In the fourth chapter we find that the Pharisees at Jerusalem,—they who constituted the religious world of the place,—had come to the knowledge that the resort to Jesus was greater than that to St John— “When therefore the Lord knew how that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples), he left Judæa and departed again into Galilee.”(115) I make out St John’s meaning to be, that our Lord quitted Judæa because He found Himself thrust into apparent rivalry with John the Baptist. The Judæan disciples wanted a sect of their own; and the Pharisees regarded our Lord’s following as an offshoot from the movement of John, an offshoot which was likely to out-top the parent tree. It seems to me that our Lord was taking a survey of the different religious sections in Judæa and examining their fitness to furnish helpers for His work. Scholars who like Nicodemus were quick to ask “How can these things be?” were not of the right order for setting a great movement afoot. If men were fully possessed with the momentous nature of God’s spiritual working in the world, the idea of this as a _fact_ would take up all their minds leaving no room for the question of _mode_. If Nicodemus had been capable of seeing how sublime was the future presented to him, he would never have expected to understand _how_ it could come to pass. Next our Lord tried the disciples of John; these may have been too full of the spirit of partizanship, and too much taken up with questions of purifying and the like, to be fit foster parents for the new Faith. Whatsoever were the cause, in neither of these classes did our Lord find a cradle for the faith. He required men plastic and receptive, capable of devoted self-surrender and possessed of self-transforming and expanding powers. These did not grow freely in the social climate of Judæa; our Lord’s thoughts then, we may suppose, went back to His own people and His own country, and He preached the Kingdom first in Galilee. Our Lord’s leaving Judæa was precipitated by the rivalry which was threatening between His adherents and those of John; more especially as that rivalry was taking the form of a competition in point of numbers. For the spirit which this would engender was to our Lord abhorrent in the extreme. When sect strives with sect, and they would decide the contest for superiority _by counting heads_, they are both in a way to fall down and worship the Spirit of the world.