o forward His purposes, shall we show no sympathy, address
no word to Him, and pretend not to hear when He speaks to us? To drag
ourselves along murmuring, doubting, making difficulties, a mere dead
weight on our Leader, this is not to follow as He desires to be
followed. To take our own way in the main, and only appear here and
there on the road He has taken; to be always trying to combine the
pursuit of our own private ends with the pursuance of His ends, is not
to follow. Had we seen these men asking leave of absence two or three
times a month to go and look after the fishing, even though they
promised to overtake their Master somewhere on the road, we should
scarcely have recognised them as His followers. Had we found them, on
reaching a village at night, leaving Him, and preferring to spend their
leisure with His enemies, we should have been inclined to ask an
explanation of conduct so inconsistent. Yet is not our own following
very much of this kind? Is there not too little of the following that
says, "What is enough for the Lord is enough for me; His aims are enough
for me"? Is there not too little of the following that springs from a
frank and genuine dealing with the Lord from day to day, and from a
conscientious desire to meet His will with us, and satisfy His idea of
how we should follow Him? May we each have the peace and joy of the man
who, when this question, "Will ye also go away?" comes to him, quickly
and from the heart responds, "I will never forsake Thee."

FOOTNOTES:

[26] "Those who turn their backs on the Eternal Son must understand,
then, that they are on their way to a creed which denies an Eternal
Father, and puts in His place an unconscious impersonal soul of nature,
a dead central force, of which all the forces in the universe are
manifestations; or an unknown, unknowable cause, remaining to be
postulated after the series of physical causes has been traced as far
back as science can go; and which robs mortal man of the hope that the
seed sown in the churchyard shall one day be reaped in the harvest of
the resurrection.... Your so-called Christianity independent of dogmas
is but the evening twilight of faith, the light which lingers in the
spiritual atmosphere after the sun of truth has gone down."--Dr. Bruce,
_Training of the Twelve_, p. 154, a book to which I am greatly indebted
here and elsewhere.

[27] Mark i. 24.

XVI.

_JESUS DISCUSSED IN JERUSALEM._

"And after thes