“Ye have heard that it hath been said of old time ... but I say unto you.”  He commonly refused to give an explanation of what He had said, but demanded acceptance on His authority.  He brought discipleship to the test of hard sayings, and permitted the departure of those who could not accept them.  He cut across popular prejudices and took small account of the “modern mind” as expressed by the Sadducees.  He expected the same unhesitating submission from the Apostles whom He was training, though it was also a part of their training to be the future heralds of the Kingdom that they should have the “mysteries of the Kingdom” explained to them.  But from the time when Jesus began to preach, saying “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” He preached and taught with the same unhesitating note of certainty, and with the same demand for intellectual submission on the part of those who heard Him.

And that continues to the end.  During the Forty Days, the few sayings that have come to us have the same ring of authority, of dogmatic certainty.  The result was that when the Apostles went out to teach they were equipped with a body of truth which they presented to the world in the same unhesitating way.  Indeed, that is the only way in which the central truths of the Christian Faith can be presented.  They are not the conclusions of argument, which may be taken up and argued over again to the end of the world,—­they are the dicta of revelation.  We either know them to be true because they have been revealed, or we do not know them to be true at all.  They are mysteries, that is, truths beyond the possibility of human finding which have been made known to man by God Himself.  They are the appropriate data of religion and what distinguishes it from philosophy.  The presence of mystery in philosophy is annoying, and the aim is to get rid of it, but a religion without mystery is absurd.  Religion deals with the fundamental relations between God and man and the light it brings us must be a supernatural light.  Such a religion in its presentation naturally cut across the preconceptions of the traditionalists in Jerusalem to whom nothing new could be true, as across the preconceptions of the sophists of Athens, to whom nothing that was not new was interesting.

This dogmatic equipment was but one side, however, of the Apostolic training for their future work, a training to which the finishing touches, so to say, were put during the Forty Days.  The other side of the training was the impression upon them of the Personality of our Lord, the effect of their close association with Him.  This has an importance that dwarfs all other influences of the time; and we feel all through the Gospel that it was what our Lord himself counted upon in forming them for their mission.  In the beginning “He chose twelve to be with Him,” and their day by day association with Him was constantly changing their point of view and reforming their character.  It was not the teaching, the explanation of parables, or the sight of the miracles; it was the silent effect of a personality that was in contact with them constantly and was constantly presenting to them an ideal of life, an ideal of absolute submission to the will of the Father and of utter consecration to the, mission that had been committed to Him.