Sixth Sunday after Trinity.
“As dying, and, behold! we live.”
—2 Cor. vi. 9.
“Dead unto sin, alive unto God.”
—Epistle for the Day.
A dying body, with a deathless soul
Which is an undivided whole
Not to be tomb'd in that sepulchral clay
Where flesh abides the Judgment-day,—
Such is the burden of existence now,
More wondrous far than lips avow!
Thus, life in death, and death in life, are we,
Victims of time, yet charter'd with eternity!
Fetter'd to earth by chains of flesh, we live,
With destined organs, doom'd to give
Fruition to all faculties which bind
The outer-world to inner mind.
Creation's Laws with elemental sway
Encircle us, by night and day;
And, thus condition'd, human Bodies rise
To that due stature healthy growth supplies.
But, soon our culminating point is gain'd,
Where, full-toned Manhood once attain'd,
The gray-hair'd weakness of the flesh gives token
The bloom of life is inly broken;
Decays, dejections, and ten thousand signs
Reveal, how mortal flesh declines,
While creeping Age with stealthy foot comes on,
Telling the thoughtful heart, that Youth is gone!
But, in the soul, parenthesis, nor pause
Impedes those everlasting laws
Whereby accretions round the Spirit grow,
Which ripen it, for weal, or woe;
Whose pulse of consciousness for ever plays
Triumphant o'er all flesh-decays:
Change, scene, and circumstance, and Man,
Help to prolong what our first breath began—
And that is, character!—which cannot die,
But forms its own eternity;
The self-creation of our choosing will,
Preferring good, or seeking ill;
Where heaven and hell in principle begin,
According as there reigns within
The flesh-born Adam, or, that spirit-grace
Emanuel purchased to renew our race.
Behold, a contrast! Faith may call sublime:—
The body bends to laws of time;
But spirit lives an undecaying life,
With seeds of its hereafter rife;
And, more than awful seems our sleepless Mind
Which thus empowers redeem'd mankind,—
Destined to feel, with guilt or glory fraught,
And think for ever, with increasing thought!
