aby-tyrant into the least injurious of tyrannies. From the plunder of a
province he would divert him by the carnage of the circus. From the
murder of a senator he could lure him by some new lust at home. From the
ruin of the Empire, he could seduce him by diverting him with the ruin
of a noble family. And Seneca did this with the best of motives. He said
he used all the power in his hands, and he thought he did. He was one of
those men of whom all times have their share. The bravest of his time,
he satisfied himself with alluring the beardless Emperor by petty crime
from public wrong; he could flatter him to the expedient. He dared not
order him to the right.

But Seneca knew what was right. Seneca also had a well-trained
conscience, which told him of right and of wrong. Seneca's brother,
Gallio, had saved Paul's life when a Jewish mob would have dragged him
to pieces in Corinth; and the legend is that Seneca and Paul had
corresponded with each other before they stood together in Nero's
presence, the one as counsellor, the other as the criminal.[L] When Paul
arose from that formal salutation, when the apostle of the new
civilization spoke to the tottering monarch of the old, if there had
been one man in that assemblage, could he have failed to see that that
was a turning-point in the world's history? Before him in that little
hall, in that little hour, was passing the scene which for centuries
would be acted out upon the 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; th