'_But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galilee? Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was? So there was a division among the people because of Him._' As I hinted before, the occurrence of this schism is no unimportant incident in St. John's Gospel. Much of the meaning of the narrative turns upon the question which produced it. Was the Christ to prove His right to the homage of His subjects by establishing His lineal descent from David, by showing that He was born in the place from which Micah had intimated that the Shepherd of Israel would come? Or was He at once to address Himself to the conscience of human beings? Was He to claim a sovereignty over them by an elder title? Were Scribes and Pharisees to bow down when they had satisfied their understandings, by spelling over texts, that Jesus possessed certain outward marks and tokens which were described in those texts? Or were publicans and sinners to hear that there was One who could give them the bread and water of life; that they might own Him, and eat, and drink, and live? Some will say that the first three Evangelists maintain the one doctrine, the fourth Gospel the other. To me it seems that St. Matthew and St. Luke, who give our Lord's genealogies from Abraham or from Adam, rest as little upon those genealogies as St. Mark or St. John, in whom they are not found; that all alike appeal to a different kind of evidence from this,--to that evidence which Pharisees and Scribes could not understand, '_because they had not repented at the preaching of John_,'--because they had not come to that living Lord, of whom the Scriptures testified, but '_thought they had life in them_.' But I do not doubt that in St. John's day, Christians had begun to dwell on the evidence of genealogies and of outward marvels, as the Jews had dwelt upon them; that this was a time of infinite peril to those Christians, and to the society of which they were members; that it was an especial function of the beloved disciple to show, not only that the craving for this evidence was not healthy, but that it was a principal cause of the rejection of Jesus by the people of God's ancient covenant. This truth is strongly brought out in the last verses of the 7th chapter.