And when Christ leaves the world, the disciples are not for long exposed to the revulsion which the crucifixion would cause. They are not suffered to feel their Master’s loss and miss Him all at once. They are not left to suppose that He had altogether gone, that His cause had failed and all was over; so that they had better wake from their delusion and go back, with blighted hope and faith, to Galilee and their boats and nets. Soon comfort came. The work for which they had been trained was still to go on, only not in the way they had expected. Their following Christ was not to be a mere episode in their lives: they had not been wrong in thinking that they should serve Him all their days. Christ is near them still, and they see Him now and again. For forty days or more they felt that He was in their neighbourhood, and might at any time appear; any stranger who accosted them might turn out to be He. Thus they are carried through the time when the effects of shock on their mind and moral nature was most to be feared, and they are brought one step nearer to the power of realising that Christ is with them. After the Ascension, He is withdrawn from the eye of sense altogether, His presence will henceforth be purely spiritual, but no sooner do they lose sight of Him in the body than the Comforter comes to their souls. So long as men walked by the guidance of one whom they saw by their side, they would not throw themselves on unseen spiritual aid. The Comforter would not come unless the Lord went away, but as soon as He was gone the comfort came. I now come to the oral teaching. Here we note the same fitness of the means to the end, but the purpose in view is a more abstract one: a quality very essential for Christ’s purpose is _expansiveness_. The truths which He revealed and the commandments He gave were to be accepted by different nations, and in various states of society: they belonged therefore to what is primary in the nature of man. It is in this that Christ’s doctrine differs from all systems. It does not belong to one age or one nationality but to all. Whether this character of Universality was due to prospective wisdom or to chance, I do not now discuss; I only say that the substance of Christ’s teaching is suitable for men in different conditions; that the form in which it is put makes this teaching easy for the ignorant to retain; and that the circumstances which accompanied it were singularly conducive to its spread. Christ arose amongst a nation which was the most strikingly individualised of all peoples, but He transmitted the type of Humanity in its most general form. We mark in Him no trace of one race or of one epoch; He was emphatically the Son of Man.