Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/210

 growing heresy. Not long after the time of Pilate, the government of Judea had been committed by the emperor to Publius Petronius, the president of Syria, a man who, on the valuable testimony of Josephus, appears to have been of the most amiable and upright character,—wholly devoted to the promotion of the real interests of the people whom he ruled. On several occasions, he distinguished himself by his tenderness towards the peculiarly delicate religious feelings of the Jews, and once even risked and incurred the wrath of the vindictive Caligula, by disobeying his commands to profane the temple at Jerusalem by the erection of that emperor's statue within its holy courts,—a violation of the purity of the place which had been suggested to his tyrannical caprice by the spiteful hint of Apion, of Alexandria. But though Petronius, in this matter, showed a disposition to incur every hazard to spare the national and devotional feelings of the Jews so awful an infliction, there is nothing in his conduct which would lead us to suppose that he would sacrifice justice to the gratification of the persecuting malice of the Jews, any more than to the imperious tyranny of Caligula. The fairest conclusion from the events of his administration, is, that he regulated his behavior uniformly by his own sense of justice, with hardly any reference to the wild impulses, either of popular or imperial tyranny. A noble personification of independent and invincible justice; but one not beyond the range of the moral conceptions of a Roman, even under the corrupt and corrupting rule of the Caesars;—for thus wrote the great moral poet of the Augustan age, though breathing the enervating air of a servile court, and living on the favor of a monarch who exacted from his courtiers a reverence truly idolatrous:

Justum et tenacem propositi virum, Non civium ardor prava jubentium, Non vultus instantis tyranni Mente quatit solida. * * *

The moral energy of the Roman character made the exemplifications of this fair ideal not uncommon, even in these latter days of Roman glory. There were some like Petronius, who gave life and reality to this poetical conception of Horace,—"A man just and resolute, unshaken from his firm purpose alike by the wild impulses of popular rage, and by the frown of an overbearing tyrant." And these were among the chief blessings of the Roman sway, to those lands in which it ruled,—that the great interests of the country were not subjected to the blind movements of a