Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

RESURRECTION OF CULTURED HEATHENISMI 2 5ho has left large remains, an object of the highestnterest with respect at once to the Roman Empire,he Jewish people, and the Christian Church. Aboutfive years before his birth Egypt had passed fromCleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, under the dominionf Rome. His manhood up to the age of fifty ywitnessed the consolidation of the monarchy undAugustus and Tiberius. When he reached that agethe preaching of our Lord began. We cannot indeedtell whether he himself went up to Jerusalem duringany of the four passovers over which that preachingextended. Neither can we think that a person so wellformed of all matters concerning his people remainedin ignorance of the stir which the events ofour Lord's life created. Thus his writings were composedat the very last period of the Jewish peoplebefore the appearance of the Christian Church. Therecould not be a matter of greater interest than to knowhow a Jew at once zealous for the religion of his ownpeople and learned in the literature and philosophy ofthe Greeks would speak at such a moment. For manygenerations there had been a large colony of his peoplein Alexandria. During all that time the greatnued to be the central point of meeting for thek and the Oriental mind, and the world's martfor intellectual speculation no less than for commercialexchange. When it fell under Roman dominion, ittook rank at once as the second city of the empire,being however far superior in the beauty* of its buildingsand in the regularity and stateliness of its structureas a city to what Rome was up to the end of thereign of Augustus, or rather to the fire of Nero. Atthe same time it was perhaps even more cosmopolitan,at least in the cultured part of its population, than