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to his eyes, and he did what human policy suggested to him, in order to alleviate the deficient and more necessary markets, at the expense of those whose abundance was comparatively useless. If these remarks, while they illustrate the revolt of the Jews, are successful in fixing by strong and clear characteristics, providentially saved out* of the wreck of heathen learning, a portion of the apocalypse, they may render a service. One portion, definitely ascertained, may be like the standing-place of Archimedes, and may have a tendency to impart a comparative degree of certainty to what follows, always understanding us to speak of what is past, and not to encourage speculations in which "mortalis ultra fas trepidat."

The state of Judæa was brought to an end; her sun was darkened, her stars were fallen, and her heavens had departed, like a scroll when it is rolled together. The rabbis of succeeding ages were placed in a different situation from R. Akiba, as regards those fanatic or fraudulent machinations which an expected Messiah must, in the very nature of things, occasionally give rise to. It could not, in process of time, be pronounced of any man that he was of the posterity of Jesse, or that his ancestors had ever been settled in Bethlehem Ephratah. Those particular tokens of a Messiah were neglected because they could not be ascertained; and were at last so far despised that it was no absolute requisite for the Messiah of the Jews even to be a Jew himself, for R. David Kimchi announced to his nation that the sultan Saladin was the predicted Messiah. In the reign of Constantius, the Jewish nation were collected in great numbers in the cities of northern and central Palestine, and raised a most desperate rebellion against his lieutenant, Gallus Cæsar, in A.D. 355. Socrates relates that the Jews who inhabited+ Diocesarea (otherwise called Sepphoris) took up arms against the Romans and began to devastate the neighbourhood by their excursions; but Gallus sending an army, routed them, and ordered their city to be razed to the ground. Sozomen uses nearly the same expressions. But the affair appears still more serious in the chronicle of St. Jerome, a man well acquainted with Palestine and its history. "In the year 355, the Jews took up arms to rebel, and they put the soldiers to death in the nighttime, but Gallus subdued them, slew many thousands of them, without sparing even the innocence of childhood, and consigned to the flames their cities-Diocesarea, Tiberias, Diospolis, and many others." Whoever will contemplate the distance from Tiberias to Diospolis will perceive the extensive and serious nature of this struggle; and, since Tiberias was one of the places whose excavated mountains received Akiba and his multitudes, it is not unlikely that Gallus may have had again to besiege Betthera. Both Socrates and Sozomen are agreed that his success in this contest was what elated his mind with the pride which soon ruined him. Our fragment of Ammianus com

Did we possess the full history of these times, we should know what bearing the harvests and vintages of Domitian's reign had upon the great events in question.

+ Socrat. ii. c. 33. Sozom, iv. c. 7.

mences with his fourteenth book, and this curious history is lost in his thirteenth. One circumstance may be conjectured from the Cæsars of A. Victor-viz., that they chose a Roman for their ruler, if they did not even invest him with the purple as a tyrannus or pretender to the empire. Interea Judæorum seditio, qui Patricium nefariè in regni speciem sustulerant, oppressa; neque multo post ob sævitiam atque animum trucem Gallus Augusti jussu interiit. Patricius is the name of a Roman, but nothing is known concerning the individual who engaged himself in this strange adventure. He was not the last or greatest Roman who meddled with Judaism. Gallus was attached to Christianity, and was a scourge to the Jews; but within six years of his death, his brother Julian ascended the imperial throne, openly renounced Christianity, and addicted himself to the mysteries of Mithras, as taught by the eastern Mages and Chaldees, as well as to various horrible superstitions of the Greeks. If the Jews of his days were really Jews in their doctrine, he had, as they well knew, not one sentiment in common with them except the hatred of Christ and Christians. Yet they entered into the plans which he formed for rebuilding the city and temple of Jerusalem with* prodigious splendour, while he was on the point of setting forth to conquer Persia.

There

is reason to think that he meditated an imitation of his uncle Constantine, (who, to promote the establishment of a new state religion, founded for himself a new capital,) and intended to establish in his glorious new Jerusalem the central seat of that Mithriac and NeoPlatonic syncretism which his writings advocated with a phrenzy of superstition. In an epistle to the Jews, he says:-"When I shall have finished the war in Persia, I will, at my own labour, build up. the city of Jerusalem, whose restoration you have so long desired, and inhabit it,† and give glory in it, together with you, to the Superior One, 74 Kρεiтtovi." His tongue and pen were too restless for any man, Jew or Gentile, to be ignorant that the Kreitton of Julian was the sun, whose worship, with that of all the host of heaven, was an abomination to every real Jew. Meanwhile he did not wait till his return to rebuild the temple, but set his lieutenant Alypius immediately to that work. Alypius undertook it with more or less of sincerity, and was assisted by the labours of the Jews. But, "when they were digging foundations, fearful globes of fire broke out with repeated eruptions, scorched some of the labourers, and prevented their approaching the spot; and by this persevering resistance of the element the undertaking was frustrated." From whatever cause this event arose, it was very strangely viewed by Julian. He imagined, in his folly, that Mithras had sent his Great Light to shine upon and auspicate his work, and that the Jews had misunderstood the sign; and, in his vexation and disappointment, he rebuked and derided them almost as if they had been Christians.

"Let no man (he writes to one of his heathen priests) try to deceive us, and disturb our minds concerning Providence. For as for the prophets of the Jews,

Sumptibus immodicis.

† Οικοδομησας οἰκησω. Ep. ad Pontificem, p. 296.

who throw these things in our teeth, what say they concerning their temple, which, having been thrice overthrown, is not yet built up? I say not that to insult them. Not I, who, so long after its destruction, meditated to restore it in honour of the God who is therein* invoked. But I now mention it merely to shew that nothing human is indestructible, and that the prophets who wrote such things were triflers, fit companions for silly old women. I think it may well be, that the deity may be great, and yet that his prophets and interpreters may be none of the wisest, because they have not committed their souls to the purification of the encyclical studies, nor have been willing to open their closely-shut eyes, or dispel the mist that covers them. But those men seeing the greatt light, but not seeing it clearly or with certainty, but as it were through a cloud, not being aware that it was the pure essence of light, but thinking it was fire, and discerning nothing clearly that was round about them, cried out, Shudder! tremble! fire! flame! death! the sword! the fiery sword!'—using a power of words to express one thing-viz., the destroying power of fire. But, with respect to these things, I had better explain to you in private how much those teachers of what relates to the Deity are, in that respect, inferior to our poets."

This deplorable effusion informs us that the Jews then professed to have inspired prophets interpreting the divine will, and that those prophets were conversant with the mysteries of the Great Light, although an unexpected alarm brought back the apostates to some other thoughts. And these prophets were the men with and through whom the great intrigue of Julian was conducted. In Julian's projected residence at the new Jerusalem more, perhaps, was meant than was said, and the Jews and Gentiles of the syncretism may have whispered among themselves præsensş Divus habebitur, adjectis imperio gravibus Persis. Such ideas are not inconsistent with corrupted Judaism, for the Jerusalem Targum does not scruple to say that the Messiah|| shall come from Rome.

Orosius, ¶ an excellent author who wrote no more than fifty years after the time spoken of, throws much light on these machinations.

"When Julian was preparing for his Persian war, and was leading with him to his predestined ruin, the assembled forces of the Romans, he offered the blood of the Christians to his gods by a vow, and intended to persecute the churches openly if he could obtain the victory. For he even commanded an amphitheatre to be built in Hierosolyma, in order, when he returned from Persia, to expose to infuriated wild beasts, the bishops, monks, and other saints of that city, and to contemplate their laceration."

Some such opinions were early entertained concerning him, for the words generally imputed to him when he received his wound-" thou art victorious, O Galilean!"--implied that his war against Persia was, in some sense or other, a war against Christ. They would not have been ascribed to him had the Christian church been unconcerned in the struggle between the two heathens. Orosius cannot be contradicted by an appeal to the less sanguinary previous conduct of Julian, because we know to what superstitious atrocities he was addicted. At Carrhæ, when entering Persia, he crucified a young woman (i. e. hung her up with her two arms extended), and ripped up her entrails,

* Κληθεντος ἐπ' αὐτῷ. Qu.

For this phrase, see vol. i. p. 465.

'H poppaia, the phrase constantly employed for the fiery sword at the gate of Paradise.

§ Four hundred and eighty-three days from his commandment to rebuild the city and the temple was a sufficient time for the achievement of his Persian war.

See Buxtorf, Lex. in Roma.

Oros. vii. 30.

to divine the issue by this hideous horuspicy; of which crime (says Theodoret) the reliques are now preserved at Carrhæ. And we may be sure that he speaks truth, for in the other great crisis of his life, when he marched against Constantius, Ammian* informs us" that he performed a ritual of the most secret nature to conciliate Bellona.” The tragedy of Carrhæ is a twice-told tale. His Persian conqueror, who was addicted to the same creed, is recorded to have been—

Fata per humanas solitus prænoscere fibras
Improbus infandâ religione sapor;

and when George, the Cappadocian, about the same time, demolished the churches of the Mithriacs in Egypt, he found in the crypts of them almost as clear evidences of their homicidal rites, as the crypt of Carrhæ disclosed to Jovian. Better folks than Julian, such as St. Dominic and Mary Tudor, have been sanguinary fanatics when spiritual delusions possessed them. And as to judging of Julian's future designs by his past life-what is the past life of a man who professed Christianity for twenty-eight-and-a-half out of thirty-one years, while he was secretly engaged in the bloody orgies of Bellona, and made his most solemn and hypocritical profession of it at Vienne, a few months before he openly renounced it ? The statements of Orosius are entitled to credit, and shew how deep a transaction that was between Julian and those rabbis, who "called themselves Jews, but were not, and were the synagogue of Satan."

Gibbon, who has coloured and falsified the acts and designs of Julian, has entirely suppressed the affairs of Patricius and Gallus, These partly illustrate one another. Rabbinical Judaism is not purely national in the politics of its creed. Unlike a Judas Gaulonites and an Akiba of old, it will pay tribute with joy to any apostate Cæsar who will abjure and persecute the faith of his own people to restore the Jews, and may not be found unwilling to receive for a Messiah any Gentile who unites the will and the power so to do. Difficulties vanish in that Judaism, for in it anything will prove, explain, or account for anything. This change, worked between the times of Trajan and Constantius, seemed to be worthy of illustration, because its effects are likely to prove important in the development of the future. H.

CONNEXION WITH DISSENTERS.

SIR,-I have lately met with some controversial pamphlets of Dr. Lee and Dr. Pye Smith. Their declarations of mutual friendship much struck me, and I was grieved at (what was yet a necessary consequence) the way in which the advocate of truth has been hampered by such feelings. With your leave, therefore, I would bring this subject before your readers.

21. v. 1.

For a flagrant exemplification of this, see British Magazine, vol. vii. p. 119; and for another, equally gross, see Akiba, cited from the Mischna, in a note to this essay.

Are we at liberty to be on terms of intimacy with dissenters?

The question may startle some, who, though they must own they have never felt quite at their ease in such friendship, have yet never supposed they really deserved blame for it; and who, perhaps, ascribing their uncomfortable feelings to mere pride and dogmatism, have hitherto laboured to overcome them, instead of taking care not to excite them. Should this letter meet the eye of any such person, the writer can assure him that, from past experience, he enters very fully into the difficulties and perplexities of his situation; and to relieve them, he would beg his calm attention to the following queries :— Do dissenters cause divisions in the church?

Dr. Pye Smith finds no answer to this, but by charging the church with the guilt thus incurred. A conscientious churchman, however, unable to consent to that, must answer my question in the affirmative. What did St. Paul think of divisions?

1 Cor. iii. 3" Whereas there is among you envying, strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?" He thought them sinful.

What does he tell us to do respecting them?

Rom, xvi. 17-"Mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine ye have learned, and avoid them."

What intercourse, then, may we have with dissenters? Are we at liberty to contract friendships with them?

Here are texts, and for a comment, if it be needed, let me refer to the 10th of the Canons and Constitutions of 1603. It is against the maintainers of schismatics in the church of England, i. e., against those churchmen who openly countenance them; and declares that they are to be excommunicated for such their wicked errors. As this canon is one of those which has fallen into disuse, I only refer to it as shewing the opinion of the church on this subject, when she last undertook to express it. As such, I conceive, it affords a comment of the very highest authority on the texts I have quoted.

These, Sir, are the principal grounds of my own view on this point. But there are many persons of learning, high character, and long standing in the church, who, from their conduct, evidently take some other view. Would it not oblige others besides myself, forward the cause of truth, and so do good, if we were favoured with their reasons?

I would now apologize for troubling you with this letter. I have done so in the hope of thereby bringing this subject in a serious form before some minds that seem hitherto to have paid it but little attention. I also trust, if possible, to elicit in return some information, or new view, that may lead me to alter my own opinion, or tend to soften its apparent asperity. I remain, yours &c., S. P.

ORDER IN THE PUBLIC SERVICES.

MY DEAR SIR,-I hope to see discussed in the British Magazine a subject deeply interesting to every parochial minister, that is, how we may best preserve order during the public services of the church.

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