The training of the disciples was partly practical, turning on what they saw our Lord do and were set or suffered to do themselves, and partly it came from what they heard. I want the reader to go along with me in marking how this training of the Apostles was adapted to generate the qualities which the circumstances of their situation demanded when Christ left the world; and it is in the practical part of the work that this is most readily traced. The selection of the Apostles may serve as an instance of what I mean. They were to preach a gospel to the poor—the movement was to spread upward from below. This will be found to be the law of growth of great moral principles which have established their sway among mankind. The Apostles therefore were chosen from a class which, though not the poorest, had sympathies with the poor. Again the Apostles were to be witnesses of the resurrection to after times; it was important, therefore, that they should possess qualities which would make men trust them; had they been imaginative, had they been enthusiasts, this would have been a bar to the accepting of their evidence; but the Apostles were singularly literal-minded men, so little suspecting a metaphorical meaning in their Master’s sayings, that when He told them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, they thought it meant that, having no bread with them, they would be constrained to eat some not made in the proper way. We see no exaggeration in them, no wild fervour, nothing that belongs to the religious fanatic. Our Lord never employs the force that such fanaticism affords; when He meets with what seems the result of emotion, as when the woman breaks out with “Blessed is the womb that bare thee,” He always brings back to mind that doing is more than feeling. We shall have to note, moreover, the progressive way in which our Lord taught His followers self-reliance and faith, and the tender care with which He lets His hold of them go by degrees. Wandering along with our Lord, they grow into a capacity for marking greatness, and trusting themselves to a superior nature. When they are sent, two and two, through the cities of Israel, they learn to use responsibility, and to feel that His power could still protect them even when He was not by. They lacked nothing then, for Christ provided for them; but the time should come when they would complete their training and have real work to do, and then they would have to employ all gifts which had fallen to them. For the real conflict, both the purse and the sword are to be taken; prudence and judgment and courage must be brought into play in doing God’s work as they are in doing that of every day life.