Upbraided thus, they, by that spokesman, said: "Stoning may lightly be despised by men Like us, whose trade it is at need to die; And bloody death were meet for men of blood. But we are of the people, as are these Whom here thou seest around us, stone in hand; And we, the people, love for cause those men, Our benefactors, whom thou seekest to slay-- Wherefore, we know not, save perhaps it be Some ill persuasion thine that slanders them As enemies of our race, seditious men, Conspiring to do evil and not good. But, if we should as lief, as we should loth, Offer them violence, and if we could, As we could not, hope then to escape the stones Here seen uneasy in so many hands At only brandished threat of harm to them, Know, there is more than mail enduing these Inviolate against what human touch Might mean them wrong. Something intangible, Invisible, inaudible, unknown, A might as irresistible as strange, Not only arms them proof against assault, But issues from them in dread strokes of doom, Silent like lightning, and like lightning swift, And instantaneous deadly more than that. What prison-walls can prisoners hold these men? Hast thou not heard how Ananias fell, Sapphira too, his wife, dead at their feet, Fell at their feet stone-dead, when they but charged A lie unto the Spirit of the Lord On those twain twinned in judgment as in crime? A dreadful visitation, as from God; But, whencesoever issuing, dreadful yet! No panoply have we against such stroke, Against the authors of such stroke, no power. Slay us, or get us slain, we can but die; But die like Ananias will we not!"