THE ROTUNDA AND CHAPEL OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE.

it is with the living interest which attaches to all that touched Christ, and entered in any way into Christianity. It is a far-reaching generalisation which reminds us that “the great civilisations have always risen in the meeting-places of ideas.”[19] Historically it is true that the times of greatest international struggle have been times of heightened vitality, when the mingling nations were ready to receive and to impart much, and to send forth a new spirit upon the world. Nothing could be more providentially apposite, from this point of view, than that Jesus should have been born “amid the fever of the establishment of the Roman power in Judea.” He kept aloof, indeed, from the Herodian people who lived delicately in kings’ houses, and from all the Greek and Græco-Roman life of his day. Yet, as Dr. Smith has shown us memorably, Jesus was no quiet rustic dreaming dreams and seeing visions far from the life of men. He lived and died in close touch with all that Rome, Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Arabia had to show. Not for the first time, nor for the last, did He see, in His temptation, “the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” As this realisation becomes more and more distinct, a new force is added to the contention that His Gospel is the Gospel for the world. It was thought out and first preached amid the throng of commerce, and while the din of battle was as yet hardly silent.

This contact of Jesus Christ with Rome, which under Paul’s hand was to become the messenger and instrument of His kingdom, is vividly associated with two hill-tops in Palestine. One of them is that height near Nazareth, some ten minutes distant from the village well, the description of whose outlook closes the chapter on Galilee in the Historical Geography with the well-known passage about the boyhood of Jesus. There, while He faced seawards, lay on the left hand below Him the wine-coloured, battle-soaked plain of Jezreel, with squadrons of the Roman army marching east and west along it; while on the right hand the Sepphoris Road ran ribbon-like along the ranges, with its constant stream of merchandise. The other hill-top is that known as “Gordon’s Calvary” at Jerusalem—a low and rounded hillock just outside the Damascus Gate. If this be indeed the site of Calvary, Christ was crucified on a wedge of ground between a military and a commercial road; and “they that passed by wagging their heads” may have been soldiers from the Tower as well as merchants from the Northern Gate.

Certain it is, at least, that Rome was about His cradle and His grave. The earliest narratives of His earthly career bring Him to Bethlehem to a Roman taxation; the latest story delivers Him to a Roman judge, to Roman soldiers, and to a Roman cross.

CHAPTER III
CHRISTIAN

From the invasion of warlike Rome we turn to that “Peace and her huge invasion” which came to the Holy Land during the later days of the Roman Empire. Before the time of Constantine the Church in Syria had grown and spread with such startling vitality and promise of even more abundant life as to bring down upon her the cruelty of persecutions. In the north the Christian communities were mainly Gentile, in the south Jewish Christians. They must have been intellectually as well as spiritually vigorous, for the curious speculations and mystic dreams of the Gnostics had already, in the second century, gained footing in Syrian Christianity.

With Constantine (324-337) Roman persecution ceased for ever. The Jews were permitted to return to Jerusalem, and the construction of the written Talmud began its career of three centuries. Julian, the last emperor on the throne before the Empire divided into east and west, had apostatised from the Christian faith before his ascension, and in 361 he attempted the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem as a strength to Judaism against Christianity. But the Galilean had conquered, and it was the day of Christ. The recognition of Christianity as the religion of the State began a new era, which ran on for a thousand years in the Eastern Empire, until the siege of Constantinople changed the face of Europe in 1453. The words of Dante will often recur to the student of early Christian days in Palestine:—

Ah! Constantine, what evil came as child
Not of thy change of creed, but of the dower
Of which the first rich father thee beguiled.

The reference is to the legend of “The Donation of Constantine,” by which he transferred Rome and the states of the Church to the Papal See. Christianity in Syria has run a strange career.