wildered heart, who by distinctly and perceptibly influencing my mind, my judgment, my affections, my will, guided me into a path of safety, and the snare was broken and I was delivered. I have been upon a sick, and as I believed, a dying bed: I have stood upon the brink of a fathomless eternity, and I have looked, fearfully looked, down upon that place of torment, whither my own sins and iniquities would long since have hurried me, and at that awful hour there was one who stood by me in the watches of the night, and whispered strong consolation: there was one who said, "There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus;" I have drawn the sting of death, and robbed the grave of its victory: "Be of good cheer," for I am with you always, and will not desert you amid the swellings of Jordan; my right hand shall sustain you until you have passed the flood,

and have landed in safety in "the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world."

And are there those who would tell the believer that this is a delusion? that imagination dried this mourner's tears, and delivered the tempted out of temptation, and made a bed of pain a bed of peace? Tell the starving man that imagination can feed him, tell the drowning man that it can rescue him, the dying man that it can heal him, but O, think not to tell the child of God that he could mistake the felt presence, the abiding, comforting, supporting presence of his Lord, for any thing that imagination could invent, or earth or hell could feign. No! you cannot thus deceive the Christian. He has the witness in himself; and if there be a confidence against which neither Satan's snares, nor Satan's power shall prevail, it is this, that

the spiritual presence of his Lord shall be continued to him through good and ill, through health and sickness, through life and death, until it shall be exchanged for His personal presence in the kingdom of His glory.

147

LECTURE VII.

ACTS xxiv. 25.

AND AS HE REASONED OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, TEMPERANCE, AND JUDGMENT TO COME, FELIX TREMBLED, AND ANSWERED, GO THY WAY FOR THIS TIME; WHEN I HAVE A CONVENIENT SEASON I WILL CALL FOR THEE.

WE resume the history of St. Paul at the close of the twenty-third chapter, where we find that the Jews, having bound themselves together in a confederacy for the destruction of the apostle, it pleased God by His providence to detect and overthrow it. Instead, therefore, of falling a victim to the malignant determination of a blood-thirsty mob, the apostle was at least to enjoy the

semblance of a fair and equitable trial before the Roman governor Felix. For this purpose, having been kept in Herod's judgment hall until his accusers, the chief priests and elders, and their counsel Turtullus, had arrived, on a set day the apostle is brought before the judgment-seat, and the venal orator to whom his destruction had been committed, thus began; "Seeing that by thee we enjoy great quietness, and that very worthy deeds are done unto this nation by thy providence, we accept it always and in all places, most noble Felix, with all thankfulness." We need not comment upon the high-flown flattery of such an exordium, when addressed to a man whom both Josephus and Tacitus unite in stigmatizing as a monster of cruelty and injustice; it is, alas! no new thing to hear language addressed by flatterers to men of power while living, which the most abject of historians would scorn to apply to them