Our course was northwesterly, for the headland of Pausilippo, which lay about eighteen miles distant, directly across the bay. We pulled several miles before we caught the land-breeze, which soon sent us in under the romantic coast for which we were steering. Passing between Pausilippo and Nisida, the island that is said to have been the temporary retreat of Brutus after the death of Cæsar, we hauled up into the little bay beyond, which is that of Baiæ. Here the town of Pozzuoli stands, on a low projection that runs into the water. There is little, perhaps no doubt, that this is the Puteoli of Paul. I thought of this apostle and of his perilous voyage as we rounded to at the quay, and pictured to myself the sort of vessel in which he had arrived, nearly eighteen centuries since, in the same harbour. She was called the Castor and Pollux, (what a thing to know even her name!) the ship of Alexandria, that had wintered in Melita, and which put into Syracuse, where she lay three days. Thence “we fetched a compass, and came to Rhegium.” This is the Reggio of Lower Calabria, which lies nearly opposite to Messina. “And after one day, the south wind blew, and we came the next day to Puteoli.” We learn some curious facts by the simple narrative of the apostle. He sailed, first, in a ship of Adramyttium, bound to some port that lay on the way to Rome. This was a regular convoy of prisoners; and we may gain some idea of the means of communication between the different parts of the empire, and of the relative insignificance of Jerusalem, at that period, by the circumstance that no direct conveyance offered. It has been objected to the authenticity of the Books of the Apostles, that the Roman writers did not speak of Christ. That the Jewish writers did not, (the well known allusion of Josephus being generally admitted to be an interpolation,) must be ascribed to his appearance conflicting with their own notions of the Messiah. There certainly _was_ a sect called Christians, who took their origin from a reputed Christ, and these facts _must_ have been known to the contemporary Hebrews, and yet _they_ are silent. But with the Romans it was different. The means of communication were so few, and Jerusalem was so unimportant in the eyes of the mistress of the world, that the philosophers who prided themselves in an elaborate system of mythology, in which an attempt is made to personify the attributes of the Deity,--a system that bears some such mystified relation to divine truths, as the black-letter notions of an old-school lawyer bear to abstract justice,--did not think such provincial opinions of sufficient interest to occupy their time and attention. On this point an error is sometimes committed by confounding the importance of Christianity at a later day, with the importance previously to, and immediately after, the Crucifixion.