The Spring Festival in the Roman Empire occurred at almost the same period of the year as the Jewish Passover and the Christian crucifixion; so that the tortures inflicted on Christ and the later Christian martyrs at this period were really to glut the lust for blood that was part of the old pagan worship. Free gifts for charity to the mob had degenerated into a bribe to the populace in place of justice. Rome was no longer Roman. It was a composite of the known world. Though Rome gave her Empire good laws and stable government, as Apollonius, the sage, pointed out to the General, Vespasian, she could not ensure the execution of those laws for two reasons: if she appointed local governors or kings, like the Herods, to hold loyalty, she could not prevent them exacting extortionate taxes for their own wealth; if she appointed Roman governors like Pilate, they could not speak the languages of the far-flung provinces and had to depend on underlings of native birth, who perverted Roman justice. The Roman Empire was falling to pieces from over-extension. Democracy was degenerating to mobocracy and mobocracy to the tyranny of the Army. Would the old Idumean guard have been executed for the loss of his prisoner in the shipwreck? He most certainly would; for Rome was as ruthless to her own, as to her provincials. The object in kidnapping a beautiful slave can be found in the four lives that have been written of Apollonius. We sometimes despair of the world because religion seems to have done so little to change men. The despair is the voice of unbelief. Read the old records. The tortures of Thecla were mild compared to the martyrdom of many a Christian in the pleasure gardens of Nero, where the victims were dipped in oil and then tied to stakes, as torches, in ridicule of the claim that they were the torch bearers of light and glad news. Rome standing for irresistible brute power, was ever jealous of the cultured Greeks; and the Greeks returned scorn for scorn—which would explain why Onesimus, a Greek runaway, was friendless in Rome. By the time of Paul’s first imprisonment, 63-64 A.D., Nero’s madness was acknowledged in Rome. The great fire, of which Paul and Seneca corresponded, took place in 64 A.D., but Rome, rolling in wealth and luxury, did not want to upset prosperity by destroying good times; and only after Nero’s suicide and three years of turbulence, when the Army loomed as a terrible menace, was Vespasian, the strong general, called to become Emperor. Regarding the Three Taverns, all through the Empire at this time, the keepers of the wine shops were women; and in the East, they were called Rahabs—a name with evil import to us to-day; but all the Rahabs were not harpies—as witness the Rahab of Jericho in Joshua’s day. Fuller details of the equinoctial gales at Crete will be given on the chapter on Apollos and John.