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 dea