uke has given
the memorable story.

John was silenced, and that moved Jesus to go back to Galilee and take
up His ministry there. His reason has been thought to have been the wish
to avoid a similar fate, but He was safer from Herod in Jerusalem than
in Capernaum, within reach of the tyrant's arm, stretched out from
Tiberias close by, and the supposition is more probable, as well as more
worthy, that a directly opposite motive impelled Him. The voice that had
cried, 'After me cometh a greater than I,' was stifled in a dungeon. It
was fitting that He, of whom John had spoken, should at once stand
forth. There must be no interval between the ringing proclamation by the
herald and the appearance of the king, lest men should say that one more
hope had been dashed, and one more prophet proved a dreamer. And is
there not a lesson for all times in the fact that when John is silenced,
Jesus begins to speak? Is not the quenching of a light kindled to bear
witness to the true Light, ever the occasion for that unkindled and
unquenchable Light to burn the more brightly, though tear-dimmed eyes
often fail to see it?

The choice of Capernaum as a residence suggested to Matthew Isaiah's
prophecy, which he quotes freely, fusing into one sentence the
geographical terms, in verse 15, which, in the Hebrew, are the close of
one paragraph, and the prophecy in verse 16 which, in the Hebrew, begins
another. The territory of Zabulon lay in what is now called Lower
Galilee, stretching right across from the northern end of the Sea of
Gennesaret to the coast of the Mediterranean, while that of Naphtali lay
further north. 'The way of the sea' is here not the designation of
another district, but a specification of those named in the preceding
clauses, and may be rendered 'towards the sea,' while 'beyond Jordan' is
the almost heathen territory on the east bank of the river, and 'Galilee
of the Gentiles' is the general name for all three, the two tribal
territories and the trans-Jordanic district. These are all smelted into
one designation, 'the people which sat in darkness,' and thus the whole
of verse 15 and the first clause of verse 16 make the nominative of the
verb 'saw.' There is something very impressive in that long-drawn-out
accumulation of geographical names, and in their being all massed in the
one sad description of their inert darkness, and then equally massed as
seeing the great light that springs up. The intense pathos of that
descri