Jesus trusted more to personal love, in forming his church, than to any other force. The power of love in developing the intellect and exciting the faculties is marked, even on the inferior animals. The dog is changed by tender treatment and affectionate care; he becomes half human, and seems to struggle to rise out of the brute nature toward a beloved master. Rude human natures are correspondingly changed, and he who has great power of loving and exciting love may almost create anew whom he will.
Jesus, that guest from brighter worlds, brought to this earth the nobler ideas of love, the tenderness, the truth, the magnanimity, that are infinite in the All-Loving. What of God could be expressed and understood by man He was, and St. John says of his ethereal gentleness and sweetness of nature: "The light shined in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not."
The varieties of natural character in this family of Jesus were such as to give most of the usual differences of human beings. The Master's object was to unite them to each other by such a love that they should move by a single impulse, as one human being, and that what was lacking in one might be made up by what was abundant in another. As He expressed it in his last prayer: "That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me."
How diverse were the elements! Simon Peter, self-confident, enthusiastic, prompt to speak and to decide. Thomas, slow and easily disheartened; always deficient in hope, and inclined to look upon the dark side, yet constant unto death in his affections. James and John, young men of the better class, belonging to a rich family, on terms of intimate acquaintance with the High Priest. Of these brothers, John is the idealist and the poet of the little band, but far from being the weak and effeminate character painters and poets have generally conceived. James and John were surnamed Boanerges--"sons of thunder." They were the ones who wanted to call down fire on the village that refused to receive their Lord. It was they who joined in the petition preferred by their mother for the seat of honor in the future kingdom. Young, ardent, impetuous, full of fire and of that susceptibility to ambition which belongs to high-strung and vivid organizations, their ardor was like a flame, that might scorch and burn as well as vivify. Then there was Matthew, the prosaic, the exact matter-of-fact man, whose call it was to write what critics have called the _bodily gospel_ of our Lord's life, as it was that of John to present the inner heart of Jesus. These few salient instances show the strong and marked diversities of temperament and character which Jesus proposed to unite into one whole, by an intense personal love which should melt down all angles, and soften asperities, and weld and blend the most discordant elements. It is the more remarkable that he undertook this task with men in mature life, and who had already been settled in several callings, and felt the strain of all those causes which excite the individual self-love of man.