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.
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