importance, and the anti-Semitic sentiment of Tacitus was evoked not only by the disreputable section of the chosen people, but also by the men who, as members of the Imperial household, had a large share in the administration of the State. Again, we should be mistaken if we attributed to the whole Jewish race distributed throughout the civilized world the same sentiments which prevailed among the bigoted Jews of Jerusalem. Even at Jerusalem, where the introduction of the Roman standards invariably produced a riot, the priests of the Temple accepted the offerings made by the different Roman generals who passed by or occupied the Sacred City; and the omission of a Gentile commander to show this form of respect to the one God was somewhat inconsistently resented. At Alexandria especially free intercourse with men who represented the wisdom of the Egyptians and the Greeks modified the conceptions of orthodox but not bigoted Jews, and the spirituality of Judaism steadily tended to prevail over its ceremonial exclusiveness. Learned Jews enjoyed as wide reputations as other learned men, and were in communication with learned Greeks; Tiberius himself is said to have nicknamed Apion the Greek, to whose anti-judaic treatise Josephus replied, “the rattle of the universe.” But while on the one hand a reformed and spiritualized Judaism was tending to become the effective religion of the Empire, the debased Judaism was joining hands with the other demoralizing superstitions of the East. No one who has read the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul attentively can deny that if there were spiritually-minded Jews like the great Apostle, there were also Jews who practised exorcisms and divination, and who studied “curious books.” We know little of the peculiar tenets of the Chaldæans and the Magians, equally little of the Egyptians, except as worshippers of Isis, but we know that fortune-telling and witchcraft were practised by them, no less than dignified inquiries into the laws of nature, so far as their imperfect means of observation permitted. The dividing line between Thrasyllus the “mathematician,” the friend of Tiberius, and those men whom foolish Libo consulted, would have been difficult to draw, science was not to be clear of superstition for many ages, but there were respectable astrologers, genuine, though perhaps mistaken, searchers after truth, alongside of the disreputable charlatans who interpreted dreams and told fortunes and held sway over the dissolute imaginations of needy profligates by means of conjuring tricks and skilfully organized conspiracies with numerous confederates. Even the purest of Jewish sects--if indeed they can be called a sect--the Essenians, laid stress upon their powers of predicting events by means of the stars.