It may be confidently asserted, that in portions of Asia Minor, Syria, and Northern Egypt, their faith had largely displaced the ancient superstitions. The splendid literature of the Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom, the rich fund of speculation in the Talmud, the intellectual wealth of Philo, the Pauline and Johannean Gnosis, brilliantly attest their intellectual vigor. The Rev. Brooke Foss Walcott, in Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible," declares, that from the date of the destruction of Jerusalem, in the year 70, the power of Judaism "as a present living force, was stayed." But such a statement can be accepted only in a much qualified sense. The destruction of Jerusalem put an end to the State more completely than the overthrow of any modern city could do; for the holy city was the home of the national life in a peculiar sense; it was the seat of the national worship in which the national life centred. With the temple fell the institutions that rested on the temple. When the walls were thrown down and the grand buildings levelled, it was like erasing the marks of history, tearing up the roots of tradition and setting the seal of destiny on the nation's future. The territory was small; the power of the great city was felt in every part of it, and the quenching of its light left the land in darkness. But the catastrophe which terminated the existence of the State, gave a new life to the religious idea and opened a new arena for its conquests. It greatly increased the number of Jews in the city of Rome, the imperial city of the West, the conquering metropolis; raised the congregations already existing there to a position of considerable importance; served to unite, by the sympathy of a common sorrow, parties that had been divided; had the effect in some measure to weaken antipathies, harmonize opinions and inflame zeal; in a word, transferred to Italy the faith that, in outward form, had been crushed in Palestine. Thenceforth Judaism, which had been a blended worship and polity, ceased to be a polity, and became more intensely than ever, because more exclusively, a worship.