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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 660. The Slave
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The Slave
1. What Felix looked for was entertainment; what he found was judgment and penalty. Because time hung heavy upon him, Felix bethought himself of Paul, the prisoner. The fame of St. Paul's eloquence had made its way even into the palace. For reasons of curiosity and motives of entertainment, soldiers were sent for the Apostle, in the hope that he might while away an hour and kill a little time.
There was one who went to hear Mr. Whitefield-a member of the “Hell-fire Club,” a desperate fellow. He stood up at the next meeting of his abominable associates, and he delivered Mr. Whitefield's sermon with wonderful accuracy, imitating his very tone and manner. In the middle of his exhortation he converted himself, and came to a sudden pause, sat down broken-hearted, and confessed the power of the gospel. That club was dissolved. That remarkable convert was Mr. Thorpe, of Bristol, whom God so greatly used afterwards in the salvation of others. I would rather have you read the Bible to mock at it than not read it at all. I would rather that you came to hear the Word of God out of hatred to it than that you never came at all.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon, Barbed Arrows, 41.]
2. Beside Felix on the seat of judgment sat Drusilla-“his wife,” the sacred historian calls her; for he does not think it needful to interrupt the history by laying bare the shame and scandal of their connexion, or to bring out that, however wife in name, yet wife in deed she was not. For Felix had enticed her, the first of three queens whom he successively married, from her own husband, one of those petty princes whom the Romans endured within their empire; and in his case and hers the names of husband and wife did but palliate and conceal the realities of adulterer and adulteress.
Drusilla was the youngest daughter of King Herod Agrippa i. She was a beautiful young Jewess of some eighteen years of age. But those dark shadows lying across her path would have marred the fairest womanhood. It was not God who had made her Felix's wife.
One reading inserts in verse 24 the statement that Drusilla wished to see St. Paul, and that Felix summoned him in order to gratify her. Very probably she, as a Jewess, knew something of “the Way,” and with a love of anything odd and new, which such women cannot do without, she wanted to see this curious man and to hear him talk. It might amuse her, and pass an hour, and be something to gossip about.
3. In the palace, however, St. Paul was a very different man from St. Paul in the judgment-hall. There he was on his trial, and he confined himself to the matters of the hour; but in the palace Felix was, so to say, on his trial before St. Paul, and the Apostle did not fail to probe the most sensitive point in the conscience of his hearer.
St. Paul's was a great heart-searching appeal, as courteous as courageous, direct to the soul of Felix. And Felix quailed before it. But conscience can only warn and guide, it cannot compel. In the famous words of Butler, “Had it might as it has right, had it power as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world.” “Felix was terrified.” It may be that Felix longed for a purer life, but the bond of his sin tightened upon his soul, and he dismissed St. Paul. He had to reckon with Drusilla, and she was unmoved by St. Paul's words.
At one time Creighton had a Shakespeare reading-class for some of the young people; and he gave lectures sometimes in the evenings in the schoolroom. On these occasions he often took a play of Shakespeare and explained it, reading the most striking scenes. At one of these lectures on “Macbeth,” the school was filled with an audience so attentive that they even forgot to cough; but it was almost too much for an old woman who was one of his most devout admirers. “Oh, it was too terrible,” she said sadly the next day; “generally when I go home, I try to remember the vicar's sermons, but this time I tried to forget as quick as possible.”1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, i. 168.]
4. St. Paul had succeeded in some measure in bringing the truth home to the darkened or neglected conscience of Felix, and therefore it was that he “trembled.” In this second department of his reasoning, St. Paul had gone even deeper into the heart of the moral question with which man has to grapple in his mortal pilgrimage than he had in reasoning upon justice. For justice is a virtue of the understanding and the will, while temperance is more of the affections and the heart. If the understanding is the basis of character, if the will is the crown, it is the affections and the heart that are the centre. Find out that on which a man sets his heart-this is an axiom of all religious teachers, learnt from our Lord Himself-and you will know whither his character is tending. To do full justice to St. Paul's meaning, we must call the virtue “self-control” rather than “temperance.” In its fullest sense it means the complete mastery of the immortal spirit over all the departments of its activity, but especially over those which relate to the affectionate nature, and are situated upon that border-land where flesh and spirit join.
Before he concluded his high argument, the teacher sought to lift his listener's mind to the greatest of all thoughts-“man's relation to God.” He spoke of “the judgment to come”-the great external fact which is the correlative of the sense of responsibility in man. “Every one of us,” says the Apostle elsewhere, “shall give account of himself to God.”
The timely remembrance of responsibility eventuating in judgment has ere now changed and elevated the purpose of a life. Listen! On the upper ledges of the wind-swept Apennine stand the venerable towers of Monte Casino, below stretches the purple valley, beyond the purple sea, beneath the jagged cliff winds the silvery Garigliano, beyond the dim and undulating plain stretch line on line of azure misty mountains, carved in the stately shapes, robed in the magic colours, of beautiful dreamy Italy. Thither-if Italian legend speaks truly-thither, through the ilex woods and up the tortuous mountain paths came Totila the Ostrogoth. He had crossed the Alps, had beaten the conquerors of the world, had triumphed at Faenza, swept the Mugello, carried Florence, Ravenna, almost Rome; and now he came, impelled (who can doubt it?) by a supernatural influence, to take counsel of the wisest and saintliest of living men. “What shall I do, my father?” asked the barbarian conqueror, as he stood awestricken before the aged Benedict. Calmly the saint replied in this fashion: “My son, thou shalt enter Rome.” “And then?” “Then thou shalt cross the sea, shalt sweep and conquer Sicily.” “And then?” “Then thou shalt reign nine years; and then,” said the father, “then thou shalt die, and then thou shalt be judged.” We may hope, in part at least we may believe, the lesson was not lost on Totila. My brothers, have we learnt that lesson? The grave prerogative of the soul is this: life's struggle over, then it “shall be judged.”1 [Note: W. J. Knox Little, Our Reasonable Service, 43.]