Worship, too, was an ancient and ineradicable feature of town life. Many towns owed their first origin to some holy place, whose associations were lost in the most remote antiquity, and many were glorified by historical associations of the religiouspast. Such holy places were scattered up and liowu the land, but the history of Jesus brings us into contact chiefly with two of them^ Jacob's Well, near Shechem, and Bethlehem, the city of David. The concentration of the religious life of the nation in Jerusalem tended to discourage the attention paid to local shrines, and it is striking that to visit the former of the two above mentioned, Jesus had to journey into the heart of Samaria ; while, as regards Bethlehem, we never hear of it after the stories of His birth. It was the sjTiagogue which gave its religious aspect to the town life which Jesus knew. The first beginning of His ministn,- was in the synagogue of Xazareth. It is in connexion with the ruins of a costly synagogue that the controversy about the site of Capernaum still centres (cf. Sanday). While the Temple still gathered roimd it the national religious sentiment, the actual religious life of the people owed more to the sjTiagogues than to the Temple. In them religion was surrounded by individual memories and family associations. In them the Scriptures grew familiar, and the Law was expounded and appUed to the details of actual life. \Mule the Temple revealed to everj' true Israelite Jehovah as the God of his nation, the sjTiagogue kept about him the thought and presence of Jehovah as God of his home. Thus the idea of the city was more and more a religious idea in Israel, and her God was a city dweller. There is an Eastern proverb which speaks of homeless strangers as ' going to God's gate,' and the idea of the City of God, fostered ind^d by Jerusalem, yet hallowed every city of Israel. Not of the capital only, but of all her towns she sang that ' unless the Lord keep the citv, the watchman waketh but in vain' (Ps 1271).
There can be no question that the city conception entered largely into Jesus' view of His Kingdom. Josephus describes (perhaps in exaggerated terms) the Essene conception of the Kingdom of God as a spot beyond the ocean ' which is oppressed neither with storms of rain nor snow, nor with intense heat, but soft, cooling, zephjT west winds always blow ' (cf. Hausrath, i. 164). That Avas Utopia seen from the wilderness — the Kingdom of God seen from the desert. But for Jesus the desert was but an occasional resort. It was the croAvded streets of towns that set His point of view ; and the life — not the retreat from life — of men and women, was the ideal of His Kingdom. In every
E arable and prophecy of His wliicli describe it, we ear the hum of man's activity, and see him busy with human business.
The town life, however, which Jesus knew in Syria was very far fi-om the ideal. Of course, in estimating such matters, a large allowance must always be made for the different tastes of Easterns and Westerns, so that many things which impress us as disadvantages may have been either unnoticed or acttially enjoyed by Orientals. Nothing, for instance, strikes the traveller more than the con- stant publicity of life in the East, to which refer- ence has already been made. There seems, at first sight, to be no private life at all. Every one knows everything about everybody. The intimacy of family life appears to be everywhere, but without its aflection, and the uncea.sing sound of speech keeps up an unbroken and unseemly exposure of private afiairs. That Jesus felt this oppre.ssive at times is proved by those periodic retreats to desert places and to mountains which are so familiar to readers of the Gospels. The note of intimacy, the personal quality of intercourse even in crowded thoroughfares, appear in countless touches of the narrative. He Himself refers to it when He gives it as a thing to be counted on, that that which is told in the chamber will be proclaimed on the housetop (Mt 1(F, Lk 12^), (from which at least ten families would hear it). There is, behind the main speech of the Gospels, the sound of an eternal chatter among the 'rustling crowds.' Remarks of disciples and Wstanders are often overheard either by Jesus or by the reporter (Mt 13^- ^, Jn 4^ etc.). Sins of speech are more frequently referred to and rebuked than other sins.
This publicity, however, is but one part of the general sense of com/ortlessncss -which, depresses the Western A-isitor in the East. At one time, when Jesus was homeless, He eWdently felt this, con- trasting His own wandering life with that of foxes and of birds (Mt 8*'). But the homes themselves are often such as to seem very comfortless to the traveller. Of comse, comfort" is a matter which very largely depends upon custom, and the apparent want of it is often illusory. The streets are filthy, and often imtidy in detail ; but the inhabitants seem to have a .singidar lack of sensitiveness to smells, and the sordid litter of odds and ends ap- pears not to distract their eye from appreciation of the fine building that rises out of it. In many houses the floor is on two levels, the upper portion being for the human inhabitants, and the lower for cattle, whose mangers are hollowed out of tlie raised floor along its edge. Even in better houses the rooms are bare ; and jars for olives, oil, or water, along Arith corn - baskets and agricultural implements, give to the reception-rooms the ap- pearance of outhouses. The main desiderata seem to be heat in winter and coolness in summer, so that the interiors are generally dark — a state of matters which is not conducive to cleanliness. There is no glass, and the strong sunlight pene- trates the rooms in shafts which end in brilliant jewel-like flames of colour where they strike upon