St. Peter iii. 13, 14.

Who is he that will harm you if ye be followers of that which is good? But and if ye suffer for righteousness sake, happy are ye!

This epistle was addressed by St. Peter to men under great tribulation, the converted Jews in different parts of the east, “the strangers,” he calls them, “scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.” Strangers indeed they were, as dwelling in foreign lands and remote from their beloved Jerusalem; strangers they were, still more, to whom the world was an uneasy pilgrimage, who were the objects, if Tacitus is to be believed, of the common hatred of the human race, shut out in no small degree from the defence of the laws, and exposed on the slightest pretences, or on no pretence at all, to the heaviest lash of their severity.

Of the dangers and distresses to which the primitive Christians were liable, it would be long, and with my present audience it would be needless to enter into a detail. But this notice of them was required to put you in possession of the general drift and tendency of St. Peter's arguments, which were directed, through a considerable part of both the Epistles which bear his name, to counteract and conquer the peculiar temptation to which a community thus situated were liable.