The long expected favorite and friend of the Jewish people, having been thus hailed sovereign by their grateful voices, and having strengthened his throne and influence by his opening acts of liberality and devotion to the national faith, now entered upon a reign which presented only the portents of a course most auspicious to his own fame and his people’s good. Uniting in his person the claims of the Herodian and Asmonaean lines,――with the blood of the heroic Maccabees in his veins, ――crowned by the imperial lord of the civilized world, whose boundless power was pledged in his support, by the obligations of an intimate personal friendship, and of a sincere gratitude for the attainment of the throne of the Caesars through his prompt and steady exertions, ――received with universal joy and hope by all the dwellers of the consolidated kingdoms of his dominion, which had been long thriving under the mild and equitable administration of a prudent governor, ――there seemed nothing wanting to complete the happy auspices of a glorious reign, under which the ancient honors of Israel should be more than retrieved from the decline of ages. Yet what avails the bright array of happily conspiring circumstances, to prince or people, against the awful majesty of divine truth, or the pure, simple energy of human devotion? Within the obscurer corners of his vast territories, creeping for room under the outermost colonnades of that mighty temple whose glories he had pledged himself to renew,――wandering like outcasts from place to place,――seeking supporters only among the unintellectual mass of the people,――were a set of men of whom he probably had not heard until he entered his own dominions. They were now suggested to his notice for the first time, by the decided voice of censure from the devout and learned guardians of the purity of the law of God, who invoked the aid of his sovran power, to check and utterly uproot this heresy, which the unseasonable tolerance of Roman government had too long shielded from the just visitations of judicial vengeance. Nor did the royal Agrippa hesitate to gratify, in this slight and reasonable matter, the express wishes of the reverend heads of the Jewish faith and law. Ah! how little did he think, that in that trifling movement was bound up the destiny of ages, and that its results would send his name――though then so loved and honored――like Pharaoh’s, down to all time, a theme of religious horror and holy hatred, to the unnumbered millions of a thousand races, and lands then unknown;――an awful doom, from which one act of benign protection, or of prudent kindness, to that feeble band of hated, outcast innovators, might have retrieved his fame, and canonized it in the faithful memory of the just, till the glory of the old patriarchs and prophets should grow dim. But, without one thought of consequences, a prophetic revelation of which would so have appalled him, he unhesitatingly stretched out his arm