Acts 26:24-25 And as he thus spoke for himself, Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, you are beside yourself; much learning does make you mad.… Proved by — I. HIS MANNER ALL THROUGH THIS TRYING TIME. He had endured enough to turn the strongest brain. The violence of the mob; the narrow escapes from scourging and assassination, with all the tremendous anxieties connected therewith, and with his trials before the various tribunals; the hope deferred by the policy of Felix; the strain involved by the appeal to Caesar, and now his arraignment before a crowded and distinguished court. Who else could have endured all this without mental derangement? Yet we see Paul uniformly calm, courteous, courageous, conciliatory, quick to see and prompt to seize every favouring opportunity, and adapting himself with an ease amounting to genius to every circumstance in which he was placed. If this is madness, who then is sane? II. THE MATTER OF HIS DEFENCE. Two or three years had passed since his defence on the stairs, and nearly a quarter of a century since the event he describes. The slightest touch of insanity would be easy to detect in the inevitable variation of some important details. Yet all these accounts are consistent. No lapse of memory, no mental indistinctness or weakness is observable. No man ever gave the same account of an hallucination twice, and no man ever suffered for one as Paul did for his vision of Christ, or ever utilised it for the benefit of the race. III. THE EFFECTS OF HIS CONDUCT ON THE WORLD. What madman has turned the course of history, which was running in a wrong direction, into the right? To morally revolutionise the world, to secure for his Master a following which no man can number of the very elect of the race, and to secure a place in the affections of untold millions, are hardly effects which we should attribute to the work of a madman. IV. THE COMMON CONSENT OF THE WISEST AND BEST of the past eighteen centuries who have found in Paul's words salvation from sin, comfort in sorrow, stimulus to high endeavour and hope in death. (J. W. Burn.) Parallel Verses KJV: And as he thus spake for himself, Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad. |
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