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The inevitable concomitant followed a continually increasing moral and physical degeneration. An increasing luxury and indulgence called for an increasing means to satisfy them. Messengers were sent and additional tribute was levied. Pontius Pilate was the Roman administrative head or governor in Judea at the time. Tiberius Cæsar was the Roman Emperor.

And in this city folks are so polite that they are fain to wrap truth in some graceful disguise. May I, a barbarian from Judea, be allowed to set it before you, bare of clothing, naked and unadorned." "Speak, I beg you, speak." "You are Jews; but you had rather not be Jews, and you endure your origin as an inevitable evil.

These points also are fully confirmed by Tacitus, who informs us that the religion, after a short check, broke out again in the country where it took its rise; that it not only spread throughout Judea, but had reached Rome, and that it had there great multitudes of converts: and all this within thirty years after its commencement.

And as his army was pinched by famine, Antipater furnished him with corn out of Judea, and with whatever else he wanted, and this at the command of Hyrcanus.

Governments and institutions pass away, but not religions; certainly not the truths originally declared among the mountains of Judea, which thus far have proved the elevation of nations. It is then the government, not the religion, which Leo inaugurated, with which we have to do.

Towering over him, the very picture of retribution, was the man he had left, apparently dead by his hand, by the roadside in the hills of Judea months and months before. For an instant, Julian stood petrified. Over his lips came a faint, frozen whisper that Laodice heard that was proof enough to her, the moment after. "Philadelphus Maccabaeus!"

"This Yule," he said musingly after a little, "might be in another world from the last. And once I spent the day in Bethlehem of Judea." It sounded almost as if he had said he had been to heaven. They had never seen any one who had actually been in Bethlehem. "There was a company of us," he went on, "some twenty in all, who landed after a rough voyage, very sea-weary and thankful to the saints.

We see thus why it is that the public worship of the Church should have come down to us in two great lines, why there should be a tradition of eucharistic worship and, parallel to this, a tradition of daily prayer; for as the one usage links itself, in a sense, to the sacrificial system of God's ancient people and has in it a suggestion of the temple worship, so the other seems to show a continuity with what went on in those less pretentious sanctuaries which had place in all the cities and villages of Judea, and indeed wherever, throughout the Roman world, Jewish colonists were to be found.

Within that churchly pale you were saved; you were a special protege of the Maker of Sirius and Canopus and the far limits of the galaxy; who had for a dogma had to be invented to explain the untimely disastrous death of the Teacher, incarnated and been crucified in Judea. Outside that pale you were damned, from Caesar on his throne to the smallest newsboy yelling false news in the Forum.

Judea had been a Roman province eighty years and more ample time for the Caesars to study the idiosyncrasies of the people time enough, at least, to learn that the Jew, with all his pride, could be quietly governed if his religion were respected. Proceeding upon that policy, the predecessors of Gratus had carefully abstained from interfering with any of the sacred observances of their subjects.