No; though at this audience all men forsook Paul, as he tells us; though not one of the timid converts were there, but the soldier chained at his side,—­still he triumphed over Nero and Nero’s minister.

From that audience-hall those three men retire.  The boy, grown old in lust, goes thence to be an hour alone, to ponder for an hour on this God, this resurrection, and this truth, of which the Jew, in such uncourtly phrase, has harangued him.  To be alone, until the spectre of a dying mother rises again to haunt him, to persecute him and drive him forth to his followers and feasters, where he will try to forget Paul and the Saviour and God, where he would be glad to banish them forever.  He does not banish them forever!  Henceforward, whenever that spectre of a mother comes before him, it must re-echo the words of God and eternity which Paul has spoken.  Whenever the chained and bleeding captive of the arena bends suppliant before him, there must return the memory of the only captive who was never suppliant before him, and his words of sturdy power!

And Seneca?  Seneca goes home with the mortified feelings of a great man who has detected his own meanness.

We all know the feeling; for all God’s children might be great, and it is with miserable mortification that we detect ourselves in one or another pettiness.  Seneca goes home to say:  “This wild Easterner has rebuked the Emperor as I have so often wanted to rebuke him.  He stood there, as I have wanted to stand, a man before a brute.

“He said what I have thought, and have been afraid to say.  Downright, straightforward, he told the Emperor truths as to Rome, as to man, and as to his vices, which I have longed to tell him.  He has done what I am afraid to do.  He has dared this, which I have dallied with, and left undone. What is the mystery of his power?”

Seneca did not know.  Nero did not know.  The “Eastern mystery” was in presence before them, and they knew it not!

What was the mystery of Paul’s power?

Paul leaves them with the triumph of a man who has accomplished the hope of long years.  Those solemn words of his, “After that, I must also see Rome,” expressed the longing of years, whose object now, in part, at least, is gratified.  He must see Rome!

It is God’s mission to him that he see Rome and its Emperor.  Paul has seen with the spirit’s eye what we have seen since in history,—­that he is to be the living link by which the electric fire of life should pass first from religious Asia to quicken this dead, brutish Europe.  He knows that he is God’s messenger to bear this mystery of life eternal from the one land to the other, and to unfold it there.  And to-day has made real, in fact, this his inward confidence.  To-day has put the seal of fact on that vision of his, years since, when he first left his Asiatic home.  A prisoner in chains, still he has to-day seen the accomplishment