King Herod Agrippa, after this miserable failure in his attempt to “please the Jews,” does not seem to have made a very long stay in Jerusalem. Before his departure, however, to secure his own solid glory and his kingdom’s safety, as well as the favor of his subjects, he not only continued the repairs of the temple, but instituted such improvements in the fortifications of the city, as, if ever completed, would have made it utterly impregnable even to a Roman force; so that the emperor’s jealousy soon compelled him to abandon this work; and soon after he left Jerusalem, and went down to Caesarea Augusta, on the sea-coast, long the seat of government of Palestine, and a more agreeable place for the operations of a Gentile court and administration, (for such Agrippa’s must have been from his Roman residence,) than the punctilious religious capital of Judea. But he was not allowed to remain much longer on the earth, to hinder the progress of the truth, by acts of tyranny in subservience to the base purposes of winning the favor of his more powerful subjects. The hand of God was laid destroyingly on him, in the midst of what seemed the full fruition of that popular adulation for which he had lived,――in which he now died. Arrayed in a splendid and massy robe of polished silver, he seated himself on the throne erected by his grandfather Herod, in the great Herodian theater at Caesarea, early in the morning of the day which was appointed for the celebration of the great festal games, in honor of his royal patron, Claudius Caesar. On this occasion, to crown his kingly triumph, the embassadors of the great commercial Phoenician cities, Tyre and Sidon, appeared before him to receive his condescending answer to their submissive requests for the re-establishment of a friendly intercourse between his dominions and theirs,――the agricultural products of the former being quite essential to the thriving trade of the latter. Agrippa’s reply was now publicly given to them, in which he graciously granted all their requests, in such a tone of eloquent benignity, that the admiring assembly expressed their approbation in shouts of praise, and at last some bold adulators catching the idea from the rays of dazzling light which flashed from the polished surfaces of his metallic robe, and threw a sort of glory over and around him, cried out, in impious exclamation, “It is the voice of a God, and not of a man.” So little taste had the foolish king, that he did not check this pitiful outbreak of silly blasphemy; but sat swallowing it all, in the most unmoved self-satisfaction. But in the midst of this profane glory, he was called to an account for which it ill prepared him. In the expressive though figurative language of Luke,――“immediately the messenger of the Lord struck him, because he gave not the glory to God.” The Jewish historian, too, in a similar manner assigns the reason. “The king did not rebuke the flatterers, nor refuse their impious adulation.