not. They were strangers and pilgrims (as St. Peter calls them), who
had no city or government of their own, but had been scattered abroad
among the Gentiles, and settled in all the great cities of the Roman
Empire, especially in the East: in Babylon, from which St. Peter
wrote his epistle, where the Jews had a great settlement in the rich
plains of the river Euphrates; in Syria; in Asia Minor, which we now
call Turkey in Asia: in Persia, and many other Eastern lands. There
they lived by trade, very much as the Jews live among us now; and as
long as they obeyed the Roman law, they were allowed to keep their
own worship, and their own customs, and their law of Moses, and to
have their synagogues in which they worshipped the true God every
Sabbath-day. But evil times were coming on these prosperous Jews.
Wicked emperors of Rome and profligate governors of provinces were
about to persecute them. In Alexandria in Egypt, hundreds of them
had been destroyed by lingering tortures, and thousands ruined and
left homeless. Caligula, the mad emperor, had gone further still.
Fancying himself a god, he had commanded that temples should be
raised in his honour, and his statues worshipped everywhere. He had
even gone so far as to command that his statue should be set up in
the Temple of Jerusalem, and to do actually that which St. Paul
prophesied a few years after the man of sin would do, 'Exalt himself
over all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he would
sit in the temple of God, and show himself as God.'

Then followed a strange scene, which will help to explain much of
this Epistle of St. Peter. The Jews of Jerusalem did not rise in
rebellion. They did what St. Peter told the Jews of Asia Minor to
do. They determined to suffer for well-doing,--to die as martyrs,
not as rebels. Petronius, the Roman governor who was sent to carry
out the order, was a strange mixture of good and bad. He was a