present hour, the present moment. "To day, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts." "Behold now is the accepted time, behold now is the day of salvation." To-day, grace is yours, Christ is yours, heaven is yours; to-morrow, even though

willing to seek them, not one may be within your reach; though desirous to pray for them, the Spirit of prayer may have for ever fled; while the only answer to your petitions may be that solemn denial which the word of God has recorded for such hours as these: "Because I have called and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof; I also will laugh at your calamity, I will mock when your fear cometh."—"Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me.”

This I am bound to tell you, and I am equally bound to demonstrate to you its truth by the very example before you. For two whole years St. Paul was within the reach of Felix. And was there no "convenient season?" far from it; "convenient seasons" were continually recurring; we are expressly told, as if to impress the very truth of which I speak, that Felix often, very often "sent for Paul and communed with him"-but the time was passed, the day of grace was over, the favorable moment when the heart was softened, and the body trembled, and the "soul melted like wax at the presence of the Lord," had fled, never to return; no impression that we are told of, ever again was made, no conviction of sin ever again set home upon his conscience; he heard indeed repeatedly, but all that we know of him is, that he was sent in chains to Rome very shortly after his prisoner, and with

difficulty escaped an ignominious death. In him therefore was fulfilled that seven times quoted prophecy of Isaiah,

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By hearing ye shall hear and shall not understand; and seeing, ye shall see and shall not perceive; for this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them." Brethren, we would leave the application with yourselves, and would only pray that we may be enabled to add, concerning every individual among you, as our divine Master added, when He quoted the passage to His hearers,

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But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear."

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LECTURE VIII.

ACTS xxvi. 28.

THEN AGRIPPA SAID UNTO PAUL, ALMOST THOU PERSUADEST ME TO BE A CHRISTIAN.

AFTER that most interesting incident which occurred to the apostle, whose life we are reviewing, and which formed the subject of our last remarks, we find that for two whole years, he remained a prisoner at Cesarea. It is as needless to comment upon the iniquity of the judge who thus detained a prisoner of whose innocence he was convinced, as it is to speak of his corruption, when we find that he sent for his prisoner the oftener only for the purpose of

affording him the better opportunity of offering a bribe for his escape.

We

cannot, however, help feeling some little surprise that when Felix left his government, which he did at the end of the two years, he should not have availed himself of so favorable an opportunity for performing an act of cheap and easy virtue, by liberating his prisoner. But this is explained by the evangelist, when he tells us, "Felix, willing to shew the Jews a pleasure, left Paul bound." The whole course of Felix's administration had been a course of corruption and cruelty; he dreaded, very naturally, the indignation of those whom he had governed, and therefore to court their good opinion, he committed an act of positive injustice against his innocent prisoner. It is astonishing how continually the love and the fear of the world are producing similar effects; and how invariably one dereliction of duty draws others after it in