The first step was taken when Jesus began gradually to gather “disciples” about Him, and the Twelve are mentioned in twenty-nine passages of the Gospels. In St. Paul “the twelve” are already a recognized body. However much it may be disputed whether the twelve were named apostles by our Lord Himself, or whether this name became current first in Hellenistic surroundings, yet the fact that Jesus Himself selected the twelve is indisputable. They were to be twelve in number, no more and no less. By being twelve they were—so He plainly intended—to signify the new twelve-fold Israel, and to be the germ of that holy people which He, as the Son of man, foretold by the prophet Daniel, was come to establish[1] As the new Israel they were the kernel of the new Kingdom, its spiritual support, the authorized bearers of its message, the “salt of the earth,” the “light of the world.” They knew themselves as those who would one day judge the twelve tribes of Israel (Mt. xix, 28; Lk. xxii, 30). So deeply were the twelve permeated with the fundamental importance of their corporate union, that after the Ascension of Jesus they considered it their first business to fill the gap which the suicide of Judas had left in the apostolic college by electing Matthias (Acts i, 15 ff.). Therefore the twelve were the original form and foundation of the new Kingdom. That new Kingdom entered history as an apostolic Church, built, as the Epistle to the Ephesians says (ii, 20), “upon the foundation of the apostles.” The character of apostolicity, this real historical connection with the twelve, is essential to it and cannot be taken from it.