aturally this
affected the well-being of the infant Church of Christ in Smyrna; but
that Church was assailed from another quarter, and by the sharpened
weapons, not of a scornful superiority, but of fanatical hatred. The
Jews were both numerous and powerful in Smyrna, and two cruel episodes
in their late national history accentuated their fury against the
Christians wherever they met with them. The first was the destruction of
Jerusalem (A. D. 70). The fugitives from Palestine, who found refuge in
Smyrna with their fellow-countrymen already settled there, found
sympathy also--save from one class, the Christians. Compassion these
last could feel for men whose best blood had welled over the courts of
the Temple, whose dearest and nearest had perhaps perished in Jerusalem,
that 'cage of furious madmen, a city of howling wild beasts and of
cannibals--a hell' (Renan); but they knew to be true what a Titus had
acknowledged, that 'the hand of God' was in the victory of Rome. They
saw in the downfall of the Holy City the retribution of the Heavenly
Father for the crucifixion of the Messiah; and sorrow with the sorrow of
the weeping patriots of Israel they could not and would not. Their
refusal was the signal for a determination to seize every opportunity of
revenge; and the second episode, to which we have alluded, is connected
with a specially furious outburst of maddened passion against Christians
on the part of the Jews. Hadrian, fifty years after the fall of
Jerusalem, had resolved upon rearing on its ruins the city of AElia
Capitolina. Then flashed forth the rebellion of the Jew Bar-cochba (A.
D. 132-4). The 'Son of the Star,' supported by his standard-bearer,
Akiba, the greatest of the Rabbins, measured his strength with Rome.
With mouth breathing forth flames,[88] he inspired his partisans with
confidence, and his enemies with terror. Flung back, disappointed, and
slain at Bither, the 'Son of a Lie,' as his disappointed countrymen had
found him to their cost and re-named him, had yet found opportunities of
inflicting terrible tortures and agonizing deaths upon those Christians
in Palestine, who had dared to reject his Messianic claims, and refused
to blaspheme Christ. And the spirit of vengeance spread from the Holy
Land to the provinces. Twenty years after the death of the rebel leader,
the Jews of Smyrna--probably to Polycarp 'a synagogue of Satan,' as in
earlier times St. John his master had described

them (Rev. ii.