Righteousness, temperance, and judgment. — The first word, like our English “justice,” includes in Greek ethics the duties which man owes to man. “Temperance” answers to a term with a somewhat wider sense than that which now attaches to the English word, and implies the state in which a man exercises control over all the passions that minister to sensuality, while he yet falls short of a perfect harmony between Reason and Emotion (Aristot. Eth. Nicom. vii. 7-10). What has been said of Felix shows how faulty his character was in both these respects. The selection of the unwelcome topics shows how little St. Paul belonged to the class of those who “compassed sea and land to make a proselyte” (Matthew 23:15). It would apparently have been easy to bring about this result with Felix and his wife, had the preacher been content to speak smooth things and prophecy deceits, to put the patch of a ceremonial Judaism on the old garment of a sensual life; but instead of this he presses home the truths which their state needed, and seeks to rouse conscience to something like activity. His own experience (Romans 7:7-23; Philippians 3:7-8), had taught him that, without this, neither doctrine nor ritual availed to deliver the soul from its bondage to evil, and bring it into the kingdom of God. But he does not confine himself, as a merely ethical teacher might have done, to abstract arguments on the beauty or the utility of “justice” and “temperance.” Here, also, his own experience was his guide, and he sought to make the guilty pair before whom he stood feel that the warnings of conscience were but the presage of a divine judgment which should render to every man according to his deeds. It will be noted that there is no mention here of the forgiveness of sins, nor of the life of fellowship with Christ. Those truths would have come, in due course, afterwards. As yet they would have been altogether premature. The method of St. Paul’s preaching was like that of the Baptist, and of all true teachers.
Felix trembled, and answered... — Conscience, then, was not dead, but its voice was silenced by the will which would not listen. Felix treats St. Paul as Antipas had treated the Baptist (Mark 6:20). He does not resent his plainness of speech; he shows a certain measure of respect for him, but he postpones acting “till a more convenient season,” and so becomes the type of the millions whose spiritual life is ruined by a like procrastination. Nothing that we know of him gives us any ground for thinking that the “convenient season” ever came.