This time the crowd was powerless for they could not get their victim. The soldiers guarded him and took him into the castle where he was to be scourged, that is beaten with rods. The soldiers tied Paul up to the wall with thongs and were ready to begin the terrible scourging when he quietly asked the centurion if it was lawful to scourge a Roman citizen who had not been found guilty of any crime. The centurion went out and told the chief captain that Paul was a Roman, and he immediately stopped the scourging. The next day Paul had an opportunity to address the great council of the Jews in the presence of Ananias, the high-priest, but the council divided in their opinion of Paul, some approving of him and some disapproving, until they nearly tore him in pieces in their excitement. Once more the soldiers saved him by rushing in and carrying him away to the castle. Meantime, a band of men got together and formed a secret plot to kill Paul and have done with him. This time it was not the Roman soldiers who saved him. It was his nephew. Paul, we remember, had a sister in Jerusalem. And in some way her son discovered this plot. He got into the castle and told his uncle, who brought him to a centurion and the centurion took the young man to the chief captain where he told all he knew of the plot. The brave boy saved his uncle’s life, for the chief captain, when he heard the boy’s story, ordered two hundred soldiers and seventy horsemen and two hundred spearmen to take Paul by night to Cæsarea, where the Roman governor had his home and headquarters and where Paul would be safe until his trial was over. He was taken at first to Herod’s palace, though we may be pretty sure that the part in which Paul lived was more like a prison than a palace, but this wonderful man had something in his soul which changed even prisons into palaces. Soon after his arrival, Ananias, the high-priest, with a lawyer named Tertullus, came down to Cæsarea to lay before Felix, the Roman governor, the charges against Paul. Tertullus made a speech charging Paul with being “a pestilent fellow,” “a mover of insurrections” up and down the empire wherever he travelled. He said Paul was “a ringleader of the Nazarenes” and that he did things contrary to the laws and customs of the Jews. Tertullus made out as bad a case as he could and the other Jews who had come down with him added whatever they could think of against the prisoner.