The subsisting alliance between civil authority and religious worship, which existed in the Roman world, whatever the particular gods worshipped, and rites and customs practised in the various countries composing it might be, was interrupted and snapped asunder by the proclamation of the Gospel as an universal religion. It is true that in the first twelve years, while the Apostles addressed themselves to the Jewish people, wherever they might be, inviting them to accept Jesus as the Christ, the liberty to do this, within the various synagogues, might be covered by the liberty accorded to the Jewish race everywhere on Roman soil to practise their own religion as a thing handed down to them from their ancestors. So long as it was a question of Jewish law—in the words of the Roman proprætor, the brother of Seneca, at Corinth—the protection of an undoubtedly sanctioned religion, to use the phrase of Tertullian, would veil from censure the action of the Apostles; but as soon as, and in proportion as the kingdom of Christ came forth to the Gentiles as an universal religion—so soon as Christ was declared to them to be the Son of God, the Saviour of the world—so soon as men were distinguished as Christians, as they were already at Antioch, that is, recognised to be not a Jewish sect, but the adherents of a substantive religion with distinct belief, which was repudiated by the mass of Jews, a religion of universal import, which was founded on the Person of a Redeemer, the God-man who had come into the world, lived as a man, died, and risen again, and who called upon all men to be His followers, whether Jews or Gentiles, it became evident that the toleration, nay more, the support and guarantee for all religions which were subsisting equally for the various peoples of the Roman Empire, did not apply to the followers of the new religion. St. Paul, for instance, as a ringleader of the Galilean sect, was punishable and was punished by the Jewish Sanhedrim, as infringing what they considered the orthodox Jewish belief, and this conduct of the Jewish authority, everywhere pursued towards the Christians, drew upon them the attention of the Roman magistrates. The culmination of this conduct and policy was seen as to its result in the persecution set on foot by Nero, under Jewish instigation, and the act of Nero seems to have had the permanent effect of establishing the illicitness of the Christian faith, in the sight of Roman law. The destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, as the seat of Jewish worship, completely established the severance of the Christian people from the Jews, and gave them religious independence with all its honour and all its perils. For what was their position towards that universal heathendom which surrounded them on all sides? Take the three great constituents of belief, of worship, and of government, which we been have considering in their several departments, in their relations with each other, and in their co-inherence.