The shape and the content of Matthew’s gospel suggest that the author himself is a scribe like the one that Jesus names. The scribes of the first century were all teachers. The “training” of the scribe that is mentioned is the Greek verb matheteuo—“to teach, to learn.”
This is what they did for the sick. They were not ashamed to carry the bucket of waste matter and take it to the sea; they washed out the bucket and brought it back into the sickroom. Then I thought that they were doing what the Bishop had told us in school, that we should love one another and look after each other with love, without despising anyone; we should help the weak. All this they did to those who were sick.
Because both of them [Archbishop Theodore and his assistant Abbot Hadrian] were extremely learned in sacred and secular literature, they attracted a crowd of students into whose hearts they daily poured the streams of wholesome knowledge.
Good Jesu, too late have I loved thee, nor ever yet have I wholly followed thee; make me now at last wholly to love thee, and out of the fullness of thine infinite love give me all the love I might have had, had I always loved thee.
Jesus Christ, the love that gives love,
You are higher than the highest star;
You are deeper than the deepest sea;
O eternal God,
Turn us into the arms and hands,
The legs and feet
Of your beloved Son, Jesus.
This hymn text is by John Greenleaf Whittier, a nineteenth-century Quaker who gave himself to the anti-slavery movement when he was twenty-five. In this hymn he extols the Quaker virtue of silence in the midst of the enthusiastic revivalism of the Great Awakening.
Christ on the cross cries:
My people, what wrong have I done to you?
What good have I not done for you?
We ought to hold firmly and maintain our [Christian] unity, especially those of us who are bishops presiding in the Church, thereby revealing the episcopate to be one and undivided. The episcopate is one; it is a unity in which each bishop enjoys full possession.
In uniting us to a visible society, for the purpose of redeeming us from the corruptions of our evil nature and of the world, and for training us for the purity and bliss of a celestial and eternal existence, the Divine Author of our being has not only exercised that sovereign power which makes us in all things dependent on his will, but has mercifully accommodated himself to the social principle which so strongly characterizes us.