Galilee we have seen, as a retired spot with an honest-hearted people, was admirably fitted for the scene of the ministry; but yet it could not be “that a prophet should perish out of Jerusalem,” and it was imperative that there the end should come. The Holy City was also fitted, in a very peculiar manner, to be the centre from which the new movement was to radiate forth. The Lord’s death, the Supreme Event in the history of mankind, was not to take place in a corner. The circumstances of it could not be too notorious or too widely vouched. It was to be made known in East and West to the Hebrew, the Greek, the Roman and to all mankind. Now Jerusalem, both geographically, and as the point to which the Jews of the dispersion bent watchful eyes from many lands, was wondrously adapted to be a centre of diffusion. It was in a very remarkable way a “city set upon a hill.” It stood accessible to three continents, at the centre of gravity of the known world, and it was on the watershed of two civilizations: the Aryan and Semitic races and languages and the different modes of thinking which go along with the languages were brought together there. Moreover, owing to the dispersion of the Jews and their custom of visiting Jerusalem at the great feasts when they possibly could, “devout men from every nation under Heaven” were drawn together there from time to time, and a common interest in what concerned “Israel” was spread over the globe. The agency of these festivals connected Jerusalem, as by electric threads, with every great city in the inhabited world, and the Israelites who were settled in every large town of the empire afterwards provided nests for the new Faith. The Apostles, as was natural, after the Resurrection went back to Galilee. It can only have been owing to directions they must have received, that they _all_ returned to Jerusalem for the Ascension. Our Lord then enjoined them to remain and from thence to propagate the Faith. This injunction explains their abandonment of their homes and callings, which is hard to account for otherwise. I now proceed with the history. During this chapter I shall for the most part follow St Mark, who relates the events nearly in the order in which I believe they happened. After a brief notice of John and of the temptation he proceeds thus: “Now after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe in the gospel.”(140) The Evangelist does not say that our Lord came from Judæa, but He could have come from nowhere else. It would seem that our Lord on arriving in Galilee went at once to the Lake shore and called the two pair of fisher brethren to His side.