Hailing the first blush of returning day, I sat on the desolate shore and read the inspired history of Cæsarea. Excepting Jerusalem, no city in Palestine is more intimately connected with the early Christian Church. Coming from the interior, the apostles sought the great centres of commerce, where they preached to men of all nations their catholic faith. Having baptized the Ethiopian eunuch, Philip the Evangelist followed the coast, and, preaching Jesus to the inhabitants of all the maritime cities thereon, he came to Cæsarea.[510] Thirty years thereafter, here, with his four daughters, he resided as one of the seven deacons of the infant church, when St. Paul and St. Luke were his guests. It was in his house that Agabus took Paul’s girdle, and, binding his own hands and feet, foretold the arrest and imprisonment of the apostle to the Gentiles.[511] Arrested in the Holy City, here Paul was brought a prisoner by order of Claudius Lysias, and somewhere amid these ruins was the dungeon in which he was confined two years. In obedience to Roman law, hither came Ananias the high-priest, with the orator Tertullus, to accuse him before the governor. Here stood the palace of the sordid Felix and his adulterous Drusilla, where he “reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come;” and where he made that marvelous defense before Agrippa and Festus, provoking the taunt from the latter, “Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning hath made thee mad;” and extorting the concession from the former, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” And from this harbor, now the wreck of earlier grandeur, that apostle entered the ship Adramyttium, under Julius, a centurion of Augustus’s band, to prosecute his appeal before Cæsar, and at last to die a martyr at Ire Fontana, beneath the walls of Rome.[512] Here was the home of the devout Cornelius, to whom Peter came from Joppa on the coast, 33 miles to the south, with the keys of the kingdom of heaven, to open its gates to the Gentiles and baptize the first heathen convert. Here, in the year 270 A.D., Eusebius Pamphili was born, and subsequently this was the birthplace of Procopius the historian.