throughout all nations.  The Jews had a more than ordinary attachment to their native land.  Patriotism in their case was not only a passion, but a part of their religion; and their love of country was entwined with the holiest feelings of their nature.  In Jerusalem alone could God be acceptably worshipped.  And yet it was divinely ordered that those who had been for ages the hermits of the human race should become all at once the most cosmopolitan, when the time for imparting to the world the benefits of their isolated religious training had come.  And the Jews thus scattered abroad preserved amid their alien circumstances their national worship and customs, and thus became the natural links of connection between the missionaries of the Cross and the Gentiles whom they wished to reach.  Through such Jewish channels the Gospel speedily penetrated into remote localities, which otherwise it would have taken a long time to reach.  We are struck with distinct traces of the Christian faith in the time of St. Paul in the most unexpected places.  For instance, in the National Museum at Naples I have seen rings with Christian emblems engraved upon them, which were found at Pompeii; proving beyond doubt that there had been followers of Jesus even in that dissolute place, who, unlike Lot and his household, were overwhelmed in the same destruction with those whose evil deeds must have daily vexed their righteous souls.  The same symbols which we find in the Roman Catacombs,—­the palm branch, the sacred fish the monogram of Jesus, the dove, are unmistakably represented on these rings.  Some of them are double, indicating that they were used by married persons:  one has the palm branch twice repeated; another exhibits the palm and anchor; a third has a dove with a twig in its bill; and one ring has the Greek word elpis—­hope—­inscribed upon it.

St. Paul at Puteoli may be said to have dwelt among his own people.  Not only was he with his own countrymen and fellow-disciples, but he was in the midst of associations that forcibly recalled his home.  The apostle was a citizen of a Greek city, and the language in which he spoke was Greek; and here, in the Bay of Naples, he was in the midst of a Greek colony, where Roman influence had not been able to efface the deep impression which Greece had made upon the place.  The original name of the splendid expanse of water before him was the Bay of Cumae; and Cumae was absolutely the first Greek settlement in the western seas.  Neapolis or Parthenope was the beautiful Greek name of the city of Naples, testifying to its Hellenic origin; and Dicaearchia was the older Greek name of Puteoli, a name used to a late period in preference to its Latin name, derived from the numerous mineral springs in the neighbourhood.  The whole lower part of Italy was wholly Greek; its arts, its customs, its literature, were all Hellenic; and its people belonged to the pure Ionic race whose keen imaginations and vivid sensuousness seemed to