as it is, to come into operation, there must be a twofold trust.

The healer, the medium of healing, must have faith in the Name. Yes!
of course. In all regions the first requisite, the one indispensable
condition, of a successful propagandist, is enthusiastic confidence
in what he promulgates. 'That man will go far,' said a cynical
politician about one of his rivals; 'he believes every word he says.'
And that is the condition always of getting other people to believe
us. Faith is contagious; men catch from other people's tongues the
accent of conviction. If one wants to enforce any opinion upon
others, the first condition is that he shall be utterly self-
oblivious; and when he is manifestly saying, as the Apostles in this
context did, 'Do not fix your eyes on us, as though we were doing
anything,' then hearts will bow before him, as the trees of the wood
are bowed by the wind.

If that is true in all regions, it is eminently true in regard to
religion. For what we need there most is not to be instructed, but to
be impressed. Most of us have, lying dormant in the bedchamber and
infirmary of our brains, convictions which only need to be awakened
to revolutionise our lives. Now one of the most powerful ways of
waking them is contact with any man in whom they are awake. So all
successful teachers and messengers of Jesus Christ have had this
characteristic in common, however unlike each other they have been.
The divergences of temperament, of moods, of point of view, of method
of working which prevailed even in the little group of Apostles, and
broadly distinguished Paul from Peter, Peter from James, and Paul and
Peter and James from John, are only types of what has been repeated
ever since. Get together the great missionaries of the Cross, and you
would have the most extraordinary collection of miscellaneous