e larger stage.

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 Caesar, 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.