Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/233

 fact sufficiently notorious to have come within the knowledge of his historian; but as the most likely place for a secret retirement would have been some obscure region, this would increase the chances of its remaining subsequently unknown. This consideration is of some importance in settling a few negative facts in relation to various conjectures which have at different times been offered on the place of Peter's refuge.

Among these, the most idle and unfounded is, that on leaving Jerusalem he went to Caesarea. What could have suggested this queer fancy to its author, it is hard to say; but it certainly implies the most senseless folly in Peter, when seeking a hiding place from the persecution of king Herod Agrippa, to go directly to the capital of his dominions, where he might be expected to reside for the greater part of the time, and whither he actually did go, immediately after his disappointment about this very apostle. It was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire, to go thus away from among numerous friends who might have found a barely possible safety for him in Jerusalem, and to seek a refuge in Caesarea where there were but very few friends of the apostles, and where he would be in constant danger of discovery from the numerous minions of the king, who thronged all parts of that royal city, and from the great number of Greeks, Romans and Syrians, making up the majority of the population, who hated the very sight of a Jew, and would have taken vast pleasure in gratifying their spite, and at the same time gaining high favor with the king by hunting out and giving up to wrath an obscure heretic of that hated race. It would not have been at all accordant with the serpent-wisdom enjoined on the apostle, to have run his head thus into the lion's mouth, by seeking a quiet and safe dwelling-place beneath the very nose of his powerful persecutor.

Another conjecture vastly less absurd, but still not highly probable, is, that Antioch was the "other place" to which Peter went from Jerusalem; but an objection of great force against this, is that already alluded to above, in reference to the ineligibility of a great city as a place of concealment; and in this instance is superadded the difficulty of his immediately making this long journey over the whole extent of Agrippa's dominions, northward, at such a time, when the king's officers would be every where put on the alert for him, more particularly in the direction of his old home in Galilee, which would be in the nearest way to Antioch. His most politic movement, therefore, would be to take some shorter