the
history of Israel, with which they were presumably as well acquainted
as he, and then reviled them in the most insulting terms as "stiffnecked
and uncircumcized." Finally, after boring and annoying them to the
utmost bearable extremity, he looked up and declared that he saw the
heavens open, and Christ standing on the right hand of God. This was too
much: they threw him out of the city and stoned him to death. It was
a severe way of suppressing a tactless and conceited bore; but it was
pardonable and human in comparison to the slaughter of poor Ananias and
Sapphira.

PAUL.

Suddenly a man of genius, Paul, violently anti-Christian, enters on
the scene, holding the clothes of the men who are stoning Stephen. He
persecutes the Christians with great vigor, a sport which he combines
with the business of a tentmaker. This temperamental hatred of Jesus,
whom he has never seen, is a pathological symptom of that particular
sort of conscience and nervous constitution which brings its victims
under the tyranny of two delirious terrors: the terror of sin and the
terror of death, which may be called also the terror of sex and the
terror of life. Now Jesus, with his healthy conscience on his higher
plane, was free from these terrors. He consorted freely with sinners,
and was never concerned for a moment, as far as we know, about whether
his conduct was sinful or not; so that he has forced us to accept him as
the man without sin. Even if we reckon his last days as the days of
his delusion, he none the less gave a fairly convincing exhibition of
superiority to the fear of death. This must have both fascinated and
horrified Paul, or Saul, as he was first called. The horror accounts for
his fierce persecution of the Christians. The fascination accounts for
the strangest of his fancies: the fancy for attaching the name of Jesus
Christ to the great idea which flashed upon him on the road to Damascus,
the idea that he could not only make a religion of his two terrors, but
that the movement started by Jesus offered him the nucleus for his new
Church. It was a monstrous idea; and the shocks of it, as he afterwards
declared, struck him blind for days. He heard Jesus calling to him from
the clouds, "Why persecute me?" His natural hatred of the teacher for
whom Sin and Death had no terrors turned into a wild personal worship
of him which has the ghastliness of a beautiful thing seen in a false
light.

The chronicler of the Acts of