The life and work of St. Paul

164 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
essential to the state of an imperial viceroy. The autonomy of the city, and
its consequent freedom from the property tax, made it a pleasant place of
abode to many others. The soft, yielding, and voluptuous Syrians, the
cunning, versatile, and degraded Greeks, added their special contributions to
the general corruption engendered by an enervating climate and a frivolous
society. Side by side with these governed, as at Alexandria, by their own
Archon and their own mimic Sanhedrin, but owing allegiance to the central
government at Jerusalem lived an immense colony of Jews. Libanius could
affirm from personal experience that he who sat in the agora of Antioch might
study the customs of the world.
Cities liable to the influx of heterogeneous races are rarely otherwise than
immoral and debased. Even Rome, in the decadence of its Caesarism, could
groan to think of the dregs of degradation the quacks, and pandars, and
musicians, and dancing-girls poured into the Tiber by the Syrian Orontes.
Her satirists spoke of this infusion of Orientalism as adding a fresh miasma
even to the corruption which the ebbing tide of glory had left upon the
naked sands of Grecian life. 1
It seems as though it were a law of human
intercourse, that when races are commingled in large masses, the worst
The mud and
qualities of each appear intensified in the general iniquity.
silt of the combining streams pollute any clearness or sweetness they may
previously have enjoyed. If the Jews had been less exclusive, less haughtily
indifferent to the moral good of any but themselves, they might have
checked the tide of immorality. But their disdainful isolation either prevented
them from making any efforts to ameliorate the condition of their
fellow-citizens, or rendered their efforts nugatory. Their synagogues one,
at least, of which was a building of some pretensions, adorned with brazen
spoils which had once belonged to the Temple of Jerusalem, 2 and had been
resigned by Antiochus Epiphanes, in a fit of remorse,
to the Jews of
Antioch rose in considerable numbers among the radiant temples of the
gods of Hellas. But the spirit of those who worshipped in them rendered
them an ineffectual witness; and the Jews, absorbed in the conviction that
they were the sole favourites of Jehovah, passed with a scowl of contempt,
or " spat, devoutly brutal, in the face " of the many statues which no ckssic
beauty could redeem from the disgrace of being " dumb idols." There were
doubtless, indeed, other proselytes besides Nicolas and Luke ; but those
proselytes, whether few or many in number, had, up to this period, exercised
no appreciable influence on the gay and guilty city. And if the best Jews
despised all attempts at active propagandism, there were sure to be many
lewd and wicked Jews who furthered their own interests by a propaganda of
iniquity.
If the Jewish nationality has produced some of the best and greatest,
> " Jam prldem Syrus In Tiberiin defluxit Orontes
Et linguam, et mores, et cum tibicine chordas
Obliquas, necnon gentilia tympana secum
Vexit, et ad circum jussas prostare puellas."
Juv. Sat. ill. -.
*
Jot. B. J. vii. 3, 8,