The life and work of St. Paul

550 THE LIFE AND WOBK OS ST. PAUL.
On Lig rfcium to Cassarea with his wife Brasilia, and apparently in order
to gratify her curiosity to see and hear a person whose strange history and
marvellous powers were so widely known, Felix once more summoned Paul
into his presence, and bade him discourse to them about his beliefs. Right
nobly did Paul use his opportunity. Felix was a Gentile, and was moreover
his judge, and it was no part of St. Paul's duty to judge those that are
without. Had he assumed such A function, his life must have become one
incessant and useless protest. And yet, with perfect urbanity and respect
for the powers that be, he spoke of the faith in Christ which he was bidden
to explain, in a way that enabled him to touch on those virtues which were
most needed by the guilty pair who listened to his words. The licentious
princess must have blushed as he discoursed of continence ; tho rapacious and
unjust governor as ho spoke of righteousness both of them as he reasoned of
the judgment to come. "Whatever may have been the thoughts of Brasilia,
ehe locked them np in her own bosom; but Felix, less accustomed to such
truths, was deeply agitated by them. As he glanced back over the stained
and guilty past, he was afraid. He had been a slave, in the vilest of all
positions, at the vilest of all epochs, in tho vilest of all cities. He had crept
with his brother Pallas into the position of a courtier at the most morally
degraded of all courts. He had been an officer of those auxiliaries who were
tlio worst of all troops. "Wnat secrets of lust and blood lay hidden in his
earlier life we do not know ; but ample and indisputable testimony, Jewish
and Pagan, sacred and secular, reveals to us what he had been how greedy,
how savage, how treacherous, how unjust, how steeped with tho blood of
private murder and public massacre during tho eight years which he had
now spent in the government, first of Samaria, then of Palestine. There were
footsteps behind him ; he began to feel as though " the earth wore made of
glass." He could not bear the novel sensation of terror which crept over him,
or the reproaches of the blushing, shamefaced spirit which began to mutiny
"
even in such a breast as his. He cut short tho interview. Go," he said,
to a
" for tho present ; I will take some future opportunity to summon you
hearing." Even his remorse was not purely disinterested. Paul had indeed
acquired over him some of that ascendency which could hardly fail to be won
by eo lofty a personality ; and Felix, struck by his bearing, his genius, hia
Aziz, and to become his wife. It was a strange thing, and one which must have required
all the arts of Simon to effect, that thia young and beautiful princess, who was at this
time only twenty years old, should have abandoned all her Jewish prejudices, and risked
the deadliest abhorrence of her race, by leaving a prince who loved her, and had even
been induced to accept circumcision to gratify her national scruples, in order to form an
adulterous connexion with a cruel and elderly profligate, who had been nothing better
than a slave. Felix would never have dreamt for one moment of making for her sake
the immense sacrifice which Ariz had accepted, and which her previous lover, the Prince
of Commagsne, had refused. Such, however, were the subtle arts of the Cyprian sorcerer,
and such the Greek-like fascinations of the seducer, that he had gained his end, and how
thus still further obliterated the memories of his servile origin by marrying a third princess.
"Trium roginarum maritum aut adulienun" (Suet. Claud. 28). Another of his wives
was also a Drusilia, daughter of Juba, King of MauretarJa. an -I granddaughter of Antony
mid Cleopatra, The third is unknown.