as far as we know, rebuke him for his sins. He left him to rebuke
himself. He told him what ought to be, what he ought to do, and left
the rest to his conscience. Poor Felix, brought up a heathen slave
in that profligate court of Rome, had probably never heard of
righteousness and temperance, had never had what was good and noble
set before him. Now St. Paul set the good before him, and showed him
a higher life than any he had ever dreamed of--higher than all his
viceregal power and pomp--and bade him see how noble and divine it
was to be good.

But it is written St. Paul reasoned with Felix about judgment to
come.

We must not too hastily suppose that this means that he told Felix
that he was in danger of hell-fire. For that is an argument which
St. Paul never uses anywhere in his writings or speeches, as far as
we know them. He never tries, as too many do now-a-days, to frighten
sinners into repentance, by telling them of the flames of hell; and
therefore we have no right to fancy that he did so by Felix. He told
him of judgment to come; and we can guess from his writings what he
would have said. That there was a living God who judged the earth
always by his Son Jesus Christ, and that he was coming then,
immediately, to punish all the horrible wickedness which was then
going on in those parts of the world which St. Paul knew. St. Paul
always speaks of the terrible judgments of God as about to come in
his own days, we know that they did come.

We know--God forbid that a preacher should tell you one-tenth of what
he ought to know--that St. Paul's times were the most horribly wicked
that the world had ever seen; that the few heathens who had