Organisation and graduation of authority grew up in the Church, not after any plan settled and declared, but as the need of it arose. It agreed in this respect with the history of those human institutions that have proved the most enduring. In this, as in all matters, our Lord, wherever it was possible, left His followers free; not but what, when these same followers turned to their Master and prayed for guidance, as in the election of Matthias, they found in their hearts an answer positive and plain. St Peter, in the earliest days of the Church, stands forth as the foremost personage; but this influence rests on personal qualities and not on any formal appointment. He, as I have said (pp. 248, 344), was the man of action, the person who in every juncture addressed himself at once to the question, “What is to be done?” It was Peter, who took immediate steps to fill up the vacancy which the apostacy of Judas had left. He was the speaker on the day of Pentecost, and he it was who in the case of Ananias sternly repressed falsehood unto God. But the impetuosity of Peter, and his disposition to give himself up completely to the impression of the moment, though it served well to carry forward a great movement at its outset, may have made him ill adapted for the ruler of an infant Church, in which discordant elements had to be welded into one; while the well-poised judgment of James the Just(341) and his practical sense fitted him particularly for this kind of rule. That this admirable selection, this putting of each in his right place, should have come about without dispute; and that those who had “borne the burden and heat of the day” should have admitted to equality—or something more—in outward dignity, one who was “of the eleventh hour,” bears out what I have said of the phenomenal subordination of self displayed by the Apostles. It shews that outward dignity and authority—that which I have taken to be the “false mammon” of the parable—was as nothing in their eyes compared to the true riches, the priceless feeling that their work great or small, as men might count it, was all done for God and all accepted by God. The Ascension. What was said of the Resurrection we may say of the Ascension too. The changes it brought about in the position and characters of those few “men of Galilee” who stood “gazing up into heaven,” seem small matters compared with the immensity of its import for the Human Race. But, that our Lord did not leave out of sight the effect on the Apostles of the change in their condition which His departure would cause, is clear from words spoken to the Twelve, which are preserved to us by St John, and on which there is something to say. “Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send him unto you.”(342)