The sponsari of Julius Claudius and his Hebrew freedman were not men of rank, but experienced Christians. Indeed, one was an aged slave; but the Church numbered many such among her brightest jewels. Her internal order, though marked by distinctive and fixed degrees of rank, did not rest upon those external ones upon which worldly societies depend; the beautiful and harmonious bond of love alone united all the members of the universal or Catholic Church together in the first ages of Christianity. The admission of Julius Claudius and Adonijah was followed by the marriage of Lucia and her lover. If the existence of the nobly descended Roman lady had been known beyond the pale of the Church, some impediment might yet have divided her from Adonijah. Nor would it have been safe for the vestal who had broken her vow to have re-appeared in the heathen metropolis. So she was married to Adonijah in the privacy of the Sotterrania,[21] and Julius finally, through the purchased influence of Cenis, the mistress of the emperor Vespasian, got the name of Adonijah enrolled in one of the civic tribes. The new-made citizen of Rome did not intend to remain in the metropolis of the world. He wished to revisit his native land, for to him the desolation of Judea was dearer than the magnificence of imperial Rome. The Church of Jerusalem, with its bishop Simeon, had returned to Judea. No molestation was offered by the Gentile conquerors to those Jews who had never taken up arms against them, and the converted Israelites, of which the Church then holding the supremacy over every other was composed, had an apostle for their head of the lineage of David, being the kinsman of the Lord,[22] as well as his disciple. By this Church Adonijah and Lucia were received with affectionate greeting and hospitality. The travellers had indeed found a welcome from the brethren in every place, for the tenets of Christianity were widely promulgated throughout Asia; for the dispersion of Israel had caused many Gentiles to enter the Church, nor, as we have seen, did all the Jews remain in the blindness of error; for ecclesiastical records assure us that numbers about this time repented and received the faith they had blasphemed and persecuted, being convinced by the ruin of their city and destruction of their temple that the crucified Jesus was their promised Saviour.