We are so much in the habit of confining our interest in this country to its history before the time of Christ that it will probably strike many with surprise to learn that the most flourishing epoch of its history was subsequent to that time; that never before had the arts and sciences reached so high a pitch; that never before had its population been so wealthy and luxurious, its architecture so grand, its commerce so flourishing, and its civilization generally so advanced. It is true it had lost its independence, and was only a Roman province, but it is just because it was one, and not a Jewish kingdom, that our impression of its actual condition at the time of Christ is apt to be so erroneous. This fact has been very forcibly brought to my notice in a recent trip which I have made along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, more especially along its little-explored northern and eastern coasts, where the evidences of the wealth and luxury of the former inhabitants still remain in unexampled profusion. In reading in the Gospels the narrative of the works and life of Christ, so much of which was spent upon the shores of the lake, in one of the cities of which he for some time took up his abode, most of us have endeavoured, probably, to picture him to ourselves amid purely Jewish surroundings and conditions closely resembling those which we have been in the habit of associating with that previous period of Jewish history with which we are familiar in the books of the Old Testament. So far from that being the case, the part of the country in which his ministrations were principally exercised, was beyond all others a centre of Roman life, with all its luxurious accompaniments. Nowhere else in Palestine was there such a congeries of rich and populous cities as were crowded round the shores of this small lake. Nowhere else could the Jewish reformer come into closer contact with the rites of a worship alien to his own.