CHAP. IV. sixty and seventy in breadth, was no less than 204 cities and villages, the least of which contained 15,000 souls.* Reckoning nothing for smaller communities, and supposing each town and village to include the adjacent district, so as to allow of no scattered inhabitants in the country, the population of the province would amount to 3,060,000; of these, probably, much the larger proportion were of Jewish descent, and spoke a harsher dialect of the Aramaic, than that which prevailed in Judæa, though in many of the chief cities there was a considerable number of Syrian Greeks and of other foreign races. Each of these towns had one or more synagogues, in which the people met for the ordinary purposes of worship, while the more religious attended regularly at the festivals in Jerusalem. The province of Galilee with Peræa formed the tetrarchate of Herod Antipas, who, till his incestuous mar- Herod riage, had treated the Baptist with respect, if not with deference, and does not appear at first to have interfered with the proceedings of Jesus. Though at one time decidedly hostile, he appears neither to have been very active in his opposition, nor to have entertained any deep or violent animosity against the person of Jesus, even at the time of his final trial. No doubt Jerusalem and its adjacent province were the centre and stronghold of Jewish Josephi Vita, ch. xlv. B. J. 111-111. 2. According to Strabo, Galilee was full of Egyptians, Arabians, and Phoenicians, lib. xvi. Josephus states of Tiberias in particular, that it was inhabited by many strangers; Scythopolis was almost a Greek Antipas. IV. CHAP. religious and political enthusiasm; the pulse beat stronger about the heart than at the extremities. Nor, whatever personal apprehensions Herod might have entertained of an aspirant to the name of the Messiah, whom he might suspect of temporal ambition, was he likely to be actuated by the same jealousy, as the Jewish Sanhedrin, of a teacher, who confined himself to religious instruction.* His power rested on force, not on opinion; on the strength of his guards and the protection of Rome, not on the respect which belonged to the half religious, half political pre-eminence of the rulers in Jerusalem. That which made Jesus the more odious to the native government in Judæa, his disappointment of their hopes of a temporal Messiah, and his announcement of a revolution purely moral and religious, would allay the fears and secure the indifference of Herod; to him Christianity, however imperfectly understood, would appear less dangerous than fanatical Judaism. The Pharisees were in considerable numbers, and possessed much influence over the minds of the Galileanst; but it was in Judæa that this overwhelming faction completely predominated, and swayed the public opinion with irresistible power. Hence the unobstructed success of Jesus in this remoter region of the Holy Land, and the wisdom of selecting that part of the country where, *The supposition of Grotius, adopted by Mr. Greswell, that He rod was absent at Rome during the interval between the imprisonment and the death of John, and there- СНАР. IV. unmolested Galilee. for a time at least, he might hope to pursue unmolested his career of blessing. During this first progress he seems to have passed from town to Jesus town uninterrupted, if not cordially welcomed. passes Either astonishment, or prudent caution, which through dreaded to offend his numerous followers; or the better feeling which had not yet given place to the fiercer passions; or a vague hope that he might yet assume all that they thought wanting to the character of the Messiah, not only attracted around him the population of the towns through which he passed, but as he approached the borders, the inhabitants of Decapolis (the district beyond the Jordan), of Judæa, and even of Jerusalem, and the remoter parts of Peræa, thronged to profit both by his teaching, and by the wonderful cures which were wrought on all who were afflicted by the prevalent diseases of the country. peace How singular the contrast (familiarity with its circumstances, or deep and early reverence, prevent us from appreciating it justly) between the ful progress of the Son of Man, on the one hand healing maladies, relieving afflictions, restoring their senses to the dumb or blind; on the other gently instilling into the minds of the people those pure, and humane, and gentle principles of moral goodness, to which the wisdom of ages has been able to add nothing; and every other event to which it can be compared, in the history of human kind. Compare the men who have at different periods Compariwrought great and beneficial revolutions in the authors of *Matt. iv. 25. son with IV. lutions. CHAP. civil or the moral state of their kind; or those mythic personages, either deified men or humanother revo- ised deities, which appear as the parents, or at some marked epoch in the history of different nations, embodying the highest notions of human nature or divine perfection to which the age or the people have attained- compare all these, in the most dispassionate spirit, with the impersonation of the divine goodness in Jesus Christ. It seems a conception, notwithstanding the progress in moral truth which had been made among the more intellectual of the Jews, and the nobler reasoners among the Greeks, so completely beyond the age, so opposite to the prevalent expectations of the times, as to add no little strength to the belief of the Christian in the divine origin of his faith. Was the sublime notion of the Universal Father, the God of Love, and the exhibition of as much of the divine nature as is intelligible to the limited faculties of man, his goodness and beneficent power, in the "Son of Man," first developed in the natural progress of the human mind among the peasants of Galilee? Or, as the Christian asserts with more faith, and surely not less reason, did the great Spirit, which created and animates the countless worlds, condescend to show this image and reflection of his own inconceivable nature, for the benefit of one race of created beings, to restore them to, and prepare them for, a higher and eternal state of existence? *Compare the observations at the end of the first chapter. IV. Teaches in the synain the open gogues and air. The synagogues, it has been said, appear to have CHAP. been open to Jesus during the whole of his progress through Galilee; but it was not within the narrow walls of these buildings that he confined his instructions. It was in the open air, in the field, or in the vineyard, on the slope of the hill, or by the side of the lake, where the deck of one of his followers' vessels formed a kind of platform or tribune, that he delighted to address the wondering multitudes. His language teems with allusions to external nature, which, it has often been observed, seem to have been drawn from objects immediately around him. It would be superfluous to attempt to rival, and unjust to an author of remarkable good sense and felicity of expression, to alter the language in which this peculiarity of Christ's teaching has already been described:-" In Manner of the spring our Saviour went into the fields and sat down on a mountain, and made that discourse Quotation which is recorded in St. Matthew, and which is Jortin. full of observations arising from the things which offered themselves to his sight. For when he exhorted his disciples to trust in God, he bade them behold the fowls of the air, which were then flying about them, and were fed by Divine Providence, though they did not sow nor reap, nor gather into barns.' He bade them take notice of the lilies of the field which were then blown, and were so beautifully clothed by the same power, and yet 'toiled not' like the husbandmen who were then at work. Being in a place where they had a wide prospect of a cultivated land, he bade them observe his dis courses. from |
