In order that the Apostles might become His witnesses, our Lord made use of three principal agencies : (a) His personality, {b) His miracles, and (c) His teaching.
{a) To be with. Jesus was in itself the best of all education and training. It was on this account that the Apostles were chosen to be with Him habitually. A complete knowledge of Him could be attained only in this way. For knowledge is acquired insensiljly not less than sensibly, and the Apostleslearnedmuch regarding Jesus when itnever struck them that they were doing so. Gradually His influence told on them. His ideals, motives, ends became clear to them. His manners, looks, tones, words, ways became their inspiration and guide. They felt what goodness, truth, duty were. Above all, they came to know God as the father. It would, however, be a serious error to hold that the Twelve from the first moment of their selection appreciated the true grandeur of the life of Jesus. On the contrary, that life must often have pre- sented to them a problem of no little difficulty. It was not the type of life which they had been accustomed to regard as specifically religious, still less as embodying religion in its perfection and integrity. It is probable that those of the Apostles who had been disciples of the Baptist were at first more impressed by his austere and solitary life than by the life of' Jesus, which was substantially that of ordinary men. He ate and drank as they did. He dressed like them. He moved freely among them. He never sought to protect Himself from the approach of men, but on the contrary in- vited them to draw near. Nothing in His bearing or speech betrayed that He regarded Himself as standing on a ditterent plane from other men, or that He expected them to treat Him as belonging to a ditferent order of existence. He was simple, genial, afl'able, accessible. His mode of life, too, viewed as religious, must have tilled them with surprise. He had no fixed hours or forms of prayer. His approach to the Father was the ex- pression of His habitual reverence, adoration, and trust, but it was not determined, much less fettered, by rule. He prayed as He was moved to pray.
Again, He departed from a usage which was one of the chief features of the piety of the time. He declined to fast. Not only had He no regular fast days. He neither fasted Himself nor did He inculcate the observance on them. Another respect in which He deviated widely from the religious practices of His time was His disregard of cere- monial ablutions. He paid no attention to the rules affecting ritual purity. There is no evidence that He violated the usages of His nation as to foods, but His attitude towards these showed that He attached no value to them. Even that rite which was fundamental and distinctive, the pledge of salvation because the assurance of being a member of the covenant, the rite of circtimcismi, was unnoticed in His teaching. In yet another and hardly less important respect our Lord's life was largely different from the accepted type of sanctity. The Sabbath, like circumcision, wa.s one of the peculiar glories of Judaism, and the teachers of our Lord's age and of preceding generations had framed a code of rules to protect it from desecration. These He trampled under foot. The endless regulations intended to stop the performance of any work whatever on that day He brushed aside as at variance with the true end of the Sabbath institution. He rejoiced in the Sabbath, esteeming it to be one of God's best gifts to man, but He was everywhere denounced as a Sabbath-breaker by those who regarded themselves as the interpreters of the law (Jn 5'*). Even in the matter of almsgiving He was not as the men who professed to be specially religious. He was beneficent in the highest degree, but He followed no systematic rules.
Hence it is plain that the tenor of our Lord's life must have formed a problem of no little com- plexity to the Twelve during the first stage-s of their apprenticeship. Was this life — so simple, so natural— a truly religious life ? Was the religious life bright, sunny, cheerful, full of hope and joy ? Was this life of simple trust in the Father and of obedience to His will in the fulfilment of the common duties of life— was this religion? Nor was the perplexity of the Apostles lessened by the classes with which our Lord preferred to associate. He addressed Himself to the sick, the poor, and the outcast. The solicitude of Jesus for the least necessitous of these classes was a difficulty to some of them, but their surprise rose to the height when they saw Him mix freely with those under a social ban.
Doubtless the eyes of the Apostles were opened gradually. They came to perceive, as we do to-day, that the life spent by their Master was the typical life of man. Its likeness to the common life of men is its glory. For by it the common life which all must live is transfigured and made the ideal life of men. Its freedom from rule is discerned to be the rea-son why it is capable of becoming the model of all lives without excep- tion. For that freedom teaches men that true religion creates its own forms, while its essence of ti-ust in God and devotion to His will remains unalterable. The sympathy which He exhibited for all classes was a revelation of the truth that He was the Saviour of the world.