Yes, unless there be some peculiarity in the purpose of the book,
which explains this cold-blooded, inartistic, and tantalising habit
of letting men leap upon the stage as if they had dropped from the
clouds, and vanish from it as abruptly as if they had fallen through
a trap-door.

Such a peculiarity there is. One of the three to whom we have
referred has explained it in the words with which he closes his
gospel, words which might stand for the motto of the whole book,
'These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Son of
God.' The true purpose is not to speak of men except in so far as
they 'bore witness to that light' and were illuminated for a moment
by contact with Him. From the beginning the true 'Hero' of the Bible
is God; its theme is His self-revelation culminating for evermore in
the Man Jesus. All other men interest the writers only as they are
subsidiary or antagonistic to that revelation. As long as that
breath blows through them they are music; else they are but common
reeds. Men are nothing except as instruments and organs of God. He
is all, and His whole fulness is in Jesus Christ. Christ is the sole
worker in the progress of His Church. That is the teaching of all
the New Testament. The thought is expressed in the deepest, simplest
form in His own unapproachable words, unfathomable as they are in
their depth of meaning, and inexhaustible in their power to
strengthen and to cheer: 'I am the vine, ye are the branches,
without Me ye can do nothing.' It shapes the whole treatment of the
history of the so-called 'Acts of the Apostles,' which by its very
first sentence proclaims itself to be the Acts of the ascended
Jesus, 'the former treatise' being declared to have had for its
subject 'all that Jesus _began_ to do and teach while on earth,
and this treatise being manifestly the continuance of the same