brothers, in whose hearts the mighty conviction of His Messiahship had
taken root. Simon and Andrew were at home in Capernaum; but we may,
perhaps, infer from the manner in which the sickness of Peter's wife's
mother is mentioned, that Peter had not been to his house till after
the synagogue service. At all events, these four were already detached
from ordinary life and bound to Him as disciples. We meet here with
our first instance of Mark's favourite 'straightway,' the recurrence
of which, in this chapter, so powerfully helps the impression of eager
and yet careful swiftness with which Christ ran His course,
'unhasting, unresting.' From the beginning Mark stamps his story with
the spirit of our Lord's own words, 'I must work the works of Him that
sent me, while it is day: the night cometh.' And yet there is no
hurry, but the calm, equable rapidity with which planets move. The
unostentatious manner of Christ's beginning is noteworthy. He seeks to
set Himself in the line of the ordinary teaching of the day. He knew
all the faults of the synagogue and the rabbis, and He had come to
revolutionise the very conception of religious teaching and worship;
but He prefers to intertwine the new with the old, and to make as
little disturbance as possible. It is easy to get the cheap praise of
'originality' by brushing aside existing methods. It is harder and
nobler to use whatever methods may be going, and to breathe new value
and life into them. Drowsy, hair-splitting disputations about nothings
and endless casuistry were the staple of the synagogue talk; but when
He opened His mouth there, the weary formalism went out of the
service, and men's hearts glowed again when they once more heard a
Voice that lived, speaking from a Soul that saw the invisible. Mark
has no mission to record many of our Lord's sayings. His Gospel deals
more with deeds. The sermon he does not give, but the hearer's comment
he does. Matthew has the same words at the close of the Sermon on the
Mount, from which it would seem that they were part of the oral