This was the little company gathered round our Blessed Lord—poor, uneducated men, more used to employing their hands than their minds, looking like the rest of the nation for a golden age of temporal prosperity, for the people of God to come with the Messiah. They lived with their Divine Master as His intimate friends. They took their simple meals with Him, they prayed and slept at His side. After Mary and Joseph none knew Him like the Twelve.
Because they were to help Him in the great work of saving souls which brought Him down from Heaven, and because He saw beneath their rough exterior grand qualities to be developed, He loved them dearly and trained them carefully and patiently. In character they were very different, but in their love of Him, and in the readiness with which they left all they had for His sake, they were alike. When they were chosen by Him they were dull and ignorant, unable to take in the sublime thoughts of their Divine Teacher. But little by little His instructions, His example, His gentle influence began to tell, and when the Holy Ghost came down upon them at Pentecost they were fit for the great work that lay before them—to preach the Gospel and to plant the Church.
