University of Virginia Library

IV.

And one day they shall meet before their God,
The Hebrew, and the Moslem, and the flower
Of England's knighthood. On the great white throne
The Judge shall sit, and from his lips shall flow
Divinest words: “Come, friends and brothers, come;
I speak as one whose soul has known your pangs;
Your weariness and woe were also mine;
The cry, ‘I thirst,’ has issued from these lips;
And I too would not drink, but bore the pain,
Yielding my will to do my Father's work,
And so that work was finished; so I learnt
The fullest measure of obedience, learnt
The wide, deep love embracing all mankind,
Passing through all the phases of their woe
That I before their God might plead for all.
And thus through all the pulses of their life
I suffer when they suffer, count each deed
Of mercy done to them as done to Me,
Am one with them in sorrow and in joy,
Rejoicing in their likeness to My life,
And bearing still the burden of their sins
For which I once was offered. I was there,
The Light of each man's soul, in that wild cave,
On that parched desert, on that tented field;
That self-forgetting love I owned as Mine,
And ye who, true to that diviner Light
Which triumphed over nature, freely gave
That water to the thirsty, gave to Me.
Brother, and friend, and Lord of all men, I
Count nothing human alien from myself,
And lifted up upon the Cross, I draw
By that supremest love the hearts of all.
Come therefore, come, ye blessed, to the Light
That, shining through the world's great darkness, led
Your feet the upward path. That Light ye saw,
Or dimly dawning on the mountain height,
Or bursting forth in glory as the morn,
Or brightening onward to the perfect day,
And, seeing it, were glad. Ye heard the Voice
Which bade you mount the steep and narrow way,
And did not close your ears. Ye knew not then
Whence came the Light, and whose the Voice that spake:
Now when all mists are fled, and ever hushed
The world's loud murmur, ye shall see and hear,
As children looking on their Father's face,
And welcomed by their Brother's words of peace.
Yours was the work of yielding all for Him,
Through clouds and darkness pressing on in faith;
Yours the reward of looking back on life,
The fight well fought, the race well run, to see
That all things true and good were wrought in God.”