“You have a very distinguished prisoner, I believe, by the name of Paul. Do you know he is one of my countrymen? I should very much like to see him, and I should very much like to hear him speak, for I have heard so much about his eloquence.
“Besides that, the other day, when he was being tried in another room of this palace, and the windows were open, I heard the applause that greeted the speech of Lawyer Tertullus, as he denounced Paul. Now, I very much wish I could hear Paul speak. Won’t you let me hear him speak?”
“Yes,” said Felix, “I will. I will order him up now from the guard room.”
The clank of a chain is heard coming up the marble stairway, there is a shuffle at the door, and in comes Paul—a little old man, prematurely old through exposure—only sixty years of age, but looking as though he were eighty.
Paul bows very courteously before Governor Felix and the beautiful woman by his side. They say:
“Paul, we have heard a great deal about your speaking. Give us, now, a specimen of your eloquence.”
Oh, if there ever was a chance for a man to show off, Paul had a chance there!
He might have harangued them about Grecian art, about the wonderful water-works which he had seen at Corinth, about the Acropolis by moonlight, about prison life in Philippi, about “What I Saw in Thessalonica,” or about the old mythologies.
But, instead, Paul said to himself: “I am now on the way to martyrdom, and this man and woman will soon be dead; so this is my only opportunity to talk to them about the things of eternity.”
And, just there and then, there broke in upon the scene a peal of thunder. It was the voice of Judgment Day speaking through the words of the decrepit apostle. As the grand old missionary proceeded with his remarks, the stoop begins to go out of his shoulders, and he rises up, and his countenance is illumined with the glories of a future life, and his shackles rattle and grind as he lifts his fettered arm, and with it hurls upon his abashed auditors the bolts of God’s indignation.