The writer formally announces the subject of his spiritual drama, and then proceeds to develop it, according to approved rules of literary art. First comes the prologue, setting forth in a few sententious passages the cardinal idea of the piece. This occupies eighteen verses of the first chapter, and is followed by the introduction of John the Baptist and his testimony. This occupies eighteen verses more. The manifestation of the Logos to the first company of disciples is described with due circumstance in the remainder of the chapter. The symbolical opening of the public ministry, at Cana, the first open "manifestation of the glory" in the miracle of turning water into wine, by which is signified the calling to substitute a spiritual for a natural order, occupies the first ten verses of the second chapter. Then the ministry of revelation begins, with signs and demonstrations. The city of Jerusalem is chosen as the scene of it; and the scene never changes for longer than a moment, and then it changes without historical, or biographical motive. The cleansing of the temple is placed at the beginning, with undisguised purpose to announce his claim, and the dialectical contest is opened. Nicodemus, "a ruler of the Jews," seeks a nocturnal interview, betrays the ignorance of the kingdom which characterizes all save the regenerate, even the wisest, and gives occasion to the Christ to declare the intrinsic superiority of the Son of God, and the conditions of salvation through him; Nicodemus furnishing the starting point for a lofty declamation which soars beyond him into the region of transcendental ideas. The Baptist, instead of doubting, as in Matthew, and sending an embassy to the Christ to ascertain the reasons of his not disclosing himself, is himself questioned by skeptical disciples, and re-assures them by words that are an echo of the Christ's own. The interview with the woman of Samaria is introduced for the purpose of extracting another confession of the Christ's supremacy from a different order of mind. Nicodemus represented Judaism in its pride of authority and learning. The woman of Samaria represents the ignorant, superstitious, yet stubborn idolatry reckoned by the Jews as no better than heathenism; her "five husbands" are the five sects into which Judaism was divided. She too is pictured to us as sitting by a well and _drawing water_. The conversation begins with the Christ's declaration of his power to create perennial springs of water in the heart, and leads immediately up to the great disclosure of himself. Superstition, like superciliousness, listens and is persuaded. The mention of Galilee is necessary to account for the episode in Samaria, but nothing occurs there. The next scene is laid again in Jerusalem. The _water_ of Bethesda is brought into competition with the quickening spirit of the Christ; the cure of the sick man introduces a mystical discourse on the spiritual sufficiency of the Son of God.