This time Paul reached the struggling youth a hand With: "Thou hast not ill achieved in thine essay To utter what is nigh unutterable. But, Stephen, better bridge than any form Of fancy, figure or similitude, To human sense or reason possible And capable of frame in human speech, For spanning the great gulf immeasurable, Unfathomable, nay, inconceivable, (Gulf, otherwise than so, impassable, Yet so, securely closed forevermore!) The awful gulf of being and of thought, Much more, of moral difference, since our fall, That parts our kind from holy God Most High-- Yea, better bridge than any word of ours Aspiring upward from beneath to God, Is that Eternal Word of God Himself To us, down-reaching hither from above, Who, being God with God, was Man with man, And Who, returning thither whence He came, Carried our nature with Him into heaven, And to the Ever-living joined us one. "But rightly thou wert saying, my Stephen, that we Best can approach to put in speech of man The ineffable regard of God toward sin, If we impute to Him a spurning such As we feel when we hate or loathe or scorn, And wish to wreak in punishment our wrath. But we must purge ourselves of self-regard, Or we are sinful in abhorring sin; And we attaint God with gross attribute Imputed from what we through fall became. An horrible profaneness, sure, it were, The image first of God in us to foul, And then that foulness back on God asperse, Making Him hate with wicked human hate!" The wide impersonal purport of Paul's words, Not meant, he knew, in hidden hint to him, Still, Stephen with his wise docile spirit took Home to himself, and fell some moments mute, Considering; then afresh his mind exposed: "I feel, O kinsman most revered, how bold, How froward, how perverse, it were in me, First to lay hold on holy words of God To use them, as I used that psalm that night, Profanely for a vehicle of hate; And then, convicted of my fault therein, Turn round and blame the very words I used, Or seem to blame them, as unmeet from God. Yet I experience an obscure distress-- Is it of mind or heart? I scarce know which-- A sense of contradiction unresolved, When, in the spirit of all-loving love, Such as sometimes I seem to catch from thee, I read or ponder those terrific psalms."