Whether our Lord, on His way to this last Passover, set out Himself from Galilee or joined on the road the great company travelling from the north is left uncertain, but we find our Lord among a throng of visitants to the feast, who are proud of having the Great Prophet of Nazareth among them; and men come to Him—some with real troubles of soul like the young ruler—and others, like the Pharisees, either curious to obtain His decision on some vexed question, or maliciously setting Him in a dilemma between the contravention of Moses’ Law, and the retaining of a burden which men were loth to bear. One small event, preserved to us in the account of this journey, gives us the clearest glimpse of our Lord’s air and general demeanour that we ever obtain. There was, about Him, that indefinable something which wins children’s confidence at sight. The little ones, who swarmed in the hamlets of the Jordan valley, were drawn to Him by something in His look, and—after long gazing out of their dark eastern eyes, in childhood’s own intent way—they made out that they would be safe with Him, and stole to His side. The miracle of healing, worked on the way, that of the cure of the blind men in Jericho, is nearly after the old sort. As Jesus nears the end, He reverts to the ways with which His revelation began. Our Lord was touched no doubt by the affliction of these men and their urgent cry, and this was a miracle of beneficence, but He takes no pains now to withdraw the act from public view, He does not call them “aside from the multitude,”(322) and heal them in private as He had done on His way back from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon some months before. This miracle stirred the hearts of many beholders, and this emotion of theirs may have played no small part in the great drama to which this journey was the prelude; for the company that came with our Lord from Galilee formed the staple of that great concourse which shouted “Blessed _is_ the kingdom that cometh, _the kingdom_ of our father David: Hosanna in the highest,”(323) and this shout of the people not only roused in the priests that terror which “sits hard by hate,” but gave them the very thing they wanted—grounds for calling upon Pilate to prove himself Cæsar’s friend. It is not likely that any of our Lord’s doings were without an ordered purpose, and that this cessation of Signs certainly was not so, is apparent from our Lord’s words spoken probably soon after the performance of the first of those miracles mentioned above. The words are these. “And when the multitudes were gathering together unto him, he began to say, This generation is an evil generation: it seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah.”(324)