Paul Before King Felix.

Taken from:

Discipline and Other Sermons 

(1881 edition)

 by Charles Kingsley

And as he reasoned about righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment, Felix was alarmed and said, “Go away for the present. When I get an opportunity I will summon you.”  Acts 24:25

This is a well-known text, on which many a sermon has been preached, and with good reason, for it is an important text. It tells us of a man, who, like too many men in all times, trembled when he heard the truth about his wicked life, but did not repent and mend; and a very serious lesson we may draw from his example.

But even a more important fact about the text is that it tells us what were really the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion in those early times, about twenty-five years, seemingly, after our Lord's death; what St. Paul used to preach about; what he considered was the first thing which he had to tell men.

Let us take this latter question first. About what did St. Paul reason before Felix?

About righteousness (which means justice), temperance, and judgement to come.

I beg you to remember these words. If you believe the Bible to be inspired, you are bound to take its words as they stand. And therefore I beg you to remember that St. Paul preached not about unrighteousness, but righteousness; not about intemperance, but temperance; not about hell, but about judgement to come; in a word, not about wrong, but about right.

I hope that does not seem to you a small matter. I hope that none of you are ready to say, "It comes to the same thing in the end." It does not come to the same thing. There is no use rebuking a man for being bad unless you first tell him how he may become better and give him hope for himself, or you will only drive him to recklessness and despair. You must show him the right road before you can complain of him for going on the wrong one.

But if St. Paul had reasoned with Felix about injustice, intemperance and hell, one could not have been surprised. For Felix was a thoroughly bad man, unjust and intemperate, and seemingly fitting himself for hell.

He had begun life as a slave of the emperor in a court which was a mere stink of profligacy and villainy. Then he had got his freedom, and next, the governorship of Judea, probably by his brother Pallas's interest, who had been a slave like him, and had made an enormous fortune by the most detestable wickedness.

When in his governorship, Felix began to show himself as wicked as his brother. The violence, misrule, extortion and cruelty which went on in Judea was notorious. He caused the high-priest at Jerusalem to be murdered out of spite. Drusilla, his wife, he had taken away from a Syrian king, who was her lawful husband. Making money seems to have been his great object; and the great Roman historian of those times sums up his character in a few bitter words thus: "Felix," he says, "exercised the power of a king with the heart of a slave, in all cruelty and lust."

Such was the wicked upstart whom God, for the sins of the Jews, had allowed to rule them in St. Paul's time and before him St. Paul had to plead for his life.  To be continued...