In strict consistency with this language, He goes on: '_Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and have ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain; that whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, He may give it you.'_ All sectarianism, all self-seeking and self-willed religion, is based upon the idea, 'We have chosen Him. By an act of faith, or an act of love, we have entered into a relation with Him, which but for that act would not be.' And the whole Gospel turns upon the opposite maxim to this: '_I have chosen you_.' 'You are merely obeying a call. You are merely confessing a relation, with the making of which you had nothing to do.' Even when this doctrine of election has taken a narrow form,--even when it has been recognised chiefly as exclusive,--it has had a mighty power over the hearts of men. They have given themselves up, as they never could do when they thought they had selected their own Master, or were going upon errands of their own. But when it takes the form which it has here; when Christ, who has loved them to the death, commands them to love others as He has loved; when He tells them that He has placed them in their different circumstances that they may go and bring forth fruit,--that fruit being the men whom they shall persuade that they too belong to a race for which Christ has died, and which the Father loves;--there cannot be any principle which is at once so humbling and so elevating, which so takes away all notion from the disciple that there is any worth in his own deeds or words, which gives him so confident an assurance that God's word, spoken through him or through any man, will not return to Him void. And that, if I am not mistaken, is the reason why the promise, that whatever is asked of the Father in Christ's name shall be granted, is again introduced here with the variation, '_He may give it_,' instead of 'I will do it.' A man who feels that he is called to a work, does not therefore feel power to accomplish it. He may feel--as Moses did, and as Jeremiah did--an increased feebleness, an utter childishness; but he understands that he may ask the Father, whose will he is called to do, that that will may be done; so he wins a strength which is and is not his own.