“And as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus said unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the heaven _have_ nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. And he said unto another, Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. But he said unto him, Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but go thou and publish abroad the kingdom of God. And another also said, I will follow thee, Lord; but first suffer me to bid farewell to them that are at my house. But Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” What caught attention and led to the collocation of these two (and in St Luke three) instances was the diversity of our Lord’s treatment of cases apparently similar. The disciples saw that our Lord repelled one who was willing to follow him at once, and imperatively summoned two others who asked for delay. But though they might be puzzled at this inconsistency, they felt sure that there was a purpose and a meaning in it; so they transcribed these contrasting cases side by side, to show that for different conditions of soul Christ had different treatment ready. The second and third(283) of these colloquies probably took place at a different time from the first. They seem to have been held between our Lord and some of the disciples who were summoned to go out on the mission of the seventy, for St Luke inserts this document in his history just before his account of the mission. Thus St Matthew in his narrative puts the passage where the first incident occurs, while St Luke fixes its place by the second and third. This _individualising_ in our Lord’s treatment of men struck the disciples as something new; they do not indeed point it out as a novel feature, for they never remark upon our Lord’s ways, but the care of the Evangelists in preserving the most striking instances of this diversity of treatment shews that it caught their notice. To our Lord’s eye every human being had a moral and spiritual physiognomy of his own. He saw at once, what it was in each man which went to make him emphatically and distinctly his very self, and He addressed Himself largely to this. I will now consider the separate instances one by one. St Matthew, in the passage parallel to part of this,(284) tells us that the first speaker was a scribe, and it appears that he was, in some sort, also a disciple of our Lord, for on coming to the next case St Matthew speaks of “_another_ of the disciples.”