This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1853. Excerpt: ... A STIFLED CONSCIENCE. "And as he reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, Felix trembled."--Acts xxiv. 25. It has been often and justly remarked concerning Felix, the Governor of Judea, that the convenient season of which he spake, when he should give attention to the truths which now agitated his spirit, never arrived. His succeeding history presents the same characteristics, though more fully developed, which when set before him in the light of truth, made him tremble. We see no change in him but for the worse; and so far as we have any evi dence concerning his end, it tells us that he utterly perished in his own corruption. As we look at him, under the preaching of Paul, ve find that he had a conscience, a conscience which reproved him of sin and filled him with dire apprehensions. As we look at him afterward, we find him the subject of a stifled conscience, going on from bad to worse. We doubt not that the moment when Paul reasoned with him of righteousness, and temperance, and a judgment to come, was a crisis in his moral history, upon his action in which, the whole character of his future life turned. He might, at the bidding of conscience, and under the teachings of the truth, have changed his whole course and become a new man, but he stifled those monitions, and resisted those teachings, and went on more confirmed, and hopelessly confirmed in his old unrighteousness. In this brief exhibition of the text, and its connections, we have presented to us a subject of painful, but intensely interesting study. It is the human mind, in two distinct states, or stages of its spiritual history--first, as agitated in view of the appeals which truth addresses to the conscience, the subject of strong moral influences, and of clear and decided...