Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/190

 doctrine anything else than a mere completion or accompaniment to the law of Moses; nor did they imagine that they were ever to extend the blessings of the gospel to any who did not bow down to all the tedious rituals of the ancient covenant. The true power of their Lord's parting command, "Go and teach all nations," they had never felt; and even now, their great chief supposed that the change of heart and remission of sins, which he was commissioned to preach, were for none but the devout adherents of the Jewish faith. A new and signal call was needed, to bring the apostles to a full sense of their enlarged duties; and it is among the highest honors vouchsafed to Peter, that he was the person chosen to receive this new view of the boundless field now opened for the battles and triumphs of the cross. To him, as the head and representative of the whole band of the apostles, was now spread out, in all its moral vastness and its physical immensity, the coming dominion of that faith, whose little seed he was now cherishing, with but a humble hope; but whose stately trunk and giant branches were, from that small and low beginning, to stretch, in a mighty growth, over lands, and worlds, to him unknown. Thus far he had labored with a high and holy zeal, in a cause whose vastness he had never appreciated,—every moment building up, unwittingly, a name for himself, which should outlast all the glories of the ancient covenant; and securing for his Master a dominion which the religion of Moses could never have reached. He had never had an idea, that he with his companions was founding and spreading a new religion;—to purify the religion of the law and the prophets, and to rescue it from the confusion and pollutions of warring sectaries, was all that they had thought of; yet with this end in view, they had been securing the attainment of one so far above and beyond, that a full and sudden view of the consequences of their humble deeds, would have appalled them. But though the mighty plan had never been whispered nor dreamed of, on earth,—though it was too immense for its simple agents to endure its full revelation at once,—its certain accomplishment had been ordained in heaven, and its endless details were to be fully learned only in its triumphant progress through uncounted ages. But, limited as was the view which the apostles then had of the high destiny of the cause to which they had devoted themselves, it was yet greatly extended from the low-born notions with which they had first followed the steps of their Master. They now no longer entertained the