e cost" (Luke 14:28)--know what they are
doing, be rid of delusions before they follow him (Mark 8:34). What
did they expect? They had all sorts of dreams of the future. When we
first find them, there is friction among them, which is not
unnatural in a group of men with ambitions (Mark 9:33. 10:37). Even
at the Last Supper their minds run on thrones (Luke 22:24). They are
haunted by taboos. Peter long after boasts that nothing common or
unclean has entered his lips (Acts 10:14). They fail to understand
him. "Are ye also without understanding?" he asks, not without
surprise (Mark 8:17, 21). At the very end they run away.

There, then, is the group. What is to be the method? There is not
much method. As Harnack says about the spread of the early Church,
"A living faith needs no special methods"--a sentence worth
remembering. "Infinite love in ordinary intercourse" is another
phrase of Harnack in describing the life of the early Church. It
began with Jesus. He chose twelve, says Mark (3:14), "that they may
be with him." That is all. And they are with him under all sorts of
circumstances. "The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head" (Luke
9:58). They saw him in privation, fatigued, exhausted. With every
chance to see weaknesses in his character, they did not find much
amiss with him. That is surely significant. They lived with him all
the time, in a genuine human friendship, a real and progressive
intimacy. They were with him in popularity and in unpopularity; they
were with him in danger, when Herod tried to kill him and he went
out of Herod's territory. But friendship depends not only on great
moments; it means companionship in the trivial, too, it means idle
hours together, partnership in commonplace things--meals and
garden--chairs as well as books and crises. Ordinary life, ordinary
talk, gossip, chat, every kind of conversation about Herods and
Roman governors, and the Zealots--custom-house memories, tales of
the fishermen's life on the lake, stories of neighbours and
home--rumours about the Galileans who were murdered by Pilate (Luke
13:1-4)--all the babbling talk of the bazaar is round Jesus and his
group, and some of it breaks in on them; and his attitude to it all
is to these men a constant revelation of character. They are with
him in the play of feelings, with him in the fluxes and refluxes of
his thought--learning his ways of mind without realizing it. They
slip into his mind and mood, by a series of surpri