There is another point. They are not directed even to name our Lord; He would not suffer them to proclaim Jesus of Nazareth, for He had not “come in his own name.”(209) This law is most steadily observed; the seventy say on their return, that the devils were subject to them through our Lord’s name, but though they may have used His name when they wrought cures, they do not seem to have declared that the expected Messiah had come; they kept to what they were told to do. The wonder is that no one on this mission should have announced Jesus as the Messiah: they could not have been warned against doing so, because to warn them specially would have been to suggest the notion of that which was to be avoided. A similar circumstance may have been one cause of the fervent thanks which our Lord renders to His Father on the return of the seventy.(210) How long this journey of the Apostles lasted we do not know; the exigencies of harmonists have led some of them to reduce it to a day or two, but I should suppose it to have occupied at least a week. Neither do we know in what districts the journeys took place; but that the Twelve started from the neighbourhood of Nazareth in the spring of A.D. 29, and the seventy from the Northern border of Judæa or from Peræa in the following autumn, is a plausible guess. The words, “Go not into the way of the Gentiles,” &c. which St Matthew puts at the head of our Lord’s directions, I think refer to the mission of the seventy. In Peræa they were close to Gentile countries and Samaria lay in the way to parts of Galilee and Judæa. They are told not to abide in any Samaritan city or set foot at all in a Gentile land; our Lord is first sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. All went well on both occasions. On the return of the seventy our Lord saw in this success of His disciples in their ministration, an augury of the establishment of His Church. Men, it was plain, could be trusted for the great work in view; and in this success of the disciples in setting it afoot our Lord seemed to behold the Power of Evil falling from the sky. Our Lord pours out His soul on this occasion in thankfulness to His Father. “In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things from the wise and understanding, and didst reveal them unto babes: yea, Father; for so it was well-pleasing in thy sight. All things have been delivered unto me of my Father: and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father; and who the Father is, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.”(211)