Christians wherever they met with them. The first was the destruction of Jerusalem (A. D. 70). The fugitives from Palestine, who found refuge in Smyrna with their fellow-countrymen already settled there, found sympathy also--save from one class, the Christians. Compassion these last could feel for men whose best blood had welled over the courts of the Temple, whose dearest and nearest had perhaps perished in Jerusalem, that 'cage of furious madmen, a city of howling wild beasts and of cannibals--a hell' (Renan); but they knew to be true what a Titus had acknowledged, that 'the hand of God' was in the victory of Rome. They saw in the downfall of the Holy City the retribution of the Heavenly Father for the crucifixion of the Messiah; and sorrow with the sorrow of the weeping patriots of Israel they could not and would not. Their refusal was the signal for a determination to seize every opportunity of revenge; and the second episode, to which we have alluded, is connected with a specially furious outburst of maddened passion against Christians on the part of the Jews. Hadrian, fifty years after the fall of Jerusalem, had resolved upon rearing on its ruins the city of AElia Capitolina. Then flashed forth the rebellion of the Jew Bar-cochba (A. D. 132-4). The 'Son of the Star,' supported by his standard-bearer, Akiba, the greatest of the Rabbins, measured his strength with Rome. With mouth breathing forth flames,[88] he inspired his partisans with confidence, and his enemies with terror. Flung back, disappointed, and slain at Bither, the 'Son of a Lie,' as his disappointed countrymen had found him to their cost and re-named him, had yet found opportunities of inflicting terrible tortures and agonizing deaths upon those Christians in Palestine, who had dared to reject his Messianic claims, and refused to blaspheme Christ. And the spirit of vengeance spread from the Holy Land to the provinces. Twenty years after the death of the rebel leader, the Jews of Smyrna--probably to Polycarp 'a synagogue of Satan,' as in earlier times St. John his master had described them (Rev. ii. 9)--found their opportunity. Their vengeance then was only slaked by the blood of the Christian Bishop. The Saint's martyrdom was the crowning consummation of the Saint's life. With the Bishop of Durham's help we can now collect all that we shall probably ever know of both; and to this we turn in conclusion.[89]