The life and work of St. Paul

WORK AND MARTYRDOM OF ST. STEPHEN. 85
themselves inconvenienced by it in their controversies with Christians. 1 Yet
this was but an isolated prophecy, and the Christiana could refer to passage
after passage which, on the very principles of their adversaries, not only
justified them in accepting as the Christ One whom the rulers of the Jews
had crucified, but even distinctly foreshadowed the mission of His Forerunner
; His ministry on the shores of Gennesareth ; His humble entry into
Jerusalem ; His rejection by His own people ; the disbelief of His announcements
; the treachery of one of His own followers ; the mean price paid for
His blood ; His death as a malefactor ; even the bitter and stupefying drinks
that had been offered to Him ; and the lots cast upon His clothes no less
than His victory over the grave by Resurrection, on the third day, from the
dead, and His final exaltation at the right hand of God. 2 How tremendous
the cogency of such arguments would be to the hearers of Stephen cannot bo
shown more strikingly than by the use made of them by St. Paul after tho
conversion which they doubtless helped to bring about. It must have been
from St. Stephen that he heard them first, and they became so convincing to
him that he constantly employs the same or analogous arguments in his own
reasonings with his unconverted countrymen. 3
It is clear that, in the course of argument, Stephen was led to adduce some
of those deep sayings as to the purpose of the life of Christ which the keen
insight of hate^had rendered more intelligible to the enemies of our Lord than
they had been in the first instance to His friends. Many of those priests and
Pharisees who had been baptised into the Church of Christ with the notion
that their new belief was compatible with an unchanged loyalty to Judaism,
had shown less understanding of the sayings of their Master, and loss appreciation
of the grandeur of His mission, than the Sadducees whose hatred had
handed Him over to the secular arm. It did lie within the natural interpretation
of Christ's language that the Law of Moses, which the Jews at once
idolised aud evaded, was destined to be annulled ; not, indeed, those moral
sanctions of it which were eternal in obligation, but the complicated system
wherein those moral commandments were so deeply imbedded. The Jewish
race were right to reverence Moses as an instrument in the hands of God to
lay tho deepest foundations of a national life. As a Lawgiver whose Decaloguo
is so comprehensive in its brevity as to transcend all other codes as the solo
Lawgiver who laid his prohibition against the beginnings of evil, by daring to
forbid an evil thought as one who established for his people a monotheistic
faith, a significant worship, and an undefinable hope he deserved the gratitude
and reverence of mankind. _ That this under-official of an obscure sect of
1 Proofs of this statement may be found in Dr. A. Wiinsche's Die Leiden des Messias,
and several quotations from hia book may be found in the Speaker's Commentary, ad loc.
2 See Is. xl. 3 ; Mark i. 3 ; Mai. iii. 1 ; Matt. xi. 10 ; Is. viii. 14 ; ix. 1 ; Matt. iv. 14 ;
Is. Ixi. 1 ; Luke iv. 18 ; Ps. Ixxviii. 2 ; Matt. xiii. 35 ; Ps. cxviii. 22 ; Luke ii. 34 ; Acts
iv. 11; xiii. 41; Ps. xli. 9; Zech. xi. 12; John xiii. 18; Matt. xxvi. 15; xxvii. 9, 10;
Zech. xii. 10 ; John xis. 37 ; Isa. liii. 9 ; Ps. xvi. 10 ; Matt. xii. 40 ; Acts ii. 27 ; Ps. ex.
1; Acts ii. 33; Heb. i. 13, &c. (See Dariaon, On Prophecy, pattim ; Hausrath, p. 112,
ueqq.)
3 Kph. ii. 20; Rom. b, 84; &c,