Nearly two thousand years of woe and degradation then lay in dark and direful perspective between the children of the dispersion and the dawn of those better things—those political privileges which the Christian legislature of our own land has accorded to them. Selfish hearts would churlishly deny to the Jew his newly granted civic rights, but they might as well shut out the light of heaven, or forbid the wind to blow, as withhold the blessings God has promised to his long-suffering people, whose restoration and final conversion is clearly decreed, and foretold by Isaiah and all the Jewish prophets. The converted Hebrews, always working with their hands, possessed none of the commercial privileges of their unconverted brethren. These poor saints when thrust out of the synagogues were subjected to much persecution in every place, and the collection made for their relief in the metropolis of the world would provide them the means of paying the heavy tribute imposed upon them by the Roman governors. The Church of Jerusalem was too poor to aid them; the descendants of some of the apostles were tillers of the soil, who literally earned their bread in the sweat of their brows. Many years had elapsed since Adonijah and his wife had quitted imperial Rome. The magnificent Coliseum, planned by a Christian architect martyred by Vespasian, and built by captive Jews destined to die at its dedication, shone brilliantly in the mid-day sun in its youthful magnificence; not, as now, hoary with centuries of age, save where the mantling ivy covers its ruined grandeur with a veil of beauty. A solitary subterranean epitaph records that Gaudentius, whose genius raised this mightiest monument of heathen power and heathen cruelty, died Christ’s soldier and servant, but leaves his history untold, the question how a Christian became the architect of such a structure undecided. Perhaps he was condemned like the Jewish masons to build his own arena of death and martyrdom—the first, not the last, Christian who suffered on that spot, in the mystic Babylon, for the witness of Jesus.[25] Adonijah regarded with mournful interest on the beautiful arch of Titus, and the emblems of the conqueror’s devastating victory and the desolation of Judea and Jerusalem. Nearly nineteen centuries have passed since the erection of a monument, beneath which no Jew’s foot has ever been known to tread, but which stands fair, glistening, and fresh in our own age as it did then, when his eyes first looked upon it. He saw in the Temple of Peace the seven-branched candlestick, the golden vine, and the splendid vessels formerly used in the temple service, and sighed over the degradation of the fallen Jewish Church. He looked upwards, nevertheless, and through the dim and shadowy future beheld the mystic dawning of that day when the dispersed of Israel would look upon Him with sorrow and contrition whom they pierced, and should be restored again to their own glorious land.