Calmly, but without effort to be calm, "O, yea," said Paul, "so lost, and worse than so; So lost thou dost not wish to save thyself; Nay, dost not know thou needest to be saved. It is the sad besotment deep of sin, Wherein not thou alone but all of us Since Adam, the first man, are sunk and lost. We are dead in sin, this even from our first breath, And, like the dead, know not that we are dead, And, like the dead, care not to live again, Nor, more than they, could, if we would, revive. A dreadful doom of helpless living death! Helpless, yet hopeless not, blesséd be God! Yea, there is hope, albeit not in ourselves; Christ is a power of life that overflows To all that will make ready a way for Him To enter by the gladsome gates of will. He quickens whom He will, but will not quicken Save who will say to Him, 'Lord, quicken me!' A paradox, sayest thou, hard to be solved? Yea, more, outright impossibility-- With man impossibility, but not With God; with God, all things are possible." "Thou makest this thing 'sin,'" the Indian said, "Such evil as is more miserable far Than misery's self. Who taught thee this? 'Sin,''sin'-- Is it not perhaps some specter of the mind Only, unreal as horrible, which thou Hast conjured up from nothing to thyself In thy lone brooding on the riddle of things?" Paul hearing this thought backward of the time When Porcius Festus brusquely said to him In public presence: 'Paul, thou art mad; thy long Deep pouring over books turns wild thy wits.' With himself musing: 'One in his right mind Thus to be judged distraught by those distraught!' He answered: "Yea, that is a wile I know Of Satan's playing on this human heart Of ours, deceitful as it is above All things and desperately wicked, yet Insanely cunning in complicity Against itself--a wile I know too well To cheat us into thinking naught of sin. A bugbear of the morbid conscience, sin! I might myself have been, I cannot know, Lulled by this lie into false fatal peace; But the Lord Christ Himself appeared to me In light like lightning though a hundred fold Keener, shot suddenly from out a clear Sky at midnoon, and called me by my name, The name that then I bore; 'Saul, Saul,' He said, 'Why dost thou persecute Me?' 'Thee,' said I, 'Who art thou, Lord?' And He, 'Jesus I am Whom thou dost persecute.'