- wise. "When the Holy Ghost fell on them, as on us at the beginning,
then remembered I the word of the Lord, how that he said," (when parting from us, on the top of Olivet, to rise to the bosom of his father, prophetically announcing a new and holy consecration and endowment for our work,) "John indeed baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost." This peculiar gift thus solemnly announced, we had indeed received at the pentecost, and its outward signs we had thereby learned infallibly by our own experience; and even so, at Caesarea, I recognized in those Gentiles the same tokens by which I knew the workings of divine grace in myself and you. "Forasmuch, then, as God gave them the like gift as to us, who believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, what was I, that I should withstand God?"—This clear and unanswerable appeal silenced the clamors of the bold assertors of the inviolability of Mosaic forms; and when they heard these things, they held their peace, and, softened from their harsh spirit of rebuke, they, in a noble feeling of truly Christian triumph, forgot all their late exclusiveness, in a pure joy for the new and vast extension of the dominion of Christ, secured by this act, whose important consequences they were not slow in perceiving. They praised God for such a beginning of mighty results, and laying aside, in this moment of exultation, every feeling of narrow Jewish bigotry, they acknowledged that "to the Gentiles also, God had granted repentance unto life."
HEROD AGRIPPA.
At this time, the monarch of the Roman world was Caius Caesar, commonly known by his surname, Caligula. Among the first acts of a reign, whose outset was deservedly popular for its numerous manifestations of prudence and benevolence, forming a strange contrast with subsequent tyranny and folly, was the advancement of a tried and faithful friend, to the regal honors and power which his birth entitled him to claim, and from which the neglectful indifference at first, and afterwards the revengeful spite of the preceding Caesar, Tiberius, had long excluded him. This was Herod Agrippa, grandson of that great Herod, who, by the force of his own exalted genius, and by the favor of the imperial Augustus, rose from the place of a friendless foreign adventurer, to the kingly sway of all Palestine. This extensive power he exercised in a manner which was, on the whole, ultimately advantageous to his subjects; but his whole reign, and the later years of it more particularly, were marked by cruelties the most
