The Epic of Paul

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

An energy of earnest in Paul's voice,
A tender earnest, full of love and fear,
Fear without dread, serene vicarious fear
(Yet faithful sympathy with God expressed)
The solemn somber of a lighted look
In him, reflected as from some unseen
Region where light was more than luminous,
Appalling, like the splendor of a cloud
Whence deep the thunder now begins to break—
These, with his words themselves infusing awe,
Made Stephen feel his heart in him stand still.
Both for meet reverence toward the reverend man
Who spake these things, and likewise to assure
Himself that he in nothing failed the full
Sense and effect of all that he had heard,
Stephen his hush awe-struck, of thought, prolonged.

Then, partly from a certain manliness
Innate in him, inalienably his,
Which, while of noble and ennobling awe
It made his spirit but more capable,
Yet kept him ever conscious of his worth,
And would not suffer that, with any thought
Quick in him and still seeming to him true
Or worthy to be questioned for its truth,
He should, howso abashed, abandon it—
Partly self-stayed so in a constant mind,
But more, supported by his perfect trust
Well-grounded in his kinsman's gentleness
And tact of understanding exquisite,
Stephen returned to press his quest once more:
"I must not seem insistent overmuch,
O thou my kinsman and my master dear,
To whom indeed I hearken as to one
Divinely guided to be guide to men;
But a desire to know not yet allayed,
Perhaps I ought to own, some haunting doubt,
Prompts me to ask one question more of thee.

"I know the psalms whereof we speak were meant,
As were their fellow psalms, each, not to breathe
The individual feeling of one soul
Whether himself the writer or whoso
Might take it for his own, but to be used
By the great congregation joining voice
In symphony or in antiphony
Of choral worship, with stringed instruments
Adding their help, and instruments of wind:
So, most unmeet it were if private grudge
Of any whomsoever, high or low,
Should mix its base alloy with the fine gold
Of prayer and praise stored in our holy psalms
For pure oblation from all holy hearts
To Him, the Ever-living Holy God.
The wicked and the enemy therein
Accurséd so from good to every bane
And ill here and hereafter following them
And hunting down their issue to the end
Of endless generations of their like—
These, I can understand, were public foes,
Not private, adversary heathen tribes
That hated us because they hated God
Who chose us for His own peculiar race,
And swayed us weapon in His dread right hand
To execute His judgment on His foes,
His foes, not ours, or only ours as His—
'Them that hate Thee do not I hate, O God?'
The righteous execration bursting forth,
An outcry irrepressible of zeal,
Through all the cycle of those fearful psalms,
Not from a heart of virulence toward men,
But from a love, consuming self, for God.
Such, I can understand, the purport was
Wherein Himself, the Holy Ghost of God,
Inspired those psalms and willed them to be sung.
But, O my master, tell me, did not yet
Some too importunate spirit not thus pure,
Of outright sheer malevolence some trace,
Escape of private malice uncontrolled,
Hatred toward man that was not love for God,
On his part who was chosen God's oracle
To such high end and hard, enter the strain
He chanted, here or there, to jar the tune
And of his music make a dissonance?"

Stephen, as one who had with resolute
Exertion of an overcoming will
Discharged his heart with speech, let come what might,
Rested; the tension of his purpose still
Persisting to refuse himself recoil.
Feeling his nephew's girded attitude,
Nowise resistant, though recessive not,
Braced to keep staunch his standing where he stood,
Paul would not overbear it with sheer strength;
Choosing, with just insinuation wise,
To ease it through concession yielded him.
He said: "My Stephen has pondered deep these things,
And to result of truth well worth his pains.
Thou hast profited, my son, perhaps beyond
Thine own thought of thy profiting, in sweet
Acquist of wisdom from the mind of Christ.
Fair change, change fair and great, in thee since when
Thou cursedst Shimei in that bitter psalm!—
Bitter from thee who saidst it bitterly.
Behold, thou art fain, forsooth, to find those words,
Those same words now which then thou likedst well
Rolling them under thy tongue a morsel sweet,
Almost too human for at all divine.
Was there not in them, this thou askest me,
Expression intermixed of wicked hate,
His whose the occasion was to write the psalm?
The turns and phrases of the speech wherein
The psalmist here or there breathes out his soul
In malediction, have such force to thee,
Importing that his spirit let escape
A passion of his own not purified
Amid the pressure and the stress of zeal
Inspired from God against unrighteousness.

"Well, Stephen, the entrusted word of God
To men is ours through men and, men being such,
Why, needs we have the priceless treasure stored,
Stored and conveyed, in vessels framed of clay.
No perfect men are found, were ever found:
God's inspiration does not change men such.
His wisdom is to make of men unwise,
Of men, too, fallen far short of holiness,
Imperfect organs of His perfect will.
Adhesion hence of imperfection, man's,
Fast to the letter of the Scripture clings;
But it makes part of His perfection, God's,
Who knows us, and from His celestial height
Benignly earthward deigning condescends.
In terms of our imperfect, flawed with sin
Even, the Divine inworking wisdom loves
To teach us noble lessons of Himself,
Ennobling us to ever nobler views
Of what He is, so shadowed forth to us.

"'Sin,' that word 'sin,' so weighted as we know
With sense, beyond communication deep,
Of evil, of wrong, of outrage, of offence
Toward God, and toward ourselves of injury
Irreparable and growing ever great
And greater to immortal suicide
Wreaked with incredible madness on the soul—
What is that word in the light shallow speech
Of pagan Greek? What but a word to mean,
As if of purpose to make naught the blame,
Simply the casual missing of a mark?
Venial, forsooth, merely an aim not hit—
The aim right, but the arrow flying wide!
Into such matrix, shallower as would seem
Than could be made capacious of such sense,
God must devise to pour His thought of sin!
But how the thought has deepened since its mould,
Still vain to match the sinfulness of sin!
Humbleness—what a virtue, what a grace
Say rather, yet in all the Greek no word
To name it, till God's wisdom rectified
A word that erst imported what was base,
Mean, sordid, dastard, unuplifted, vile
In spirit, pusillanimous, to name
The lowly temper, best beloved in man
By God, the heavenly temper of His Son!
The thought at last is master of its mould,
Though mould is needful for the plastic thought.

"In our imagination of The True,
We climb as by a ladder, round by round,
Slowly toward Him, the Inaccessible,
Who dwells in a seclusion and remove
Of glory unapproachable, and light
That makes a blinding darkness round His throne.
He stoops and finds and touches us abased
So far beneath Him where we grovelling lie;
Nay, He lays hold of us and lifts us up;
With cords, so it is written, of a man
He draws us, blesséd God!—with bands of love,
Of love, the mightiest of His heavenly powers!
O, the depth fathomless, the starry height,
The breadth, the length immeasurably large,
Both of the wisdom and the knowledge, God's!
Because, forsooth, we have some few steps climbed,
Shall we, proud, spurn from underneath our feet
The ladder that uplifted us so far,
That might have raised us yet the full ascent?
That ladder rests on earth to reach to heaven:
Let us go on forever climbing higher,
But not forget the dark hole of the pit
Out of which we were digged, nor, more, contemn
The way of wisdom thither reaching down
And thence aspiring to the topmost heaven;
Whereby our race may (so we stumble not
Through pride, or like Jeshurun waxen fat
Kick) reascend at length to whence we fell—
Nay, higher, and far above all height the highest,
To Him, with Him, exalted to His right,
To Him, with Him, in Him, Lord Christ, Who rose
For us in mighty triumph from His grave,
Then reascended where He was before,
Ere the world was, God with His Father God,
But still for us; and, still for us, sat down
Forever, in His Filial Godhead Man,
Assessor with His Father on His throne,
Inheriting the Name o'er every name
Ascendant, King of kings and Lord of lords,
And us assuming with Himself to reign!
Amen! And hallelujah! And amen!"

As one might watch an eagle in his flight
That soared to viewless in the blinding sun;
As one might hearken while from higher and higher
A lark poured back his singing on the ground,
So Stephen gazed, listening, with ecstatic mind.

"Transported with delight I hear thee speak
Thus, O my reverend master, for with awe,
Which is delight, the deepest that I know"—
Thus at length Stephen spoke, easing his mind
A little, with its fulness overfraught.
"Doxology outbreaking from thy lips
Becomes them so! The rapture of thy praise
Is as the waving of a mighty wing
Beside me that is able to upbear
Me also thither whither it will soar.
I am caught in its motion and I mount
Unmeasured heights as to the heaven of heavens.
Let me join voice with thee and say, 'Amen!'
Not least I love when least I understand
Often thy high discourse. Eluding me
It leads me yet and tempts me after thee,
Tempts and enables, and, above myself,
I find myself equalled to the impossible!
But then when afterward I sink returned
To what I was—no longer wing not mine
To lift me with its great auxiliar sweep
Upward—I grope and stumble on the ground.

"Bear with me that I need to ask such things,
But tell me yet, O thou who knowest, tell me,
Am I then right, and is it, as thou seemedst
To say but saidst not, veering from the mark
When now almost upon it, so I thought,
Who waited watching—did the psalmist old
Commingle sometimes an alloy of base
Unpurified affection with his clear
All-holy inspiration breathed from God,
Lading his language with a sense unmeet,
Personal spite, his own, for God's pure ire?
Forgive me that I need to ask such things."