Divine Providence opened their way in a manner familiar to all readers of history; and, under the conduct of Simeon, this believing remnant found a refuge at Pella, a city in the mountainous part of the Decapolis, on the confines of Syria.
After the destruction of Jerusalem, and when the land had found a transient repose from the horrors of war, great numbers of the Christians, in common with others of their own nation, returned and established themselves on the hallowed (but then desolated) spot, to which the orthodox Jew in all his wanderings continually reverts, as his patrimonial home and only resting-place. The temple was now no more, and the magnificent economy of which it had been regarded as "the pillar and ground" had passed away like a dream; but the waste plains of Zion were again peopled by a remnant of the true Israel, who worshipped the Father in spirit, and her solitudes were made vocal with "hymns to Christ as to God." Simeon continued to hold the episcopate till the year 107, when, in one of the persecutions carried on by Trajan in the East, he was called to seal his long ministry with martyrdom. He had been denounced to Atticus, the governor of Syria, as being not only a Christian, but a Jew of the house of David; (Trajan having continued the inquisition after that lineage, begun by Domitian;) and on the latter account especially he was sentenced to death. The fortitude with which, at the advanced age of a hundred and twenty years, he underwent a complication of torments for several days, impressed the spectators and the proconsul himself with wonder. Having endured much in other forms of torture, his sufferings were terminated by crucifixion, after he had governed the church forty years.
Thus the flock at Jerusalem had only two bishops for the space of seventy years. The successor of Simeon also, Justus by name, lived to the age of a hundred and
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