The life and work of St. Paul

672 THB LIFE \AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
by any false "
hopes. I was rescued out of the lion's mouth. The Lord shall
deliver me "not necessarily from, death or
"
danger, but from every evil
work, 1 and shall save mt> unto His heavenly kingdom." Death by martyrdom
was no such " evil work; " 2 from that he did not expect to be saved nay, he
knew, and probably even hoped, that through that narrow gate an entrance
might be ministered unto him abundantly into Christ's heavenly kingdom.
But he must have passed through perilous and exciting hours, or he would
have hardly used that metaphor of the lion's mouth, 3
prompted perhaps by a
reminiscence of the powerful image of the shepherd prophet, " As the shepherd
tears out of the motith of a lion two legs and the piece of an ear." 4
But who was the lion ? Was it Satan ? 6 or Helius the Prsefect of the
city ? or Nero ? 6 or is the expression a merely general one ? Even if so,
it is not impossible that he may have pleaded his cause before Nero himself.
The power of deciding causes had been one which the Roman Emperors had
jealously kept in their own hands ; and if the trial took place in the spring of
A.D. 66, Nero had not yet started for Greece, and would have been almost
certain to give personal attention to the case of one who had done more than
any living man to spread the name of Christ. Nero had been intensely anxious
to fix on the innocent Christians the stigma of that horrible conflagration,
of which he himself had been dangerously suspected, and the mere suspicion
of which, until averted into another channel, had gone far to shake even his
imperial power. And now the greatest of the Christians the very coryphceus
of the hated sect stood chained before him. He to whom popularity, forfeited
in part by his enormous crimes, had become a matter of supreme importance,
saw how cheaply it could be won by sacrificing a sick, deserted, aged, fettered
prisoner, for whom no living soul would speak a word, and who was evidently
regarded with intense hatred by Gentiles from Asia, by the dense rabble of
the city, and by Jews from every quarter of the world. Cicero has preserved
for us a graphic picture of the way in which, nearly a century and a half
before this time, a screaming, scowling, gesticulating throng of Jews, unde-
terred by soldiers and lictors, surrounded with such threatening demonstrations
the tribunal before which their oppressor, Flaccus, was being tried, that he,
as his advocate, though he had been no less a person than a Roman Consul,
and " father of his country," was obliged to plead in low tones for fear of
their fury.
If in B.C. 59 the Romish Jews could intimidate even a Cicero in
1 From all that can be really called irovqp6v.
" Liberabit me ne quid agam " (and we
may add, ne quid patiar) " Christiano, ne quid Apostolo indignum (Grot.).
2 "
Decollabitur ? liberabitur, liberante Domino "(Bengel). It would be difficult for
me to exaggerate my admiration for this truly great commentator. On the following
words, " to whom be glory for ever and ever," he remarks, "Doxologiam parit spes,
quanto majorem res."
3 2 Tim. iv. 17.
4 Amos iii. 12. Of. ivioiriw TOV Mot/rat, referring to Xerxes (Apocr. Esth. xiv. 13).
1 Pet. v. &
6
\tovra yap TOV Wpova T)