neither their route nor their methods could be fully determined in advance, for they depended on future openings that might present themselves, and were therefore in large measure left to their own judgment. But the direction in which it was launched gives a clear intimation of the desires and hopes that animated its authors; it turned its back on Palestine and the East, and set its face toward Asiatic Greece and the famous centres of Greek civilisation ; it was, in short, a message from a Greek Church to their Greek brethren in other lands.
The condition of Western Asia at that time held out an exceptional promise of success to Christian Apostles. Thanks to the universal peace and settled order which the Czsars had established throughout the Empire, that region had attained a high pitch of industrial activity and commercial prosperity. In spite of the social corruption and luxurious vices which riches brought in their train, the consequent exuberance of life, social, intellectual and spiritual, afforded a favour- able opening for religious reform. The region had been in former centuries a frequent battlefield between Greek and Asiatic races, and still formed a border-land between eastern and western thought. But the religion which the people had inherited from ancient times was more Oriental than Greek, and its degraded type of sensuous worship could hardly satisfy the conscience even of a heathen community to which the influences of western civilisation had penetrated. Greek philosophy and Roman morality combined to create a nobler ideal of human duty and divine government than could be reconciled with the popular religion, so that all the better feelings of educated men and women were stirred into revolt against the debased superstition of the masses.
The religious ferment produced by this collision was specially aggravated by the multiplication of Jewish colonies in the principal cities of Asia Minor, systematically planted and fostered long ago through the wise policy of Syrian kings for the encouragement of trade and promotion of intercourse between these two races of their subjects. These settlements were particularly thriving in Southern Galatia, along the direct line of communication between the two capitals Antioch and Ephesus. Nowhere else are recorded such conspicuous traces of their religious influence over the surrounding population. They formed, of course, distinct communities of their own, divided from the Greeks by unsociable habits as well as ritual obligations and religious scruples. Yet their Scriptural teaching proved so attractive to seekers after God that a considerable num- ber of Greeks frequented their weekly services in the Pisidian