uits and
jealously guarding themselves from intermingling with foreign nations.
In the New Testament we find them still, indeed, clinging with a
desperate tenacity to Jerusalem and to the idea of their own
separateness; but their habits and abodes have been completely changed:
they have given up agriculture and betaken themselves with
extraordinary eagerness and success to commerce; and with this object
in view they have diffused themselves everywhere--over Africa, Asia,
Europe--and there is not a city of any importance where they are not to
be found. By what steps this extraordinary change came about it were
hard to tell and long to trace. But it had taken place; and this
turned out to be a circumstance of extreme importance for the early
history of Christianity.

Wherever the Jews were settled, they had their synagogues, their sacred
Scriptures, their uncompromising belief in the One true God. Not only
so: their synagogues everywhere attracted proselytes from the
surrounding Gentile populations. The heathen religions were at that
period in a state of utter collapse. The smaller nations had lost
faith in their deities, because they had not been able to defend them
from the victorious Greeks and Romans. But the conquerors had for
other reasons equally lost faith in their own gods. It was an age of
skepticism, religious decay and moral corruption. But there are always
natures which must possess a faith in which they can trust. These were
in search of a religion, and many of them found refuge from the coarse
and incredible myths of the gods of polytheism in the purity and
monotheism of the Jewish creed. The fundamental ideas of this creed
are also the foundations of the Christian faith. Wherever the
messengers of Christianity traveled, they met with people with whom
they had many religious conceptions in common. Their first sermons
were delivered in synagogues, their first converts were Jews and
proselytes. The synagogue was the bridge by which Christianity crossed
over to the heathen.

78. Such, then, was the world which Paul was setting out to conquer.
It was a world everywhere pervaded with these three influences. But
there were two other elements of population which require to be kept in
mind, as both of them supplied numerous converts to the early
preachers: they were the original inhabitants of the various countries;
and there were the slaves, who were either captives taken in war or
their descen