Go forth to your spheres of duty, and do not be discouraged if, in your first attempts, you miss the mark. Ehud missed it. ESAU. Esau had the birthright given him. In the olden times this meant not only temporal but spiritual blessing. One day Esau took this birthright and traded it off for something to eat. Oh, the folly! But let us not be too severe upon him, for some of us have committed the same folly. After Esau had thus parted with his birthright, he wanted to get it back. Just as though you, tomorrow morning, should take all your notes and bonds and government securities, and should go into a restaurant, and in a fit of restlessness and hunger throw all those securities on the counter and ask for a plate of food, making that exchange. This was the exchange Esau made. He sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, and he was very sorry about it afterward; but “he found no place for repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.” There are sins which, though they may be pardoned, are in some respects irrevocable; and you can find no place for repentance, though you seek it carefully with tears. After wasting forty years, you can not get back the neglected advantages of boyhood and youth. FELIX AND DRUSILLA. A city of marble was Cesarea--wharves of marble, houses of marble, temples of marble. This being the ordinary architecture of the place, you may well imagine something of the splendor of Governor Felix’s residence. In a room of that palace--floor tesselated, windows curtained, ceiling fretted, the whole scene affluent with Tyrian purple, and statues, and pictures, and carvings--sat a very dark-complexioned man by the name of Felix, and beside him sat a woman of extraordinary beauty, whom he had stolen by breaking up another’s domestic circle. She was only eighteen years of age, a princess by birth, and unwittingly waiting for her doom--that of being buried alive in the ashes and scoria of Mount Vesuvius, which in sudden eruption, one day, put an end to her abominations. Well, one afternoon Drusilla, seated in the palace, weary with the magnificent stupidities of the place, says to Felix: “You have a very distinguished prisoner, I believe, by the name of Paul. Do you know he is one of my countrymen? I should very much like to see him, and I should very much like to hear him speak, for I have heard so much about his eloquence. “Besides that, the other day, when he was being tried in another room of this palace, and the windows were open, I heard the applause that greeted the speech of Lawyer Tertullus, as he denounced Paul. Now, I very much wish I could hear Paul speak. Won’t you let me hear him speak?” “Yes,” said Felix, “I will. I will order him up now from the guard room.” The clank of a chain is heard coming up the marble stairway, there is a shuffle at the door, and in comes Paul--a little old man, prematurely old through exposure--only sixty years of age, but looking as though he were eighty.