Surely an Omniscient God must have known that grave doubts would arise in the future from the real or apparent ignorance of His Son, and, vice versa, that any prescience shown by Him would be hailed with delight as a proof of His divinity. If it be urged that such trials of faith are useful, why should it be the thoughtful of future generations who are chiefly to be so tried? If Christ had chosen His disciples from among the "wise men of the East" (or West), instead of from among men of the lowest order of intelligence and education, there would then have been no necessity for the doctrine to "have been either inadequate because adjusted to their comprehension, or else incomprehensible because adjusted to a reality which was beyond them." Only a very small and remote corner of the world was favoured by the presence of God when revealing Himself in human form for the benefit of mankind. Only the most ignorant, for the most part, heard His personal teaching. Had He revealed Himself to all, or to a far greater number of persons then living, and satisfied the ardent longings of the wise men and philosophers of those times, would this not have conduced to the rapid recognition of Christianity and to its firm establishment over the whole world for all ages? The tiny Sea of Galilee, the birthplace of the Gospel, is only about twelve miles long and seven miles in its widest part, and Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum were all situated close together at the northern end. Here Jesus made his permanent home after His fellow-townsmen at Nazareth had rejected Him; here He preached, and here He performed many mighty works. Not till I had visited the spot did I fully realise the insignificance of the area to which the Saviour of mankind confined His ministry. Round the lake stood such important cities as Tiberias and Taricheæ. They were studiously avoided by Jesus. (This would account, perhaps, for their great men hearing nothing of the new teaching, though hardly for their hearing nothing of stupendous miracles performed at their very door.) The cities of the Decapolis were also flourishing in this neighbourhood at the time of Christ's ministry, and were the centre of great literary activity. Gadara produced Philodemus the Epicurean, a contemporary of Cicero; Meleager the epigrammatist; Menippus the satirist; Theodorus the rhetorician, the tutor of Tiberius; and others. Gerasa, also, was a mother of great teachers. In the words of George Adam Smith: "Philodemus, Meleager, Menippus, Theodorus, were names of which one end of the Lake of Galilee was proud, when Matthew, Peter, James, and John were working at the other end." [86] If it be argued that for some inscrutable reason God sent His Son only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and intended His preaching to reach the Gentiles through the medium of His chosen people, why was such a learned and pious Jew as Philo left out in the cold?