"Today it is almost a distinguishing mark of Catholics that they see a real function for the Apostles. In non-Catholic writing, no more important function can be found for them than to be foils to the brilliancy of their Master, which is to say fools asking their foolish questions to bring out the wisdom of His answers, very much the function of in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Yet they meant something very important to Our Lord—"You have not chosen Me, I have chosen you." [John 15:16] And even if we hold it not surprising that those Christians who have lost the sense of the divinely-founded hierarchical structure of the Church should not see the function of the Apostles as the first members of that hierarchy, it is still surprising that any Christian should overlook this other function to which we have been leading up. For these were the men who knew Christ before they knew He was God. Had they known from the beginning, they might simply have feared Him, and fear might have made a bar to any progress in intimacy. But by the time that they knew beyond the possibility of uncertainty that He was God, it was too late to have only fear. For by the time they knew He was God, they had come to know that He was love. If they had known that Christ was God first, then they would have applied their idea of God to Christ; as it was, they were able to apply their knowledge of Christ to God. The principal fruit for them and for us of their three years of companionship with Him was the unshakeable certainty of His love for men; and it was St. John, the Apostle He loved best, who crystallized the whole experience for us in the phrase of his first Epistle, "God is Love." (iv. 8)"