University of Virginia Library

Growth is the first, profoundest, law of life:
Often a sign and monument of growth
Is seemingly the most destructive strife.
Should life cease growing, life's strong pulse
Would droop in the dead air, and sloth,
Palsying activity, nature convulse
With th' agony of stifled breath,
All things collapsing into death.
There is no death: collapse
Of life man cannot think;
Eternity so wraps
His brain in light, his thought can never sink
Into the dark of nothingness:
To be is the sublime
First element of thought, its prime
Beginning, and unending end and dress.
Life lives on motion, motion on progression;
In life there can be no recession.
That history repeats itself is false:
Likeness there ever is, a sameness never.
There are no chains upon the vaults
Of time that spirit does not sever,—
Spirit, th' invisible omnipotence,
Essential substance, life undying,
Informing matter, that an earthly sense
May catch glimpses of th' underlying
Creative Might, and thus help educate
Mankind, that man may learn
His deeper nature and immortal fate.
Within him he hath powers that yearn
For betterment, the lever
Unrested these of his uplifting,
That works even in the fever
For conquest or for wealth, a drifting,
It seems, upon Time's stormy sea,
But ruled by tides in th' ocean of Eternity.
The tides out of this ocean
Bring in deep-minded leaders,
To guide Time's turbulent motion,—
Through their deep-mindedness, thought-breeders:
These, agitating manhood's deeps,
Quicken the thirsty soul of man
With aspiration that upleaps
Towards purer life and action's nobler plan.
Such men are few and far between,
So great and true they foil the changes
Of time, and can be ever seen
Raised high above the common line,
Illuminated, clear,
Lofty as peaks of grandest mountain-ranges,
Heaven-ypointing monoliths, that shine
Solitary in earth's purest atmosphere.

The two chief ancient States
That by sheer mental force,
Were lifted high above their mates,
Had run their bounded course.
The Greeks, who with judicial sentence
Slew Socrates, their highest, best,
And were for true repentance
With moral core unblest,
Had sunk to a Roman tributary;
And Rome, from spiritual helplessness,
Incapable to carry
Her load of rule, much less
Her ponderous sceptre wield
With wisdom, had been forced to yield
Herself to an Imperial master.
And now, still worse to blast her,
The master was Tiberius.
Nor under the good Antonines,
Better than 'neath delirious
Caligula, could they uplift their minds
Towards genuine liberty.
Man's spiritual deeps had not been stirred:
Voices had sounded that were free,
But far too feeble to be heard.
Pure Paganism had culminated:
The man-made Gods of Greece and Rome
Had done their best, and men were sated
And sad; without a home
For souls immortal and aspiring,
No watchful angels quiring.

While thickened over haughty Rome the mist
Of earthiness and sensual sadness,
And in deep Plato's Athens no new grist
Came to her speculative mills,
And old Jerusalem called raptured madness
Her poet-prophets' warnings, threats,
Was born among her northern hills,
Of parents who were not the pets
Of Fortune, a man-child, with soul so great,
Loving, and true, that he became
Uplifter of humanity,
High exemplar, without a mate
Among his fellow-men, to be
Unparalleled, his name
Holy, himself an endless treasure,
Which men will the more value, love,
The nearer they approach his lofty measure;
A paragon, to prove
Deep manhood's vast resource;
An inexhaustible live force,
Moving mankind by one life's beauty;
An inextinguishable light,
Illumining the path of duty;
A living, lasting, vivifying Might.
But what are words to this man's deeds?
His words most wise, his life was wiser:
A noble life outweighs all creeds:
Good doers are above the moralizer.
Of body, self, he took no thought,
With spiritual power his work so rife;
Out of the deepest soul his doing wrought;
Largest humanity shone through his life.

The first creative beam is Love,
And universal origin:
Without it nothing could begin;
By it, and through it, all things move.
Love is the core of being:
Thus we can apprehend
Why Being is, foreseeing
Whither all beings tend.
To Jesus' life this is the key:
His being is an incarnation,
The highest, of love divine, and he
Of human love the consummation:
Love is his inspiration, a first source
Of his wide wisdom. Sympathy
Moved his deep brain with force
Creative: this his warm divinity.
Before such large transcendent power,—
To Faith closely allied,—
Hearts opened,—gratefully supplied,
As dry fields to an August shower.
Manly continuous fellow-feeling
Kindled in his great soul a glow
That quickened it, unsealing
Within him the divine, to flow
On thirsting human-kind,
A beauty and a strength for aye.
Love was the master in his mounting mind;
Therefore is he a regnant power to-day:
Disinterested love, man's foremost might,
Winged the swift arrows of his intellect.
Never for wrong, always for right,
Flowed his deep words, unflecked
By thought of self. In this new man
Upshot highest humanity,
Hinting a larger, holier, social plan,
Drawn from an innate deity.

From quiet Nazareth
Went forth this workman's son
To seek his fortune, with a breath
So fraught with life, it won
The lives of highest men
Through all earth's after ages,
Inspiring their best deeds,
Feeding their noblest needs,
Writing itself on pages
Aglow with wisest ken.
Behold, with your mind's eye,
This youthful Nazarene,
Ideally as high
As is the mother-queen
Amid her buzzing hive,—
Without whose inborn gifts
Her subject-bees could never thrive,—
And yet so real, he uplifts
The lowly, who then feel
Within them a new manhood's heavenly weal.
Our sensibilities make of us men;
They nerve the intellect for highest reach;
They lift us from o'erheated sensual pen,
Nursing the best that we can learn or teach.
And here was one who 'mong their altitudes
Filled full his deepening soul, daily upreacher
Towards sovereign spiritualized beatitudes,
Supreme, divinest Teacher.
Only can teach who well hath learned,
From a deep consciousness,
These spiritual lessons, burned
Into his speech by deep soul's fire:
A worldling's words are less
Than nothing,—spoken for hire.
When the holy spiritual is made the means
Of scheming worldliness, the false Church leans
To its fall. Look round and see
What pulpits are the thrones of power, and what
The seats of faith and meek fidelity.
If you would learn how sure this worldly rot
Consumes the soul, go to the home,
These fifteen hundred years,
Of priestly usurpation: go to Rome.
The soul of life is truth:
Nature doth never lie.
The great Judean youth,
Who bred a world of tears
In his soft, luminous eye,
Whose life was love in motion,
Was highest truth's interpreter.
His being was devotion
Unto the good and true: a blur
On the clean mirror of his mind,
That glassed divineness' light,
Were aught with the least falsehood signed.
That he in thought and act and speech
Was wholly true, thence was his might.
This 't was empowered him to teach,
Then, now, forever. Through his elevation
In spiritual gifts, he was unweighted, free,
An agent in creation,
Beneficent, high potency.
So many men are very slaves
Of obstinate opinions.
Peeping from the rude graves
They dig for truth,—resurgent ever,—
They dream they rule her wide dominions,
While self rules their unblest endeavor.
On Jesus, self could get no hold:
As well might earthen exhalations hope
Mandates of the hot Sun to mould:
Generic, universal, was the scope
Of thought and will in him. The Pharisees
Feel his rebuke to-day
As keenly as when he unmasked,
To their surprised dismay,
Th' hypocrisies wherein they basked
In old Jerusalem. Strong as decrees
Of Heaven the words that win
Our love and reverence, when he spoke
Tenderly to repentant sin,
Freeing it from unmanly yoke.
But tender he was not
To the cold selfishness that uses
Keen intellect to plot
Against one's fellows, and abuses
A partial ableness
To draw from others power and pelf,
Unmindful of their weak distress,
To feed a sordid or ambitious self.
In Jesus' soul great manhood's deeps
So swelled his forceful being
That what to others seemed the rugged steeps
Of duty were to him smooth, level ground,
Whereon he moved with th' ease
Of th' eagle, high, far-seeing,
That sails above the chasm,
Wherein the solitary sound
Is lost of avalanches that man sees
Loosed from their moorings deep of snow,
With that imaginative spasm
Which 't is man's privilege to know.
Among the poor and sick,
In body or in soul,
Great Jesus spake and wrought
With such a natural might
And deep beneficence,
Probing their feelings to the quick,
Making their maimèd bodies whole,
That many worshiped him as a blest light
From Heav'n (whence all light is), and thought
He was a God, so sure his sense
Of right and wrong; and priests,
Who lived on creeds outworn,
Felt he was foe to their loved feasts
Of power, and looked on him with fear and scorn:
Aye, fear and scorn and hate,
Fear's ugly, cross, misshapen child,
That strives to strangle his high, holy mate,
Love, who requites his wrath with mild,
Unbaffled, sure persistency.
Jesus, the crucified,
In mortal anguish cried,
“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do;”
Sublimest this of what in life can be.

The holy, deep, eternal, true,
That shone through his great acts and speech,
Shines on with brightening beam: 't will reach
At last his crucifiers.
For, that strong people, led
By Moses, and with wisdom fed
By great Isaiah and his fellow-bards,
Having in every vein
The blood that streamed through lofty Jesus' brain
(And streams through all of human kind),
Which the Almighty Spirit wards,
Is more and more swayed by the higher mind,
And what the higher mind inspires.
In this great composite,
The unselfish feelings, broad and high,
That ruled in Jesus' life and thought,
Are with supremest puissance fraught,
Because they firmly fit
As key-stone of the human arch, and tie
Its diverse elements
Into one whole of strength and beauty,
As are the wonders tied of visual lens
For its resplendent duty.
That the wide splendor of three years,
Through one man's dedication to
Zealous, pure, self-forgetting work
For human good, shines 'mid their peers
Of all the centuries with glow
Illuming the gross murk
Of history,—this bright phenomenon
Uplifts the mind, and makes
The heart to know Love's boundless might, and on
The human spirit breaks,
Creative as the solar power
Upon th' awaiting fields athirst,
Refreshing souls with shower
Of hope and cheer, when at their worst.
The lofty Jesus walked
Not in the arrogant pride
Of power, which time hath ever balked;
He was self-cinctured with a panoply
Woven of light, forth-streaming guide,
Kindled by love, and kindling
'Mong men's perverted loves
New power, and glow, undwindling
While the life current moves,
To grow eternally.
The shafts he threw were shafts of light,
Love-winged, to dissipate the night
Of sensualism and ignorance.
By him no shafts were shot to drench
A Niobe in mother's tears:
His motive was to quench
All suffering and mortal fears.
Unlike Apollo, the bright man-made God,
Who plied a jealous, vengeful rod,
Our Jesus was a God-made man,
Made after the divinest plan.
Thence, while the Grecian God is of the past,
The Jewish Man is of the present, anchored fast
For eighteen centuries in mankind's soul,
His hold strengthened by Time as th' ages roll
Onward with betterment; and this, because,
In harmony with deep, benignant laws,
He is our brother, our exalted brother,
Exalted by a full humanity,
Vivid with human spirit as no other,
Ever our fellow-man and guide to be.

Higher! higher! this is man's deep device:
Were it not so, then he
Were victim of a blind expediency,
And sport of Chance's dice.
Then there had been
No martyred Nazarene.
That there has been a man of this rare height,
One whose pulsations were quick jets of light,
Shows manhood's lofty reach
And godlike gifts of thought and speech;
And that man is no creeping creature
Circling in earth-paths dim,
But that his regal feature,
Crowning the Heavenward brow of him,
Is Reason, Love, and Faith, and Aspiration,
Cleansing and lifting his large soul
Towards an angelic elevation,
Binding into a high religious whole
His vast and complex powers.
The loftiness of Jesus is a sign
Of human possibilities.
Mount Washington uptowers
Above his peers, because there lies
Beneath them all invisible mine
Of lifting force. Inspiring exemplar
He could not be, had we not th' elements
Within us that uplifted him so far
Above his neighbor “priests and Pharisees;”
With all their shallow, selfish, low intents,
They could but slay one who in the degrees
Of human excellence
Shamed their debasing, sordid sense.
The greatest deeds and deepest words of Jesus
Are ours by fellowship of nature:
The spiritual law that in our best moods frees us
From sensuality and sordidness,
Ruled all his moods, and this so raised his stature
That some men, in their morbidness,
Look upon Jesus as no true man,
A something superhuman,
Willing him into unnatural loneness,
Which, with men's innate proneness
To imaginative substitutes for fact,
Is infinitely easier than
To know him as a brother-man,
Imitable in his every act.

This imaginative deification
Of our prime, holy brother
By opinion founds for th' elevation
Of priests, who'd make the Church our mother,
And on themselves, as sole interpreters
Of man-made deity, confers
A petty godship, sacredness
Factitious, claiming power to curse or bless.
This false, ambitious fiction—
Men striving with weak, wilful wills
To shape an infinite—is contradiction
Monstrous and impudent, that kills,
Rather than fosters, spiritual germs,
That innate force divine, that can uplift
Our being from the low state of earthen worms
Towards angelhood: this is the gift
Supreme. The priests who slew great Jesus,
And now would by his sanction ease us
Of self-direction,—our first right,—
Are of the Devil, not of God, and blight
Our being's moral core.
Your crude imaginations
Of Deity,—what can they be?
To Jesus' fresh and pure humanity,
Unwholesome, shapeless exhalations.
His doings, sayings, could not pour
Such streams of highest life
Into our human being,
Were he not richly rife
In human love and human seeing;
Nor would the best that he could do,
Or wisest he could speak,
Us to his side a moment woo
To hearken his deep words and seek
His high companionship,
Did there not lie within our life-blood's beat
Bars of the music from his lip,
Sparks of the purifying heat
That warmed him into wisest words and deeds.
This earth-life is but a fine fraction,
Infinitesimal, of human work;
And these our numerous earthly hopes and greeds
Are but a temporary attraction
To discipline the powers that in us lurk.
Our destiny is Heaven;
Like Jesus, we are sons of man and God:
Believe that with our bodies 'neath the sod
Our being ends, that 'tis not given
To us to rise with Jesus from the dead,—
Then were man's dignity
A jest, a mockery,
And human life a sensuous prison dread;
Men were like squirrels in their cages,
Active in unprogressive motion,
Or readers reading ever the same pages,
Or sailors on a shoreless ocean,
Or like a man of richest worth
Who naught may give to the unlearn'd,
As though the pendent earth
Only upon its axis turned.
Nay, men were as though each were fast
Tied to a festering corpse,
Or, like great Hector, slain at last,
Dragged at the tail of bounding horse.
What you can think of steepest contradiction,
Or most illogical delusion,
Will help to paint man's fatal dereliction,
His life's black, dismal, deep confusion,
If he were but an earth-bound animal,
A cunning, carnal, intellectual mortal,
To whom is oped no Heavenly portal;
That were indeed a fall!

Heaven's Kingdom is within you: the most deep,
The weightiest, words that Jesus spake are these.
From the divinest human soul they leap,
Aflame with life: they are the golden keys,
That, on his Heavenly thought smooth turning,
Within the daily human heart reveals
Celestial lights forever burning.
From each man's inmost soul appeal
Is ceaseless made to keep aglow
(In some they 're seemingly extinct)
These God-implanted lights:
Only by them can manhood see to sow
And reap, what are together ever linkt,
His duties and his rights.
Heaven's Kingdom is a sway
Of purity and light,—
Light supersolar, ray
Than lightning's flash more bright,
Seen but by spiritual eye,
Invisible potency,
Divine, o'ermastering power:
On earth who feels its rule
Doth o'er his fellows tower,
As master in a school.
This inward spiritual throne,
Whose aim is Justice and its sceptre Love,
Jesus, by living spiritually above
His fellow-men, hath made his own.
The spiritual Kingdom was his daily theme:
He felt its glories and its joys;
He knew that life is dark without its beam,
And all life's gains but fragile toys.

Jesus lived many years in few:
The flame, shot forth from his deep, true,
Upleaping, powerful soul,
Had in it such a light
That, like the boreal blaze from Arctic pole,
That o'er far latitudes illumes the night,
It shone o'er darkened ages.
His fire of love kindles to-day,
In souls of thankful sages,
Its beautiful, inextinguishable ray,—
Ray that reveals in him
Heaven's Kingdom, and enkindles hope
And faith in souls most dim.
Better than best of men he taught
His fellows, and through life's and love's quick force
Such potent deeds he wrought,
They seem from supernatural source
To those of unenlightened scope.

After the Crucifixion came
His deepest lesson; when,
Disconsolate, with eyelids wet,
His loved disciples met,
Like children suddenly bereft,
Desolate, motherless, all left
Uncomforted; and then,
While they were whispering his dear name,
Jesus amid them stood,
Apparently of flesh and blood.
(Creative spirit taketh leave
Out of material elements
A temporary form to weave,
Accessible to earthly sense.)
In wonder, love, and awe,
They gazed, until he spoke:
I live. I am arisen.
Those mighty words, that woke
Man in his slumbering prison,
They spake th' o'erarching law
Of human life; they are a leap
Out of the dark of narrow sleep
Into the light of broad, angelic day.
Jesus spake for humanity;
Man is immortal, and a spirit,
And naught doth he inherit
Like the great right, Ever to be.
I am with you alway.
There spake for angelhood
The angel, man glorified;
His love aye alive for human good,
Nearer to God, more deified.
No superearthly Sun,
And Earth had never been:
No superearthly beings won
For earthlings, they had never seen
Or sun or stars, or felt the holy fire
Of spiritual light, that ever beckons higher.
Sun, stars, they help our bodies grow and breathe,
Angels our souls with unvoiced aidance wreathe.
Jesus, leader of men on earth,
Through more humanity, more love,
Inspiring them to higher worth,
In Heaven doth his brothers move.
He, they, are ever with us here,
Touching our deeper chords,
That each make sweeter music in his sphere,
And we be not of life the slaves, but lords.