The Epic of Paul

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

Paul fixed his gaze point-blank on Felix while
These things he said, not as with personal aim—
Which might have been resented, being such,
Resented, and thereby avoided quite—
Rather as if, through body, he beheld
His hearer's soul, and set it with his eyes
Far forward into the eternal world,
And there saw the fierce flame he spoke of, fast
Adhering or inhering, burn that soul,
With burning unescapable by flight
Or refuge through the universe of God.
Paul's vision was so vivid that his eyes
Imprinted what he saw upon the soul
Of Felix, that almost he saw it too.
He stared and listened, with that thought intense
Wherewith sometimes the overmastering mind
Will blind the eyesight and the hearing blur.

A sense of insecurity in power,
Bred in him by his consciousness of crime,
With dread, too, of the moment, then perhaps
Already nigh! when that omnipotence,
That omnipresence, that omniscience, Rome's,
Might beset him, to cut him off from hope—
This feeling blindly wrought the while beneath,
Like struggling earthquake, to unsettle him;
Thus weakened, half unconsciously, his will
Fell childlike-helpless in the power of Paul.
Now fear hath torment, and to Felix, prey
Of fear with torment, Paul still added fear;
Perhaps his fear intolerable grown
Might save the sufferer from the thing he feared!
Paul further said: "O Felix, Cæsar's sway
Over this world, inevitable thus,
Subduing all, is yet but image pale
Of the supreme dominion absolute
Which to Christ Jesus in the heaven belongs.
The captives of the emperor need but wait
Patient a while and sure release arrives;
Since death at least, to all, or soon or late,
Comes, one escape at last from Cæsar's power,
Who owns no empire in that world beyond.
But of that world beyond, no end, no bound,
Whither we all must flee in fleeing hence,
Still the Lord Christ abides eternal King;
Death is but door to realm of His more wide.
Here, the sheathed sword of His avenging ire
Will sometimes touch, undrawn, with blunted edge,
The wincing conscience of the wicked man
That knows himself a criminal unjudged.
Those touches are the mercy of the Lord
That would betimes the guilty soul alarm;
Those pains of conscience are the smouldering fires
Which, quenched not now in sin-atoning blood,
Will, blown to fury, by and by burst forth,
And, fuelled of the substance of the soul,
That cannot moult its immortality,
One inextinguishable vengeance burn.

"'Be wise now, therefore, O ye kings, be ye
Instructed, judges of the earth;' so God
Cries in our Scriptures in the ears of men.
'Kiss ye the Son,' He says, 'in homage kiss
The Son of Mine anointing, Christ the Lord,
Kiss Him lest He be angry, and His wrath
Ready to be enkindled you devour.
But in the living scriptures of the soul
Itself, the holy word of God in man,
The selfsame admonition beats and burns—
If men would read it and would understand!
The raging of desire not satisfied,
The sickness of the surfeit of desire,
The ravages of passion uncontrolled,
And waste of being, by itself consumed,
To bury or deface what else were fair—
Like lava spouted from the crater's mouth
Of the volcano burning its own bowels
To belch them torrent over fertile fields—
These things, O Felix, in the conscious heart,
Are muffled footfalls of oncoming doom."

Peculiar commination seemed to flame,
Volcanic, in Paul's manner as he spoke.
One might have felt the figure prophecy—
For some fulfilment in this present world
Impending to be symbol of his thought—
His likening of the self-consuming soul,
Disgorging desolation round about,
To a volcano its own entrails burning,
And in eruption pouring them abroad;
So real, so living, so in imminent act,
Paul's speaking made his fiery simile.
Drusilla, when, long after, with her son
Agrippa, born to Felix, overwhelmed
In that destruction from Vesuvius
Which under ashen rain and lava flood
Pompeii rolled with Herculaneum,
Like Sodom and Gomorrah whelmed again!—
Drusilla then, despairing, for one fierce
Fleet instant—instant endless, though so fleet—
Saw, as from picture branded on her brain,
Heard, as from echo hoarded in its cells,
The very image of the speaker's form,
His posture, gesture, features in their play,
These, and the tones, reliving, of the voice
Wherewith, in Cæsarea judgment-hall,
He fulmined, yea, as if this self-same wo!

But Paul, no pause, immitigably said:
"Belshazzar, Babylonian king of old,
Once in a season of high festival
Held in his palace with a thousand lords,
Saw visionary fingers of a hand
Come out upon the palace walls and write.
Then that king's countenance was changed in him,
In answer to the trouble of his thoughts;
The very jointings of his loins were loosed,
And his knees, shaken, on each other smote.
In language that he did not understand,
But prophet Daniel told the sense to him,
Belshazzar had his own swift ruin read.
Thus, O lord Felix, in our hours of feast,
Oft, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN,
Dread warning to us that the end is come,
That we have been full proved and wanting found,
That now our vantage must another's be—
Appalling words of final doom from God,
In lurid letters live along the walls
Of the soul's pleasure-house—for who will heed!
Remorses, doubts, recoils, forebodings, fears,
And fearful lookings for of judgment nigh,
Previsions flashed on the prophetic soul
Refusing to be hooded not to see—
These are handwritings on the wall from God;
They, syllabling the sentence of His ire,
Spell MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN,
For pleasure-lovers lost in lust and pride.
Well for Belshazzar, if betimes he heed!"

Had Felix been alone, deep in the dark,
And a wide waste of solitude around,
A comfort it had seemed to him to loose
One mighty agitation of his frame
And shiver his blood-curdling terror off;
Or, in one wanton, wild, voluptuous cry,
Shriek it into the startled universe.
But, seated there upon his throne of power,
Drusilla by his side regarding him,
To tremble, like a culprit being judged,
Before a culprit waiting judgment! He,
With last resistant agony of will,
Kept moveless his blanched lips, and on his seat
Sat stricken upright, and so stared at Paul.

There Paul stood tranquil, choosing thunderbolts,
And this the thunderbolt that last he launched:
"Hearken, O Felix. In the clouds of heaven,
Attended by the angels of His might,
The Lord Christ Jesus I behold descend.
The trumpet of the resurrection sounds,
And sea and land give up their wakened dead;
These all to judgment hasten at His call:
The books are opened and the witness found;
All the least thoughts of men, with all their words
And deeds, all their dumb motions of desire,
Their purposes, and their endeavors all,
Are written in the record of those books.
They blaze out in the light of that great day.
Like lightning, fixed from fleeting, on the sky;
Deem not one guilty can his guilt conceal.
A parting of the evil and the good;
The good at His right hand He bids sit down,
The awful Judge, omnipotent as just;
The evil, frowning, bids from Him depart.
Swift, them departing—who would not know God,
And not obey the gospel of His Son—
He, taking vengeance, follows in their flight
With flaming fire and dreadful punishment,
Destruction everlasting from His face,
From the Lord's face, and glory of His power!"

The shudder that had slept uneasy sleep
Within the breast of Felix lulling it,
Woke startled at these minatory words
Spoken as with the voice of God by Paul.
That couchant shudder from its ambush broke,
And openly ran wantoning over all
The members of the terror-stricken man.
But the cry clamoring in him for escape,
To ease the anguish of his mortal fear,
Felix found strength to modulate to this,
In forced tones uttered, and with failing breath:
"Go thy way this time, Paul; at season fit
Hereafter I will call for thee again."

The soldier duly led his prisoner out,
And Felix was full easily rid of Paul;
Of Paul, but of Paul's haunting presence not
The image of that orator in chains,
The solemn echo of the words he spoke,
Swam before Felix, sounded in his ears,
So real, the real world round him seemed less real.

Drusilla, to her discomposure, found
Her husband strangely alien from his spouse;
The blandishments so potent with him late
Lost on an absent or repellent mind.
The awe of Felix under Paul's discourse
She had remarked with unconcerned surprise.
She now recalled it with a doubt, a fear.
The jealous thought woke in her: 'If my lord
Should, overwrought in conscience, cast me off!
What byword and what hissing then were I,
Stranded and branded an adulteress!
I, who the scion of a kingly house,
Haughty Antiochus Epiphanes,
Haughtily spurned as suitor for my hand,
Because he would not for my sake be Jew;
Who wedded then Azizus, eastern king,
Willing to win me at the price I fixed;
Who next with scandal parted from his bed,
To snatch this dazzle of a Roman spouse—
I to be now by him flung to the dogs!
All at the beck of an apostate Jew,
Arraigned a culprit at his judgment-bar!
Drusilla, rouse thee, say, It must not be!
Drusilla, arm thee, swear, It shall not be!'