attention no more than the winds that beat upon the wall; and the heart becomes so hardened as to be unimpressible, until the dread sentence is at last passed,—­“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; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.  Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me:  for that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord:  they would none of my counsel:  they despised all my reproof.  Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices.”

A young man came to Jesus seeking eternal life.  “Jesus, looking on him, loved him,” and answered his prayers by teaching him how eternal life could alone be attained.  But the young man went away sorrowful, because he had much riches.  What a history was contained in that brief moment of his life!

Again, young King Agrippa, along with the young Bernice, hear a sermon from Paul the prisoner.  The outward picture presented to the eye on that day had nothing more remarkable or peculiar about it than has been witnessed a thousand times before and since.  Those royal personages entered “the place of hearing” with “great pomp,” accompanied by “the chief captains and principal men of the city.”  And before them appeared an almost unknown prisoner, upon whom his own nation, including “the chief priests and elders from Jerusalem,” demanded the judgment of death to be passed.  That prisoner, “in bodily presence weak and contemptible,” was however “permitted to speak for himself;” and verily he did speak!  He spoke of God and Christ; of repentance and the new life; and of his own glorious commission to “open the eyes” of men, “to turn them from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God, that they might receive the forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them that are sanctified through faith in Jesus.”  What a revelation was this from God to man!  The voice which spoke from Sinai and through the prophets, the voice of Him who is truth and love, spoke at that moment of life through Paul to those royal hearers, and to the captains and principal men.  But Agrippa, with a sneer or with some conviction of the truth, replied, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.”  Unlike St Paul himself, when the Lord spoke to him on his way to Damascus, Agrippa was disobedient to the heavenly vision.  And so the sermon ended; the gay multitude dispersed; the place of hearing was left in silence, and echoed only the midnight winds or the beat of the sea-wave on the neighbouring shore.  St Paul retired to his cell; Agrippa, Festus, and Bernice, to their chambers of rest, to sleep and dream by night, as they slept and