Smyrna, the see of Bishop Polycarp, was fully exposed to the influences of this reviving Paganism. The rhetorician, Aristides--true type of the Pagan charlatan who summoned to his aid in subjugating a superstitious people the mysterious and occult powers with which astrology and dreams, auguries and witchcrafts, invested their possessors--was himself a frequent dweller in Smyrna. Often must he have heard of and despised the man branded by the titles, 'the teacher of Asia, the father of the Christians, the puller-down of our gods, who teacheth numbers not to sacrifice nor worship'[87] which--like the inscription over his crucified Lord--did unconsciously proclaim the very and only truth. Twice did the city of Smyrna, during Polycarp's prime, receive fresh honours and privileges for her devotion to the worship of Imperial deities. The religious guild of the temples of the Augusti celebrated here their festivals with exceptional splendour; the 'theologians' and 'choristers,' who owed their existence and affluence to the magnificence of a Hadrian, not only saluted him as their 'god,' their 'saviour and founder,' but by senatorial decree established games--the Olympia Hadrianea--grotesquely pompous in titular magnificence. Naturally this affected the well-being of the infant Church of Christ in Smyrna; but that Church was assailed from another quarter, and by the sharpened weapons, not of a scornful superiority, but of fanatical hatred. The Jews were both numerous and powerful in Smyrna, and two cruel episodes in their late national history accentuated their fury against the Christians wherever they met with them. The first was the destruction of Jerusalem (A. D. 70). The fugitives from Palestine, who found refuge in Smyrna with their fellow-countrymen already settled there, found sympathy also--save from one class, the Christians. Compassion these last could feel for men whose best blood had welled over the courts of the Temple, whose dearest and nearest had perhaps perished in Jerusalem, that 'cage of furious madmen, a city of howling wild beasts and of cannibals--a hell' (Renan); but they knew to be true what a Titus had acknowledged, that 'the hand of God' was in the victory of Rome. They saw in the downfall of the Holy City the retribution of the Heavenly Father for the crucifixion of the Messiah; and sorrow with the sorrow of the weeping patriots of Israel they could not and would not. Their refusal was the signal for a determination to seize every opportunity of revenge; and the second episode, to which we have alluded, is connected with a specially furious outburst of maddened passion against Christians on the part of the Jews. Hadrian, fifty years after the fall of Jerusalem, had resolved upon rearing on its ruins the city of Ælia Capitolina. Then flashed forth the rebellion of the Jew Bar-cochba (A. D. 132-4). The 'Son of the Star,' supported by his standard-bearer, Akiba, the greatest of the Rabbins, measured his strength with Rome. With mouth breathing forth flames,[88] he inspired his partisans with confidence, and his enemies with terror. Flung back, disappointed, and slain at Bither, the 'Son of a Lie,' as his disappointed countrymen had found him to their cost and re-named him, had yet found opportunities of inflicting terrible tortures and agonizing deaths upon those Christians in Palestine, who had dared to reject his Messianic claims, and refused to blaspheme Christ. And the spirit of vengeance spread from the Holy Land to the provinces. Twenty years after the death of the rebel leader, the Jews of Smyrna--probably to Polycarp 'a synagogue of Satan,' as in earlier times St. John his master had described