They had heard, and now they would fain have seen. But already the holy indignation of Him, Whom they only knew as Joseph’s son, was kindled. The turn of matters; their very admiration and expectation; their vulgar, unspiritual comments: it was all so entirely contrary to the Character, the Mission, and the Words of Jesus. No doubt they would next expect, that here in His own city, and all the more because it was such, He would do what they had heard had taken place in Capernaum. It was the world-old saying, as false, except to the ear, and as speciously popular as most such sayings: ‘Charity begins at home’—or, according to the Jewish proverb, and in application to the special circumstances: ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ Whereas, if there is any meaning in truth and principle; if there was any meaning and reality in Christ’s Mission, and in the discourse He had just spoken, Charity does not begin at home; and ‘Physician, heal thyself’ is not of the Gospel for the poor, nor yet the preaching of God’s Jubilee, but that of the Devil, whose works Jesus had come to destroy. How could He, in His holy abhorrence and indignation, say this better than by again repeating, though now with different application, that sad experience, ‘No prophet is accepted in his own country,’ which He could have hoped was for ever behind Him; and by pointing to those two Old Testament instances of it, whose names and authority were most frequently on Jewish lips? Not they who were ‘their own,’ but they who were most receptive in faith—not Israel, but Gentiles, were those most markedly favoured in the ministry of Elijah and of Elisha. As we read the report of Jesus’ words, we perceive only dimly that aspect of them which stirred the wrath of His hearers to the utmost, and yet we do understand it. That He should have turned so fully the light upon the Gentiles, and flung its large shadows upon them; that ‘Joseph’s Son’ should have taken up this position towards them; that He would make to them spiritual application unto death of His sermon, since they would not make it unto life: it stung them to the quick. Away He must out of His city; it could not bear His Presence any longer, not even on that holy Sabbath. Out they thrust Him from the Synagogue; forth they pressed Him out of the city; on they followed, and around they beset Him along the road by the brow of the hill on which the city is built—perhaps to that western angle, at present pointed out as the site. This, with the unspoken intention of crowding Him over the cliff, which there rises abruptly about forty feet out of the valley beneath