Life of St. Paul pages 142 and 143

(142.) 187.  Trial. - There can be little doubt that he appeard again at Nero's bar, and this time the charge did not break down.  In all history there is not a more startling illustration of the irony of human life than this scene of Paul at the bar of Nero.  On the judgment -seat, clad in the imperial purple, sat a man who in a bad world had attained the eminence of being the very  worst and meanest being it in - a man stained with every crime, the  (143.) murderer of his own mother, of his wives and of bis best benefactors; a man whose whole being was so steeped in every nameable and unnameable vice that body and soul of him were, as some one said at the time, nothing but a compound of mud and blood; and in the prisoner's dock stood the best man the world contained, his hair whitened with labors for the good of men and the glory of God.  Such was the occupant of the seat of justice, and such the man who stood in the place of the criminal.