Jews, and the champions of a restricted policy, confining the benefits of the Messiah's advent to the true Israelites. [Footnote 5: See "Judaism in Rome," p. 245.] The destruction of Jerusalem was one of the causes that may have operated to close this gulf. By breaking up the head-quarters of the Christian conservatism, and dispersing the lingerers there among the inhabitants of Gentile cities, it weakened their ties, widened their experience, softened their prejudices, and prepared them to accept the larger interpretation of their faith. The writings of the New Testament, all of them produced after the destruction of Jerusalem, some of them fifty or sixty years after, none of them less than ten or fifteen years, bear traces of this enlargement. The Jewish christians living in Greek and Roman Cities could hardly avoid the temptations to adopt that view of their faith which commended it to the communities whereof they were a part, and this was the view presented by Paul and his school, the intellectual, or, as some prefer to call it, the "spiritual" view. According to this view, also, the new religion was grafted on the old, Judaism was the foundation; the root from which sprung the branches, however widely spreading. Paul, as has been remarked, addressed himself invariably to Jews, in the first instance, and turned to the Gentiles only when the Jews rejected him. The essential beliefs of the religious Jew he retained, never exchanging them for the beliefs of Paganism, or qualifying them with the speculations of heathen philosophy. He labored in the interest of the faith of Israel, broadly interpreted, nor, in respect of his fundamental conceptions, did he ever wander far from the religion of his fathers. The spiritual distance between the school he founded, and the school that in his life time he opposed, was not so wide that it might not in course of time, be diminished, until at length it disappeared entirely. Parties holding the same cardinal belief, will not forever be separated by incidental barriers, especially when, as was the case with the destruction of Jerusalem, providence moves the chief barriers away.