This discourse of our Lord precedes His setting out for Jerusalem to the feast of Tabernacles, and may be supposed to contain his parting directions to the body of disciples left behind at Capernaum. Nothing would be so disastrous as the breaking out of rivalry among them; His injunctions therefore, like those which He gave to the Apostles at the last, are to the effect that they should forgive and love one another. At the end of the 9th Chapter in St Mark, we have a hard passage which has suffered from interpolation;(269) this I believe to have been the close of the lesson given to the Twelve in the house at Capernaum, when our Lord called them round Him and sat down. “For every one shall be salted with fire. Salt is good: but if the salt have lost its saltness, wherewith will ye season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace one with another.”(270) When our Lord says “every one shall be salted with fire” I believe that He is thinking of that fire which He had come to send upon the earth; that new sense of communion with God, which Christ awakened in the consciences of men and which has been a mighty transforming agency in the world. The Apostles who were to be instinct with this Spirit were the salt of the world. This Spirit should be to them what salt is to that which it seasons and preserves; but if the preserving principle, embodied in the Apostles, and which was to emanate from them should itself prove corrupt, then where could help be found? If they, the chosen ones, became selfish, if they wrangled about who should be greatest; then the fire which our Lord had come to send upon earth was clearly not burning in them, and whence could it be kindled afresh. So our Lord parts from the body of disciples, going with a few on His way to the feast, and His last injunction is that they should have salt in themselves and be at peace one with another. At this point, the end of the ninth chapter, we lose the guidance of the Gospel of St Mark. All that the writer gives for the events of half a year, lies in this verse: “And he arose from thence, and cometh into the borders of Judæa and beyond Jordan: and multitudes come together unto him again; and, as he was wont, he taught them again.”(271) It would seem as if it was the Galilæan ministry that he had set himself to relate, and that when our Lord passed into Judæa and Peræa he—being perhaps no longer a constant eye witness and not willing to speak from hearsay—broke off his tale. The narrative is supplied here by St John (Chap. vii.) and also by St Luke who, in a section of the Gospel which has driven formal Harmonists to despair (Chaps. ix. 50 to xviii. 15), preserves matter of the greatest value belonging apparently to this time.