Whereupon Festus answered that he had no fault to find with me, but since I had appealed to Caesar I must go by the next ship, and as there would be none for some weeks Festus, who had said to King Agrippa and Berenice, when they came to pay a visit to the new governor, and, being Jews, were curious about my gospel, I find no fault with this man and would have set him at liberty, but he has appealed to Caesar and by the next ship he goes to Rome, permitted me my liberty to go whither I pleased and to preach as I pleased in the city and beyond the city if I pleased.  Whereupon I notified to Festus I would go to Jericho, a two days’ journey from Caesarea, and he said, go, and in three weeks a ship will be here to take thee to Rome.  But he said:  if the Jews should hear of thee thou’lt lose thy life, and he offered me a guard, which I refused as useless, knowing well that I should not meet my death at Jericho.  Why cherish a love for them that hate thee? he said, and I answered:  they are my own people, and my heart was filled again with the memory of the elect race that had given birth to the prophets.  Shall these go down dead into their graves never to rise again, God’s chosen people?  I asked myself, and set out with Timothy, my son in the faith, for Jericho, a city I had never seen nor yet the banks of Jordan down which Jesus went for John’s baptism.  But for these things I had little thought or care, but was as if propelled by some force that I could not understand nor withstand; and a multitude collected and hearkened to the story of my conversion on the road to Damascus, but discontent broke out among them when I said that Jesus had come neither to confirm nor to abolish the law, that the law was well while we were children but now we could only enter into eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ our Lord.

The rest of my story you know:  how we fled into the hills for our lives’ sake, and how Timothy in the dark of the evening kept to the left whereas I came round the shoulder of the hill and was upheld in the path by God, who has still need of me.  His ways are inscrutable, for, wishing to bring me to you, he sent me to preach in Jordan and urged the Jews to threaten me and pursue me into the hills, for he wished you holy men who live upon this ridge of rock in piety, in humility, in content, in peace one with the other, fearing God always, to hear of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead and the meaning thereof, which is that Christ came to redeem us from the bondage of the law and that sense of sin which the law reveals unceasingly and which terrifies and comes between us and love of Jesus Christ, who will (at the sound of the last trump) raise the incorruptible out of the corruptible.  Even as the sown grain is raised out of its rotten grave to nourish and rejoice again at the light, so will ye nourish again in the fields of heaven, never again to sink into old age and death if you have faith in Christ, for you have