It was, I think, in Galilee, as St Matthew tells us, that this profession of adhesion was made. At the time he speaks of, popular feeling in our Lord’s favour was at its greatest height, and it was owing to the thronging of the multitude to the Lake shore near Capernaum that our Lord gave orders to depart unto the other side. The circumstances tally perfectly with the language of the passage, for our Lord was then going into a wild country. But where the passage stands in St Luke, our Lord is travelling “as it were in secret” from a village in Samaria to Jerusalem. In this journey, rapidly made, he would not have been likely to have fallen in with the scribe at all, and, as He did not preach as He went, we cannot account for the emotion which the scribe displays; moreover, it could hardly be said that at Jerusalem, He would not have “where to lay His head.” What most particularizes the scribe is his impulsiveness. We have here another example of that mistrust of emotional fervour which our Lord uniformly shews. The woman who cried “Blessed is the womb that bare thee,”(285) the scribe in the case before us, and St Peter, when he said, “I am ready to go with thee both to prison and to death,”(286) all are answered by our Lord in the same tone of repression.(287) Sudden transports and ebullitions of feeling like those just named, come mainly of temperament and of passing physical conditions which subjugate the agent, and our Lord does not regard them as betokening a character on which he can depend. It speaks well for the right feeling of this scribe that he forbears to press his suit. He divined, with the delicacy of a well bred Oriental, that our Lord’s reply, though apparently only discouraging him from following for his own sake, shewed that He held it best that he should stay behind. He is satisfied that our Lord’s judgment will be right and he yields at once. A man with less perception might have protested against the imputation on his endurance, and have declared that he would go with the Master though he should have to lie on the bare earth.