University of Virginia Library

THE RIGHTEOUS OF THE WORLD.

The Rabbis, who devise strange dooms of wrath and ill,
For such as knew not here God's perfect law and will,
Yet these have told how they, as many as with true
And faithful heart fulfilled and loved the good they knew,
The Righteous of the world, shall once delivered be
From darkness, and brought in God's countenance to see:
Which thing they thus recount:—It shall befall one day
In those eternal courts where it is day alway,
Before Him will the Just sit ranged in order meet,
The holy Angels all will stand upon their feet;
And while they hymn the praise, the glory and the worth
Of Him who by a word created heaven and earth,
Will ever high and higher be borne and swept along
Heaven's azure-vaulted roofs the full concent of song:
Then will that mighty voice of jubilee be heard,
Until from end to end the spacious world is stirred,
Until even those that lie excluded from his face,
The Righteous of the world, who knew not of his grace
And law, while living—now will triumph in his name,
And with their loud Amen will join the glad acclaim.
Then He who knoweth all, yet purposing to show
His goodness, will demand from whence these voices grow.
The ministering angels then will answer and will say,
The while they veil for awe their faces—‘These are they,
Who did not know thy law while living, and for this
They lie in hell remote from glory and from bliss;
They cry Amen from thence.’—But He will of his grace
Compassion take on them and on their mournful case,
Will give the golden key from heaven's crystal floors,
Which opens with a touch hell's forty thousand doors,
And Michael, mighty prince, will fly with it amain,
On mercy's errand swift, and all the angelic train.
Hell's forty thousand gates will open at his word,
Its narrow chambers deep with expectation stirred.
And as a man draws up his neighbour from a pit,
When he shall have therein through evil hap alit,
The prisoners he will draw from dungeons where they lay,
And extricating lift from the deep and miry clay,—
Will wash and cleanse their wounds where they have plaguëd been,
And clothe in garments white, and beautiful and clean;
And taking by the hand, will lead them to the gate
Of Paradise, where they must for a moment wait;
Till there with leave brought in, they fall upon their face,
And worship God, and praise and magnify his grace:
While all that had before their places round the throne,
Will give new thanks for this new mercy He has shown,
And by new voices swelled, and higher and more strong,
Ring through the vaults of heaven the full concent of song.