Easter Day.[56] But these charges refute themselves. Jerusalem was a large and noble city in his day, and it is absurd to talk of the Jews having wished to rebuild it. Nor among all his edicts, preserved in the Theodosian Code, is there a word about cutting off ears or compulsory eating of pork. During this reign the Jews in Persia are accused of having stirred up a sanguinary persecution against the Christians. The latter had, for a long time past, been making their way into Sapor’s dominions, to the great vexation of the Jews. But when at last they had succeeded in converting to their faith Ustazades, one of Sapor’s chief officers, the irritation of the Jews rose to so great a height that they persuaded Sapor to put down the growing evil by the severest measures. A long and bloody persecution ensued, in which Simeon, Bishop of Ctesiphon, suffered martyrdom, the newly built churches were destroyed, and every trace of Christianity obliterated. Constans, the son of Constantine, who succeeded to the throne A.D. 353, far from relaxing any of the severities laid on the Jews by his father, proceeded to greater lengths against them. Provoked by an insurrection they had raised in Judæa, he re-enacted the laws of Adrian and his father—adding to them that any Jew who married a Christian, who circumcised, or even kept, any Christian slave, should be put to death. He also greatly increased the heavy taxes with which they were already loaded. It is no wonder that the accession of Julian—who, immediately after his assumption of the purple, publicly declared his abnegation of Christianity—should have been hailed by the Jews, as well as the pagans, as the dawn of a new day of freedom and prosperity to them. They hastened to present him with an address, representing, among other grievances, the great wrong done them in their exclusion from Jerusalem, the scene of the ancient glories of their race, the never-forgotten home of their ancestors, though the heathen were permitted to dwell there without molestation. While the most sacred sites were hidden by Christian churches, and devoted to Christian worship, the spot where their own beloved Temple had once stood lay desolate, and they were not even permitted to approach and gaze upon its ruins. Julian replied even more favourably than they could have hoped. He addressed the Jewish patriarch as ‘his brother;’ he inveighed against the unmerited severity with which they had been treated; he remitted the imposts of which they complained; annulled the decree by which they had been forbidden to enter Jerusalem; and finally gave them permission to rebuild the Temple on Mount Moriah, promising them every help in the execution of the work, and appointing one of his own favourite officers, Alypius, to superintend it.