THE RELIGION OF THE JEWS. Among the cities captured by the Romans was Jerusalem, about which cluster so many stories from the Old Testament. There, hundreds of years before, lived David, the shepherd boy who, after wonderful adventures, became king of his people. There his son Solomon built a temple of dazzling splendor. Among this people had arisen great preachers,--Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah,--who declared that religion did not consist in the sacrifice of bulls and goats, but in justice, in mercy, and in humility. They had a genius for religion, just as the Greeks had a genius for art, and the Romans a genius for government. THE JEWS CONQUERED BY THE ROMANS. When the Jews first heard of the Romans they admired these citizens of a republic who made and unmade kings. In later years they learned that the Romans were hard masters and they feared and hated them. The Jewish kingdom was one of the last countries along the shores of the Mediterranean which the Romans conquered, but like all the others it finally became a Roman province. JESUS OF NAZARETH. A few years before the Jewish kingdom became a Roman province there was born in a village near Jerusalem a child named Jesus. After he had grown to manhood in Nazareth he gathered about him followers or disciples whom he taught to live and act as is told in the books of the New Testament. [Illustration: A VIEW OF JERUSALEM Showing the Mount of Olives in the distance] This was the beginning of the Christian religion. It was first held by a little band of Jews, but Paul, a Jew born in Tarsus, a city of Asia whose inhabitants had received the rights of Roman citizenship, believed that the message of the new religion was meant for all nations. He taught it in many cities of Asia Minor and Greece, and even went as far west as Rome. Several of the epistles or letters in the New Testament were written by Paul to churches which he had founded or where he had taught. So it happens that from Palestine came religious teachings which multitudes consider even more important than the art and literature of the Greeks or the laws and political methods of the Romans. WHY THE CHRISTIANS WERE PERSECUTED. The Romans at first refused to permit any one in their empire to call himself a Christian. They disliked the Jews because the Jews denied that the Roman gods were real gods, asserting that these gods were mere images in wood and stone. The Christians did this also, but in the eyes of the Roman rulers the worst offense of the Christians was that they appeared to form a sort of secret society and held meetings to which other persons were not admitted. The emperor had forbidden such societies.