progress. Of course, deprived themselves, of all political power, they had not the means of meeting the evil by physical violence, and they well knew that any attempt on their part to raise an illegal commotion against the strangers, would only bring down on the exciters of the disturbance, the whole vengeance of their Roman rulers, who were unsparing in their vengeance on those that undertook to defy the forms of their laws, for the sake of persecution, or any private ends; and least of all would a class of people so peculiar and so disliked as the Jews, be allowed to take any such treasonable steps, without insuring them a most dreadful punishment. These circumstances therefore compelled them to proceed, as usual, under the forms of law; and their first step against Paul therefore, was to apprehend him, and take him, as a violator of religious order, before the highest Roman tribunal,—that of the proconsul.
The proconsul of Achaia, holding his supreme seat of justice in Corinth, the capital of that Roman province, was Lucius Junius Gallio, a man well known to the readers of one of the classic Latin writers of that age,—Seneca,—as one of the most remarkable exemplifications of those noble virtues which were the great theme of this philosopher's pen. Out of many beautiful illustrations which may be drawn from Roman and Jewish writers, to explain and amplify the honest and faithful apostolic history of Luke, there is none more striking and gratifying than the aid here drawn from this fine philosophical classic, on the character of the noble proconsul, who by his upright, wise, and clement decision, against the mean persecutors of Paul,—and by his indignant refusal to pervert and degrade his vice-regal power to the base ends of private abuse, has acquired the grateful regard and admiring respect of all Christian readers of apostolic history. The name of Lucius Junius Gallio, by which he is known to Roman writers as well as in apostolic history, was not his original family designation, and therefore gives the reader no idea of his interesting relationship to one of the finest moralists of the whole period of the Roman empire. His original family name was Marcus Annaeus Novatus Seneca,—which appellation he exchanged for his later one, on being adopted by Lucius Junius Gallio, a noble Roman, who being destitute of children, adopted, according to a very common custom of the imperial city, one of a family that had already given promise of a fine reward to those who should take its offspring as theirs. The famous philosopher before men-
