Thirty years passed: the miseries of Judæa and her hapless people increased. The Law of Moses was still, indeed, the religion of the country; in some hearts pure and spiritual as it had been given, in others, burdened with superstition, violence, and minutiæ, wholly foreign to its beautiful consistency: in others fast giving place to the customs and habits of the Romans. Darkness—moral, intellectual, and spiritual—had gathered over the nation as a whole. God had left them in His wrath to pursue their own hardened course; but even at this period, when the true religion seemed fast fading from the earth, a ray of reviving lustre beamed exactly in confirmation of the consoling theory, that God never leaves Himself without witnesses upon earth.

Helena, queen of Adiabene, a district beyond the Tigris, had embraced Judaism. An independent sovereign, whose dominion over her own subjects was absolute, and whose actions owned no supremacy but her own will, this act must have been both voluntary and from conviction. It could have had no ulterior motive in ambition, for Judæa was not only under iron subjection to the Romans, but devastated by famine and disease. Izates, the son of Helena, had been sent by his father, Monobazus, to be educated at the court of Abenerig, king of Characene, a district on the Persian Gulf. While there, he became acquainted with Ananias, a Hebrew merchant, who, in his commercial character, had frequent access to the women's apartments, and never lost an opportunity of inculcating the tenets of his faith.