The text is taken from a striking incident in the life of the greatest of apostolic missionaries. It was in the presence of Festus and Agrippa that Paul had poured forth those few burning utterances which to Festus seemed like madness, but which Paul himself declared to be words of truth and soberness. Then it was that the Jewish prince, Agrippa--far better instructed and seeing deeper into Paul’s mind than the heathen Festus, yet still unconvinced--broke in upon the conversation with the words which in the English translation have well nigh passed into a proverb, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” The sense which they thus give would be in itself perfectly suitable to the halting, fickle character of the Herodian family, and would accurately describe the numerous half-converts throughout the world--“Almost,” but not quite, “thou persuadest me to join the good cause.” But the sense which, by the nearly universal consent of modern scholars, they really bear in the original is something still more instructive. The only meaning of which the Greek words are capable is an exclamation, half in jest and half in earnest, “It is but a very brief and simple argument that you offer to work so great a change;” or, if we may venture to bring out the sense more forcibly, “So few words, and such a vast conclusion!” “So slight a foundation, and so gigantic a superstructure!” “So scanty an outfit, and so perilous an enterprise!” The speech breathes something of the spirit of Naaman, when he was told to wash in the Jordan--“Are not Abana and Pharpar better than all the waters of Israel?” It is like the complaint of the popular prophets in the time of Hezekiah, whose taste demanded stronger flavor than the noble simplicity of Isaiah, “Thou givest us only line upon line, precept upon precept.” It breathes the spirit of the Ephesian Christians who, when they heard St. John’s repeated maxim of “Little children, love one another,” said, “Is this all that he has to tell us?” It expresses the spirit of many an one since, who has stumbled at the threshold of the genuine Gospel--“So vague, so simple, so universal. Is this worth the sacrifice that you demand? Give us a demonstrative argument, a vast ceremonial, a complex system, a uniform government. Nothing else will satisfy us.”