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Page 34
Faith on the one side, before expediency and cruelty on the other! Paul
before Seneca and Nero! He was ready to address Nero, with the eloquence
and vehemence which for years had been demanding utterance.
He stood at length before the baby C�sar, to whose tribunal he had
appealed from the provincial court of a doubting Festus and a trembling
Agrippa.
And who shall ask what words the vigorous Christian spoke to the dastard
boy! Who that knows the eloquence which rung out on the ears of
astonished Stoics at Athens, which commanded the incense and the
hecatombs of wandering peasants in Asia, which stilled the gabbling
clamor of a wild mob at Jerusalem,--who will doubt the tone in which
Paul spoke to Nero! The boy quailed for the moment before the man! The
gilded dotard shrunk back from the home truths of the new, young,
vigorous faith: the ruler of a hundred legions was nothing before the
God-commissioned prisoner.
No; though at this audience all men forsook Paul, as he tells us; though
not one of the timid converts were there, but the soldier chained at
his side,--still he triumphed over Nero and Nero's minister.
From that audience-hall those three men retire. The boy, grown old in
lust, goes thence to be an hour alone, to ponder for an hour on this
God, this resurrection, and this truth, of which the Jew, in such
uncourtly phrase, has harangued him. To be alone, until the spectre of a
dying mother rises again to haunt him, to persecute him and drive him
forth to his followers and feasters, where he will try to forget Paul
and the Saviour and God, where he would be glad to banish them forever.
He does not banish them forever! Henceforward, whenever that spectre of
a mother comes before him, it must re-echo the words of God and eternity
which Paul has spoken. Whenever the chained and bleeding captive of the
arena bends suppliant before him, there must return the memory of the
only captive who was never suppliant before him, and his words of sturdy
power!
And Seneca? Seneca goes home with the mortified feelings of a great man
who has detected his own meanness.
We all know the feeling; for all God's children might be great, and it
is with miserable mortification that we detect ourselves in one or
another pettiness. Seneca goes home to say: "This wild _Easterner_ has
rebuked the Emperor as I have so often wanted to rebuke him. He stood
there, as I have wanted to stand, a man before a brute.
"He said what I have thought, and have been afraid to say. Downright,
straightforward, he told the Emperor truths as to Rome, as to man, and
as to his vices, which I have longed to tell him. He has done what I am
afraid to do. He has dared this, which I have dallied with, and left
undone. _What is the mystery of his power?_"
Seneca did not know. Nero did not know. The "Eastern mystery" was in
presence before them, and they knew it not!
What was the mystery of Paul's power?
Paul leaves them with the triumph of a man who has accomplished the hope
of long years. Those solemn words of his, "After that, I _must_ also see
Rome," expressed the longing of years, whose object now, in part, at
least, is gratified. He must see Rome!
It is God's mission to him that he see Rome and its Emperor. Paul has
seen with the spirit's eye what we have seen since in history,--that he
is to be the living link by which the electric fire of life should pass
first from religious Asia to quicken this dead, brutish Europe. He knows
that he is God's messenger to bear this mystery of life eternal from the
one land to the other, and to unfold it there. And to-day has made real,
in fact, this his inward confidence. To-day has put the seal of fact on
that vision of his, years since, when he first left his Asiatic home. A
prisoner in chains, still he has to-day seen the accomplishment of the
vows, hopes, and resolutions of that field of Troy, most truly famous
from the night he spent there. There was another of these hours when God
brings into one spot the acts which shall be the _argument_ of centuries
of history. Paul had come down there in his long Asiatic
journeys,--Eastern in his lineage, Eastern in his temperament, Eastern
in his outward life, and Eastern in his faith,--to that narrow
Hellespont, which for long ages has separated East from West, tore madly
up the chains which would unite them, overwhelmed even love when it
sought to intermarry them, and left their cliffs frowning eternal hate
from shore to shore. Paul stood upon the Asian shore and looked across
upon the Western. There were Macedonia and the hills of Greece, here
Troas and the ruins of Ilium. The names speak war. The blue Hellespont
has no voice but separation, except to Paul. But to Paul, sleeping, it
might be, on the tomb of Achilles, that night the "man of Macedonia"
appears, and bids him come over to avenge Asia, to pay back the debt of
Troy.
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