Master's love, and suffered for Him more than martyrdom at the foot of the Cross. He was the youngest of the Apostles, and calls himself "the disciple whom Jesus loved," because of the special affection our Lord showed him.
Thomas was a practical man. He had no idea of a service of Christ that costs nothing. It was all very well to go out preaching and to return to their Master saying joyfully they had been working miracles and casting out devils in His Name; but if they were really His followers they must be ready to follow Him always and everywhere, not only when the multitude cried out in admiration, "We never saw the like," but when the Samaritans refused Him a passage through their country and when the rulers persecuted Him. And so when the other Apostles tried to dissuade their Master from going into Judea where danger threatened, Thomas said boldly: "Let us also go that we may die with Him."
His courage, like Peter's, failed him at the last, but his idea of what our Lord had a right to expect of His disciples never changed. It accounts in part for his obstinate refusal to believe in the Resurrection. All the others, Peter included, told him they had seen their risen Lord. He would not believe. He knew better. What! that Christ should raise Himself to life when He had been dead three days, and come back to them with the old love when they had all failed Him in His hour of need—it was impossible. Our Lord had to show Himself to Thomas before he would believe that His rising again and coming to comfort His poor, weak disciples was not too good to be true.
Matthew. After his call to the Apostleship we hear no more of Matthew in the Gospels. He wrote the first
