On the river Strymon, near where it flows into the Strymonic gulf; but making no stay that is mentioned, they continued their journey in the same direction to Apollonia, an inland town on the river Chabrius, in the peninsula of Chalcidice; whence turning northwest they came next to Thessalonica, a large city at the head of the great Thermaic gulf. In this place was a synagogue of the Jews,—the first that they had found in their European travels; for in this thriving commercial place the Jews were, and always have been, in such large numbers, that they were abundantly able to keep their own house of worship and religious instruction, and had independence enough, as well as regard for the institutions of their fathers, to attend in large numbers weekly at this sanctuary. So zealous and successful indeed had they been in their devotion to their religion, that they had drawn into a profession of the faith of the God of Israel, a vast number of Greeks who attended worship with them; for such was the superior purity of the religion of the Jews, which regarded the one only living God, who was to be worshiped not in the debasing forms of statues, but in spirit and truth, that almost every place throughout the regions of Grecian civilization, in which the Jews had planted their little commercial settlements, and reared the houses of religious instruction, showed abundance of such instances as this, in which the bright intellectual spirit of the Greek readily appreciated the exalted character and the holy truth of the faith owned by the sons of Israel, and felt at once how far more suited to the conceptions of Hellenic genius was such a religion, than the degrading polytheism which the philosophy and poetry of a thousand years had striven in vain to redeem from its inherent absurdities. Among these intelligent but mixed congregations, Paul and his companions entered, and taking advantage of the freedom of religious discourse allowed to all by the order of a Jewish synagogue, they on three successive sabbaths reasoned with them out of the scriptures, on that great and all-absorbing point in the original apostolic theology,—that the Christ, the Messiah, so generally understood to be distinctly foretold in the Hebrew scriptures, was always described as destined to undergo great sufferings during his earthly career, and after a death of shame, was to rise from the grave;—and at last concluded with the crowning doctrine—"This Jesus, whom I preach to you, is this Christ."
This glorious annunciation of a new and spiritual dispensa-
