was held, not only by his own people, but by many of the Jews themselves, may be inferred from a passage in the works of Josephus, (no longer indeed found in the modern copies, but referred to by Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome,) in which the historian confesses his opinion, that the calamities that subsequently befell Jerusalem were in token of the vengeance of God on account of the murder of this just man.
In accordance with the views of the majority of biblical critics on the character and design of the Epistle to the Hebrews, we may with tolerable accuracy suppose that it would be in this or some not-far-off period of similar trial, that the church in Palestine had the privilege of first receiving that divine discourse, the instructions and exhortations of which were so perfectly suited to the state of a community exposed to the inveterate malice of enemies like theirs. Combined with the sublimest views of the Christian mysteries, they had here inculcated a series of motives to perseverance, the most consolatory and cheering. So far from there being any true ground for doubting the reality of this specific destination of the epistle, it seems scarcely possible to read it with an ordinary degree of intelligence without finding one's self surrounded by the scenery of Jerusalem, and placed amid the local circumstances of a people like that which composed the Christian church in that city. The temple yet stood in solemn grandeur; the altars flamed; the priesthood of the B'ni-Levi ministered; and not only did the secular power, held by the enemies of the cross, place the Christian in jeopardy every hour, but, the long-established habits of the Jewish mind, the necessity for setting himself in a state of schismatical divorce from so much that had hitherto been held sacred, established, and inviolable, among his people and his forefathers, and for going forth without the camp, covered with reproach, to a
