Christ’s particular care to leave the disciples their proper independence is everywhere apparent. They come to Him of their deliberate will. They are not stricken by any over-mastering impression, or led captive by moving words. They are not forced to break with their old selves; their growth in steadfastness comes of a better knowledge of their Lord, and the more they advance in understanding God’s ways and therefore in believing, the stronger are the grounds of assurance which are granted to them; the more they have, the more is given them; the most attached are granted most. Christ, we find, draws out in His disciples the desired qualities of self-devotion and of healthy trust in God, without effacing the stamp of the individual nature of each man. He cherishes and respects personality. The leader of a sect or school of thought is often inclined to lose thought of the individual in his care for the society which he is establishing, or to expect his pupils to take his own opinions ready made, in a block. He is apt to be impatient if one of them attempts to think for himself. His aim very commonly is “To make his own the mind of other men,” and a pupil who asserts his own personality, and is not content with reflecting his master’s, is not of the sort he wants. But our Lord was a teacher of a very different kind. He reverenced whatever the learner had in him of his own, and was tender in fostering this native growth. He was glad when His words roused a man into thinking on his own account, even in the way of objection. When the Syro-phœnician woman turns His own saying against Him, with the rejoinder, “Yes Lord, yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs,” He applauds her Faith the more for the independent thought that went with it. Men, in His eyes, were not mere clay in the hands of the potter, matter to be moulded to shape. They were organic beings, each growing from within, with a life of his own—a personal life which was exceedingly precious in His and His Father’s eyes—and He would foster this growth so that it might take after the highest type. Neither did He mean that what He told men should only be stored in their memories as in a treasure-house, there to be kept intact. They were to “take heed _how_ they heard.” With Christ, the part that the man had to do of himself went for infinitely more than what was done for him by another. If men had the will and the power to turn to their own moral nutriment the mental food which was given them, it would be well; but if His words merely lay in their memories, without affecting them or germinating within them, then they were only as seeds falling on sterile spots.