When the blood of thy martyr Stephen.... — Better, thy witness. The English word is, perhaps, a little too definite and technical, and fails to remind us, as the Greek does, that the same word had been used in Acts 22:15 as expressing the office to which St. Paul himself was called. He probably used the Aramaic word Edh, of which the Greek martus (witness, and, in ecclesiastical Greek, martyr) was the natural equivalent.
Consenting unto his death. — The self-same word is used as in Acts 8:1, not, we may believe, without the feeling which the speaker had lately expressed in Romans 1:32, that that state of mind involved a greater guilt than those who had been acting blindly, — almost in what John Huss called the sancta simplicitas of devout ignorance — in the passionate heat of fanaticism. The words “unto his death” are wanting in the best MSS., but are obviously implied.