Stephen is drawn as a mind too awake for the room he’s in. “Full of grace and fortitude” is less halo than psychological posture: grounded, unflinching, unusually coherent under pressure. His opponents can’t “resist” his speech, so the conflict stops being about reasons and becomes about containment. The body reacts—cut to the heart, teeth grinding, ears stopped—because the argument has touched identity, and identity fights like pain. The vision functions as the inward image that lets him hold the line when the crowd’s reality becomes mob reality. “Heavens opened” is the private certainty that makes public fear irrelevant. He answers violence with an astonishing refusal to mirror it: receive my spirit; don’t charge them. That is not passivity; it is mastery over retaliatory impulse, the final independence. The detail of Saul watching plants the seed of transformation: the witness of composure under unjust suffering infects even the consenting bystander. Matthew’s warning reads like a manual for what happens when loyalty becomes total: institutions punish, families fracture, hatred concentrates. The promise is not safety but a different kind of speech—unrehearsed, emergent, arriving from deeper than the calculating self. Perseverance here is not stubbornness; it is staying intact when social reality tries to rewrite you. Semina Verbi: the non-retaliation echoes the Bodhisattva ideal in Mahayana Buddhism, meeting harm with compassion rather than reflex. The steadiness under death recalls Stoic apatheia and Socrates’ composure before execution. Speculation: “spirit speaking in you” resembles the Daoist sense of effortless right action, wu-wei, where speech arises when the self stops grasping.