It is a feature of our Lord’s way in His course of teaching, not to suffer one set of ideas or influences to be disturbed before they have had time to take root. After a period of stress, or when new impressions had been stamped on the minds of his disciples, He provides for them an interval of calm. When the disciples return exulting from their mission through the cities, He says, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while.” When crowds thronged them and courted them for access to their Master, He carried them away, that the impressions He wanted to preserve might not be effaced in the turmoil. It may have been in pursuance of this treatment that, after the resurrection, they were sent for a time into Galilee, there to wait and to watch. All teachers know that the time of rest that follows a period in which new matter has been taken into the mind is precious for good mental growth: conceptions then become more clear and complete, and effect a sure lodgement in the mind: but this, like many processes in education, helps to widen the distance between the weak and the strong. For it is only with the more thoughtful that this half unconscious brain-process goes on; the active minded mature their acquirements during rest, while the unthinking let them fade away. It argued well, in consequence, for Peter and Andrew and John, that Christ’s influence had lost nothing through (as I believe) weeks of separation, but that as soon as they were called they sprang to their feet at once,—“they straightway left the nets and followed Him.”(138) Reverence for great men whom we have known, and the power of appreciating them, grow during absence. We may have been living so familiarly with one far above the common standard, that we may almost lose thought of his greatness; the little matters of common life, which come before us everyday, take more than their share of notice; and, as regards these, great men and smaller ones must be much alike. But when we are away from our guide, our recollections turn to what is distinctive of him—to the points in which he contrasts with everyday men: what he had in common with such disappears, and our mental portrait preserves what is characteristic, and gives us the individual more forcibly than our nearer view had done. We often first become aware of the true proportions of greatness, when we look back on it from a little way off. Out of a range of mountains, all, when seen from the valley, appearing much of a height, one is found to vastly out-top the rest when we mount the opposite hill-side.