where otherwise it might have remained unknown.  Though he was chained to a soldier, he was not kept in very rigorous custody, so that he had frequent opportunities of proclaiming the great salvation.  He was peculiarly fitted by his education and his genius for expounding Christianity to persons moving in the upper circles of society; and had he remained at liberty he could have expected to gain access very rarely to such auditors.  But already, as a prisoner, he had pleaded the claims of the gospel before no inconsiderable portion of the aristocracy of Palestine.  He had been heard by the chief captain in command of the garrison in the castle of Antonia, by the Sanhedrim, by Felix and Drusilla, by Festus, by King Agrippa and his sister Bernice, and probably by “the principal men” of both Caesarea and Jerusalem.  In criminal cases the appeals of Roman citizens were heard by the Emperor himself, so that the apostle was about to appear as an ambassador for Christ in the presence of the greatest of earth’s potentates.  Who can tell but that some of that splendid assembly of senators and nobles who surrounded Nero, when Paul was brought before his judgment-seat, will have reason throughout all eternity to remember the occasion as the birth-day of their blessedness!

The apostle and “certain other prisoners” embarked for Rome in the autumn of A.D. 60.  The compass was then unknown; in weather, “when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared,” [142:1] the mariner was without a guide; and, late in the season, navigation was peculiarly dangerous.  The voyage proved disastrous; after passing into a second vessel at Myra, [142:2] a city of Lycia, Paul and his companions were wrecked on the coast of the island of Malta; [142:3] when they had remained there three months, they set sail once more in a corn ship of Alexandria, the Castor and Pollux; [142:4] and at length in the early part of A.D. 61, reached the harbour of Puteoli, [143:1] then the great shipping port of Italy.

The account of the voyage from Caesarea to Puteoli, as given in the Acts of the Apostles, is one of the most curious passages to be found in the whole of the sacred volume.  Some may think it strange that the inspired historian enters so much into details, and the nautical terms which he employs may puzzle not a few readers; but these features of his narrative attest its authenticity and genuineness.  No one, who had not himself shared the perils of the scene, could have been expected to describe with so much accuracy the circumstances of the shipwreck.  It has been remarked that, after the lapse of eighteen hundred years, the references of the evangelist to prevailing winds and currents, to the indentations of the coast, to islands, bays, and harbours, may still be exactly verified.  Recent investigators have demonstrated that the sailors, in the midst of danger, displayed no little ability, and that their conduct in “undergirding the ship,” [143:2] and in casting “four anchors out of the stern,”