In passing through his native land Adonijah soften paused to weep and pray. He lamented the woes of his country, while he acknowledged the justice of the sentence that had gone forth against her. He visited the ruins of Nazareth and Bethlehem, he wept at Mount Calvary, he mourned over the destruction of the temple; but he saw the traces made in the living rock by the earthquake, and the sepulchre that could not hold in its keeping the risen Son of God, and was comforted. One was by his side who shared his sorrows and his joys, who wept with him for the sins of his people, and rejoiced in that atonement by which they might yet be forgiven and restored to their own land.[23] It was natural that a converted Jew, long exiled from his native land, should seek the memorable spots rendered holy by the birth, ministry, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, and that his Gentile wife should share his feelings, and accompany him in his pilgrimage; yet pilgrimages were not common in the first ages of the Church. No allusion to such visits can be found in any part of the New Testament, to afford either example or encouragement to a practice that afterwards became so general. The faith of the early Christians needed not such excitement; they felt the presence of their Lord in heaven, and did not seek to trace his footsteps upon earth. Lucia Claudia had not quitted Rome without regret; she was a member of that glorious Church to which the noblest of St. Paul’s Epistles had been addressed while he was yet personally unknown to his Roman brethren. She was the pastoral daughter of Linus, the friend of Pomponia Græcina and of the fair British convert Claudia, celebrated by Martial for her beautiful complexion, but whom the Church numbered among its precious jewels; Clement, too, and many other persons whose names were written in the Book of Life, regarded Lucia Claudia as a sister. No human society was ever so closely united in friendship as the primitive Christians, who obeyed from the heart the new commandment enjoined by their Lord, “Love one another.”