Who was the greatest man in Rome at that hour? Not the Caesar but the
poor Jewish prisoner. How astonished both would have been if they had
been told the truth! The two kingdoms were, so to speak, set face to
face in these two, their representatives, and neither of them knew his
own relative importance. The Caesar was all unaware that, for all his
legions and his power, he was but 'a noise'; Paul was as unconscious
that he was incomparably the most powerful of the influences that were
then at work in the world. The haughty and stolid eyes of Romans saw in
him nothing but a prisoner, sent up from a turbulent subject land on
some obscure charge, a mere nobody. The crowds in forum and
amphitheatre would have laughed at any one who had pointed to that
humble 'hired house,' and said, 'There lodges a man who bears a word
that will shatter and remould the city, the Empire, the world.'
Let us have confidence in the greatness of the word, though the world
may be deaf to its music and blind to its power, and let us never fear
to ally ourselves with a cause which we know to be God's, however it
may be unpopular and made light of by the 'leaders of opinion.'