but soon follows the feeling that they must cling together and be true to one another, and each in his degree supply the help that is lost. Soon the elder brothers, if there is good in them, learn what duty is, and this new responsibility draws capacity out. Now the Apostles stood in the position of elder brethren to all the family of Christ’s disciples.