[69] The most detailed account of Cæsarea-on-the-Sea, its ruins and present state, will be found in the Memoirs of the Survey of Western Palestine, vol. ii., pp. 13-29. It is accompanied with plans and maps, which show that ancient Roman Cæsarea was ten times the size of the mediæval city which the Crusaders occupied. Geikie's The Holy Land and the Bible, ch. iv., gives a very interesting account of the ancient and modern state of Cæsarea.
[70] See Josephus, Antiquities, XV. ix. 6; Wars of Jews, I. xxi. Mr. Lewin, in his Life of St. Paul, vol. ii., ch. iv., spends several pages in an elaborate discussion of the buildings and plan of Cæsarea, to which it must here suffice to refer.
[71] Cornelius was a centurion of the Italian band. This is another of the accidental coincidences which attest the genuineness of the Acts. The Roman army was divided into two broad divisions, the legions and the auxiliary forces. Now the legions were never permanently quartered in Palestine till the great war which ended in the destruction of Jerusalem, which began in A.D. 66 and ended in A.D. 70. A legion was then for the first time stationed with a fixed camp upon the site of the Holy City: see Mommsen's Roman Provinces, ii. 218. The auxiliary forces were a kind of militia raised upon the spot. Palestine was made a province of the second rank in A.D. 6, and from that time to the year 66 was garrisoned, like all second-rank provinces, exclusively by auxiliary troops, the headquarters of which were at Cæsarea. These auxiliaries, recruited amongst the Samaritans and Syrian Greeks, numbered one ala and five cohorts, about three thousand men: see Mommsen, loc. cit., p. 186. It would not have been prudent, however, to have a garrison in Palestine exclusively composed of troops locally recruited, even though restricted to Samaritans and Syrians, just as no prudent English government would garrison Ireland with a militia drawn from Ulster Orangemen alone. The Roman Government therefore mingled with the garrison of Cæsarea an auxiliary cohort composed of Italians. There were thirty-two Italian auxiliary cohorts which were thus used as a salutary precaution against treachery on the part of the local militia. See, on this interesting point, Marquardt, L' Organisation Militaire chez les Romains, p. 189 (French Edition), where this learned German writer often quotes the Acts of the Apostles to illustrate the military arrangements in Palestine during the first sixty years of the first century. Such was the military organisation of Palestine from A.D. 6 to 66. After that period Palestine was ruled in the sternest military manner, and treated like a border province subject to martial law with legionaries scattered all over it. Now if the Acts were written in the beginning of the second century, a writer would almost certainly have missed the correct description of the troops stationed at Cæsarea as St. Luke gives it in this passage. See also the article "Exercitus" in the new edition of Smith's Dictionary of Roman and Greek Antiquities; Mommsen, on the Roman Legions, in Ephemeris Epigraphica, vol. v. and Pfitzner, Geschichte der Römischen Kaiserlegionen.
[72] "The Roman camps were also the best training-schools for the old-fashioned virtues of faithfulness, straightforwardness, and hardihood; and in them were to be found the best types of the old Roman character, which, as moralists complained, were to be found elsewhere no more. If the funds of a country town had fallen into disorder, or uprightness was needed for a special post, the curator chosen by the Government was often an old soldier, who had long been tried and trusted; and early Christian history throws, incidentally, a favourable light upon the moral qualities of the Roman officer. These qualities were mainly formed by thoroughness of work and discipline."—W. W. Capes, The Early Empire, p. 210.
[73] See the article on "Proselytes" in Schaft's Encyclopædia of Theology.
[74] I owe a great many of the devout thoughts dealing with the latter portion of this subject to a volume of sermons preached by the celebrated Golden Lecturer, the eloquent Henry Melville, styled Voices of the Christian Year. Melville is now as a preacher quite forgotten, and yet he deserves to be gratefully remembered, for he was the first of the old Evangelical school to break through the traditional repetition of commonplaces which formed the main part of the preaching of the leading popular orators of fifty years ago. From a preacher's point of view his sermons will still repay study. His sermons, for instance, on the less known characters of Scripture, will teach a young divine how to extract edification and instruction out of most unpromising materials, and to apply the essential principles of the Bible to the changed circumstances of modern life. And assuredly this is the real object of a pastor's preaching in a Christian congregation, not the mere repetition of the first elements of Christianity, but an application of its great principles, first proclaimed in the language of the East, to the actions and lives of the men of the West. Preaching of that kind need never be dull and uninteresting.
[75] The house of Simon the tanner is depicted in Lewin's St. Paul, vol. i., pp. 87, 88. There is a good description of it, as also of Joppa at large, in Geikie's The Holy Land and the Bible, vol. i., p. 18, from which we take the following: "On the south side of the town, at the edge of the sea, close to the lighthouse, one is reminded of the visit of St. Peter to Joppa by the claim of a paltry mosque to occupy the house of Simon the tanner. The present building is comparatively modern, and cannot be the actual structure in which the Apostle lodged. It is, however, regarded by the Mohammedans as sacred, one of the rooms being used as a place of prayer in commemoration, we are told, of the Lord Jesus having once asked God, while here, for a meal; on which a table forthwith came down from heaven. Strange variation of the story of St. Peter's vision! The waves beat against the low wall of the courtyard, so that, like the actual house of Simon, it is close on the sea-shore. Tanning, moreover, in accordance with the unchanging character of the East, is still extensively carried on in this part of the town."
[76] This is the rendering of Psalm lv. 18 according to the version in the Book of Common Prayer.
[77] A deceased friend of mine, a well-known member of the Society of Friends, once remarked to me about this very point that his Society, to which he belonged to his dying day, while aiming at the highest spirituality, in its neglect of all rules, and suitable therefore for persons of specially exalted tone, had rendered itself unfitted for the training of children. Children cannot be trained without rules, and a society which trusts to educate them in things religious without fixed and definite training must be a hopeless failure. The original principles of "Friends" preclude them from teaching children forms of private prayer, from using fixed Bible reading and regular religious instruction, as well as from stated family worship. Efforts have been made in later times to remedy this effect, but they are merely confessions of the failure of the principles inculcated by George Fox and Robert Barclay and acknowledgments that the Church from which they dissented was right.
[78] Tertullian's treatise on Prayer will be found in Clark's translation of his works, vol. i., pp. 178-204.