w three men hurrying by, one whose face was white as
the dead, with a small crowd following; and everyone saying: not here,
not here! And as they spoke stones were being gathered, and I knew that
they were for stoning the man they had with them, one Stephen, they
said, who had been teaching in the Temple that Jesus was born and died
and raised from the dead, and that since his death the law is of no
account. So did I gather news and with it abhorrence, and followed them
till they came to an angle, at which they said: this corner will do.
Stephen was thrown into it, and stones of all kinds were heaped upon him
till one spattered his brains along the wall, after which the crowd
muttered, we shall have no more of them.

That day I was of the crowd, and the stone that spattered the brains of
Stephen along the wall seemed to me to have been well cast; I hated
those who spoke against the law of our fathers, which I held in
reverence, as essential and to be practised for all time; and the mild
steadfastness in their faces, and the great love that shone in their
eyes when the name of our Lord Jesus Christ was mentioned, instead of
persuading me that I might be persecuting saints, exasperated me to
further misdeeds. I became foremost in these persecutions, and informed
by spies of the names of the saints, I made search in their houses at
the head of armed agents and dragged them into the synagogue, compelling
them to renounce the truth that the Messiah had come which had been
promised in the Scriptures. Nor was I satisfied when the last Nazarene
had been rooted out of Jerusalem, but cast my eyes forward to other
towns, into which the saints might have fled, and, hearing that many
were in Damascus, I got letters from the chief priests and started forth
in a fume of rage which I strove to blow up with the threats of what we
would put the saints to when we reached Damascus. But while the threats
were on my lips there was in my heart a mighty questioning, from which I
did not seem to escape, perhaps because I had not thrown a stone but
stood by an approving spectator merely. I know not how it was, but as we
forded the Jordan the cruelties that I had been guilty of, the
inquisitions, the beatings with rods, the imprisonment--all these things
rose up in my mind, a terrible troop of phantoms. Gentle faces and words
of forgiveness floated past me one night as we lay encamped in a great
quarry, and I asked myself again if these saints wer