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to succour all those that suffer for Thee, our only Mediator and Advocate."
Tj One of the pictures which Tintoret conceived most rapidly and painted with passionate speed is his picture of the martyrdom of St. Stephen. It is in the great Church of St. George at Venice. Entirely ideal, it shares in the weakness which sometimes belonged to this artist's work when he was painting what was impossible. Not one of the stones which lie in hundreds round the kneeling figure of the martyr has touched him ; he is absolutely unhurt. It would have suited Tintoret's character far more to have filled the air with a rain of stones, and to have sent the saint to the ground with a huge mass crashing on his shoulder. And he could have done this without erring against our sense of beauty if he had chosen. But he was ordered otherwise ; and we have now from his hand the spiritual idea of martyrdom, not the actual reality.
The picture somewhat fails, because he wished to do it otherwise ; but the kneeling figure, with clasped hands and face upturned in ecstasy — its absolute forgetfulness of the wild cries and the violence of death, its rapturous consciousness of the glory which from the throne of God above strikes upon the face — is a concentration of all the thoughts which in many ages have collected around the idea of the sacrifice of life for the love of truth conceived of as at one with the love of Christ.
But this is not all that was represented on the canvas of this thoughtful and imaginative painter. Tintoret, who knew his Bible well, knew that Stephen had won his martyrdom by bold speaking, and that though he prayed for those who slew him, he had not been patient with their blindness to good. So there is in the whole picture a sense of triumph — the triumph and ad- vance of Christianity. " Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." That is the note. The glorious group above in Heaven is dominant. We see the future joy of the martyr in the triumph flashing from the face of Stephen, and the circle of the witnesses seated around in light seem to form an aureole round the dying figure. Not a stone touches the martyr. Nothing is fairer, nothing more victorious than his face.1
This is the only narrative in the New Testament of a Christian martyrdom or death. As a rule, Scripture is supremely indifferent as to what becomes of the people with whom it is for a time con- cerned. So long as the man is the organ of the Divine Spirit he
1 Stopford Brooke.
ACTS vii. 59, 60 87
is somewhat ; as soon as the Spirit ceases to speak through him he drops into insignificance. So this same Acts of the Apostles kills off James the brother of John in a parenthesis ; and his is the only other martyrdom that it concerns itself even so much as to mention. Why, then, this exceptional detail about the martyrdom of Stephen ? For two reasons : because it is the first of a series, and the Acts of the Apostles always dilates upon the first of each set of things which it describes, and condenses the others. But more especially because, if we come to look at the story, it is not so much an account of Stephen's death as of Christ's power in Stephen's death. And the theme of this book is not the acts of the Apostles, but the acts of the risen Lord in and for His Church.
I.
Stephen's Life.
i. The Deacon.
1. Stephen was originally a Hellenistic Jew. The Hellenistic Jews were made up, partly of men of purely Gentile parentage who were proselytes to the Mosaic Law, and partly of Jews, who, by long settlement in foreign lands, had adopted the language and manners of Greek civilization. To say that a man was a Hellenist proved nothing as to his descent ; but it showed that he accepted the religion of Israel, while yet he used Greek speech and followed Greek customs. Stephen's name, although Greek, does not exclude the possibility of his having been a Jew by birth ; and he is said to have had a Syriac name of the same meaning.
2. Of his conversion to the Faith of Christ we know nothing ; he is first mentioned when he was chosen one of the seven Deacons. The Church of Jerusalem in the earliest Apostolic age had a common fund, into which its members at their conversion threw their personal property, and out of which they were assisted according to their needs. The administration of this fund must have come to be a serious and complicated business within a few months from its establishment. And as the higher ministries of the Church were ordained, not with a view to carrying on a work of this kind, but for the conversion and sanctification
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of souls, it was natural that, with the demands upon their time which the Apostles had to meet, the finance and resources of the Church should occasionally fall into confusion. So it was that, before many months had passed, " there arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews " — that is, of the Hellenistic against the Jewish converts — "because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration." Probably these widows or their friends may have been somewhat exacting. But the Apostles felt that their time ought not to be spent in managing a bank. The Twelve, who were all in Jerusalem still, assembled the whole body of the faithful, and desired them to elect seven men "of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and of wisdom," to be entrusted, as Deacons, with the administration of the funds of the Church. Seven persons were chosen ; and at their head Stephen, described as " a man full of the Holy Ghost and of faith." These seven were ordained by laying on of the Apostles' hands ; and the result of this arrangement was that " the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly ; and a great company of the (Jewish) priests were obedient unto the faith."