CHAPTER VI. FROM THE TEMPTATION TO THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. Outset of the Work. We now come in sight of that part of our Lord’s work which is the special subject of this book. We have been shewn something of what passed in His mind during the days in the desert; but we are not told what He intended to accomplish or by what practical steps He would proceed. We need not suppose that He came forth from the desert with His plan of action completely prepared. He may not have settled where He should lay the scene of His work or whom He should take for His helpers. All this would grow clear to Him as time went on. But though He may have been waiting for the guidance of inner voice and outward circumstance as to the way of executing His charge, yet that He had God’s work to do and meant to do it is written unmistakeably in His air. We are shown Him in St John’s Gospel on His way to Galilee. A glimpse is given us across His path, and we see Him pass along with the assured tread of one whose part is taken and who knows whither His steps lead. On one point touching the form of His work He is already clear. He is not to come as a practical reformer or as a claimant of power; in these characters He would need active human aid, and the Spirit of the World would enter in: but though He is given functions beyond teaching, yet, in order to wear a garb familiar to the people, He will be in their eyes nothing more, at first, than “a _teacher_ come from God;”(74) His followers are to be purely _disciples_ and not adherents of any other kind. His concern was not with political or social forms of order,—these must be different in different times and different lands. His province was to waken into activity the capacity for knowing God which was practically dormant in the mass of mankind. Before laying down any plan or organising any society, He passes some months in _exploring_, so to say, the tempers, and minds and capacities of the different classes of persons in Jerusalem and Galilee. He is in search of the fittest receptacles for the word. He looks into the hearts of the disciples of John, and of those who like Nicodemus were “scribes instructed into the kingdom of heaven.” He turns His eye upon Samaritans and peasants of Galilee; and finally, as we know, decides to choose the quiet Lake shore for the cradle of the _Faith_. The peasants and fishers whose ways He knew—unsentimental, serviceable men—were taken as witnesses for the new revelation: they offered the new flasks wanted for the new wine.