Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

7. “Unto all who are in Rome, beloved of God, elect saints: Grace to you, and peace, from God
our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” This is a beautiful, loving and affectionate salutation.
8. “In the first place, I thank God through Jesus Christ concerning you all, because your faith is
spoken of in the whole world.” The emperors had built great highways into every country in the
known world (as it belonged to them by conquest), so traveling was convenient in all the known
earth. The stranger in every foreign land had nothing to do but find the Roman road and walk in it
till he reached the world’s metropolis; as all the roads in England centralize in London. Throughout
their universal conquests during seven hundred years, Rome made it a rule to adopt all the religions
of the conquered nations, bringing all their gods to Rome, where all were worshipped in the
Pantheon, a magnificent circular marble edifice 200 feet in diameter and 200 feet high, still standing
and in a perfect state of preservation, now useful for the Holiness people to preach in, as all have a
perfect right in that temple to worship any god in all the world, and in any way. Therefore the new
religion (Christianity), within the twenty-eight years since Pentecost, had received notoriety
throughout the whole world, in the reports carried by the travelers from Rome to the ends of the
earth. Bygone ages have been filled with miracles, not only recorded in the Bible, but great and
wonderful unwritten by an inspired pen. In 753 B.C. the jealous king of Alban had Romulus and
Remus exposed in the wild woods on the banks of the Tiber. A wolf finding them, instead of
devouring them, nursed them with her own milk. Corroboratory of this historic legend, they still keep
wolves in the same cave on the spot. I saw them when I was there in 1895. These exposed infants,
reared by the wolf, became shepherds on the spot, becoming a rendezvous of the wandering pioneers,
and soon swelling into a tribe. By the famous stratagem, well known in history, of securing wives
from the Sabines, resulting in the accession of that nation, they proceeded with their conquests over
the nations of the earth. So constant was the work of death that the Temple of Janus, whose open
doors indicated war, and closed were the signal of peace, never was closed but twice during the 753
years — once during the reign of Numa Pompilius, and again immediately after the first Punic war.
At the end of the period it was permanently closed, as the whole world was conquered and peace had
come to abide. Then was fulfilled the prophecy, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a
lawgiver from beneath his feet, till Shiloh come.” When the Romans had conquered all the world,
then Augustus Cæsar was crowned universal monarch, thus taking the scepter from Judah and all
other nations at the very time when Shiloh was born in Bethlehem, thus making the birth of the
Savior significantly the herald of “peace on earth and good will to men,” as the Romans had
conquered and thus brought universal peace. Do you not see the hand of God in all this? Nothing was
so important to the preaching of the gospel in all the earth as a powerful universal empire precisely
such as Rome. Do you not see with what rapidity Paul passed from nation to nation, preaching the
gospel? This he could not have done if all of these nations had not been under the same government.
What was true of Paul was equally true of all the apostles and their numerous comrades. Paul, being
a learned man, wrote up his travels. The original twelve, “unlearned and ignorant men,” with few
exceptions, left us no history of their ministry; however, we have a mere epitome in
contemporaneous tradition that they all, like Paul, went to the ends of the earth, preaching faithfully
till bloody martyrdom set them free to fly away to glory: Paul beheaded and Peter crucified at Rome;
Luke hung on an olive-tree in Greece; Matthew suffering martyrdom in Ethiopia, Matthias in
Abyssinia, Mark in Alexandria; James, the son of Zebedee, beheaded by Herod Antipas; James, the
son of Alpheus, precipitated from a pinnacle of the temple; Andrew crucified in Armenia, Philip in
Asia Minor; Bartholomew skinned alive by order of the barbarous king in Phrygia; Jude shot full of