When speaking of the Sermon on the Mount, I touched on the form in which our Lord delivers what He says. The remarks there made apply to the discourse before us and, in addition, it may be said, that this address is admirably adapted to be carried away by the hearers as a whole. It is strongly marked by its characteristic style, so that an addition or alteration by another hand would strike even an unpractised ear, as not having the true ring. There are four beatitudes and four denunciations, corresponding each to each; this numerical symmetry assists recollection. Then comes the sermon, made up of sayings so short and terse that the most unlettered may carry the whole away; and finally all ends with a parable, which is so well suited to the popular mind that it is now perhaps the best known of all pieces of Bible imagery. Those who like may trace in this a certain prevision, a designed fashioning of the garb of the word to suit it for that oral transmission on which, at one period, its preservation would depend. When our Lord had finished His discourse He returned to Capernaum. “And he cometh into a house. And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. And when his friends heard it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself.”(179) There were occasions in our Lord’s life in which the Divine nature seemed to glow through the human receptacle. It was so when He came down from the Mount of Transfiguration, so too, when he went forward, apart from the rest, at the outset of His final journey to Jerusalem; and so I believe it was when He came back to Capernaum bringing with Him the Twelve whom He had chosen to form the nucleus of His everlasting Church. Something in His air seems to have amazed His friends, “they said he is beside himself.” The Scribes, marking the temper of the crowd, thought it wise to drop their schemes of violence, but they set afoot the notion that He was possessed by the Prince of the Devils and ruled the spirits of evil in his name. Our Lord made no long stay at Capernaum, but took the Twelve with Him on a journey to the cities in Galilee that they might see how He preached and taught, and, what was more, that they might learn to put complete trust in His wise guidance and sheltering love. This was the first practical lesson they collectively received. It was in the interval between the calling of the Twelve and the despatching of them, two and two, on their missions, or possibly while they were gone, that the messengers sent by the Baptist came up with our Lord and His party. As the next chapter will be taken up with the lessons belonging to this mission of the Twelve, I shall deal with this incident in this chapter, although, chronologically, it might fall in the next. It is related by St Matthew as follows: