Our Lord was not founding or setting up a form of religion to which He personally would convert mankind; but He and His work were part of the subject-matter of all religion—the relations of God to man. The apostles are never encouraged to exult in the number of their converts. Even when they were sent through the cities, on what we might regard as a missionary errand, they are not directed to win men over by strong entreaty—they are not then bidden, as men afterwards were by St Paul, to “be instant in season and out of season;”(116) they are only to proclaim the Kingdom of God: those who have ears to hear will hear, and the rest will go their way. Any competition with John the Baptist was above all to be shunned. Our Lord and the Baptist were bound together by early ties. Jesus had sought and received Baptism at his hand, and we always see a delicate and unswerving fidelity in His behaviour towards him. It might be that He was to increase and John was to decrease, but it should not be by any action of His that that change of relative position should be brought about. The Gospel itself, then, discloses grounds for our Lord’s sudden departure into Galilee. Thus early, among the hearers of our Lord and the Baptist, appeared an insidious tendency to form parties, a tendency which broke out disastrously in later times; when some said, “I am of Paul” and others “I am of Apollos.”(117) There is no valid reason for supposing that our Lord left Judæa from fear of persecution. The Pharisees may have been in commotion when they heard that Jesus baptised more disciples than John; and there may have been some stir in sacerdotal circles at Jerusalem, but there is no appearance of violence having been threatened. Neither do I connect our Lord’s journey with the captivity of the Baptist. I believe that John was not thrown into prison till three or four months after this journey through Samaria; but supposing that the imprisonment had already taken place and it had seemed likely that Herod’s jealousy of John would extend to Jesus, our Lord would not have left Judæa, which was not under Herod’s jurisdiction, and have gone into Galilee which was so. At any rate our Lord quits Judæa and the Judæan disciples, or all but a few of them, and travels back to Galilee with a little company who were bound to Him, and who tended Him, it would seem, with affectionate solicitude.(118)