d he knew that evidence to
condemn him would either be discovered or manufactured.

The letter betrays the miseries of his dungeon. He prays Timothy to
bring a cloak he had left at Troas, to defend him from the damp of the
cell and the cold of the winter. He asks for his books and parchments,
that he may relieve the tedium of his solitary hours with the studies
he had always loved. But, above all, he beseeches Timothy to come
himself; for he was longing to feel the touch of a friendly hand and
see the face of a friend yet once again before he died.

Was the brave heart then conquered at last? Read the Epistle and see.
How does it begin? "I also suffer these things; nevertheless I am not
ashamed; for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is
able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day."
How does it end? "I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my
departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my
course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a
crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give
me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them that love His
appearing." That is not the strain of the vanquished.

187. Trial.--There can be little doubt that he appeared again at
Nero's bar, and this time the charge did not break down. In all
history there is not a more startling illustration of the irony of
human life than this scene of Paul at the bar of Nero. On the
judgment-seat, clad in the imperial purple, sat a man who in a bad
world had attained the eminence of being the very worst and meanest
being in it--a man stained with every crime, the murderer of his own
mother, of his wives and of his best benefactors; a man whose whole
being was so steeped in every namable and unnamable vice that body and
soul of him were, as some one said at the time, nothing but a compound
of mud and blood; and in the prisoner's dock stood the best man the
world contained, his hair whitened with labors for the good of men and
the glory of God. Such was the occupant of the seat of justice, and
such the man who stood in the place of the criminal.

188. Death.--The trial ended, Paul was condemned and delivered over to
the executioner. He was led out of the city with a crowd of the lowest
rabble at his heels. The fatal spot was reached; he knelt beside the
block; the headsman's axe gleamed in the sun and fell; and the