whom He would have to mix, their manners and customs and dress. We must not, then, think it dull and uninteresting to learn something of the state of the country when He came. Trouble is well bestowed if it helps us to know Him better, to feel as well as to know what His life on earth must have been, and what He went through, not uncomplainingly only, but willingly and brightly for the love of us. A word, then, about the government of the country.
When Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, was led thither out of Mesopotamia, he found there the fierce and wicked race of Canaan, from whom it takes the first name by which we know it. God promised it to Abraham and his children, who called it the Land of Promise. They did not, however, get possession of it till more than five hundred years after Abraham. Then Jewish kings reigned there for five hundred years, till the Jews were taken into captivity by the Assyrians, and again for another hundred years before they came under Roman rule. It was because two royal brothers quarrelled about the crown that the Romans were called in. They soon settled the dispute by making the country a Roman province, obliging the Jews to pay a yearly tribute to Rome, and setting over them as king a foreigner, Herod the Great, in whose reign our Lord was born.
The Jews hated everything that reminded them of their subjection to Rome, the sight of the Roman eagles set up in public places, of Roman soldiers stationed here and there to keep them in order, of the Roman coins with which they had to pay the tribute; they even hated and despised their fellow-countrymen, the publicans, who collected the taxes for the Romans. They were
