Now at last does our Lord find for the Apostles the rest which He had desired to give them before. It is not a missionary journey, He does not preach to the people; and the miracles which He performs are no longer illustrations of God’s Kingdom, but works of beneficence wrung from Him by the sight of suffering. The cures are wrought as privately as is possible. The Syro-Phœnician woman obtains what she desires by her exceptional openness to Divine impression: when He entered into a house “and would have no man know it,” she sought Him out. The man who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech, is taken “aside from the multitude privately,” and our Lord charged the witnesses “that they should tell no man.”(243) So again with the blind man at Bethsaida (probably Bethsaida Julias at the head of the lake)(244) “He took hold of the blind man by the hand and brought him out of the village,” and at the end “He sent him away to his home, saying, Do not even enter into the village.”(245) Our Lord appears to have returned southwards along the valley and down the eastern side of the Lake, where the miracle of the feeding of the four thousand took place. This country on the east of the Sea of Galilee, contained a mixed population, of which only the smaller part were of Israelite descent. The four thousand had followed day after day seeking cures; but there was no fear of these men trying to make Jesus a King, for there was little nationalist feeling on that side the sea. Our Lord might therefore exert His beneficence without imprudence. It seems strange that the disciples should not have thought of the feeding of the five thousand; but they may have thought that it was out of the question that a miracle should be wrought for people who were mostly heathen; or it may have been one of those not uncommon cases in which a man has seen his mistake and supposes that he can never make it again, and yet when circumstances arise, similar except for some slight variation, he does exactly what he did before. When the four thousand were sent away, our Lord takes boat and crosses the lake to Magada in “the parts of Dalmanutha.” Of this region we know nothing except that it must have been on the western side of the lake. Here our Lord again finds himself among the haunts of men, and, since wherever there was a town population Pharisees were to be found, these “came forth, and began to question with him, seeking of him a Sign from heaven, tempting him.”(246)