The Mystery of Godliness :: :: University of Virginia Library

The Mystery of Godliness

By F. B. Money Coutts [i.e. Coutts-Nevill]

Money-Coutts, Francis Burdett (1852-1923)

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[Art thou the God of millions or of tens?]

The Mystery of Godliness

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“Great is the mystery of godliness.”
1 Tim. iii. 16.

“Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings.” Vision of the Last Judgment (William Blake).

vii

[Art thou the God of millions or of tens?]

Art thou the God of millions or of tens?
Art thou the God of this world or the next?
Art thou the God of spirit or of text?
Art thou the God of sheep in folded pens,
But not of roaming, restless denizens
Of mountains and of forests, often vexed
By burricanes and spectres of perplexed
Belated waifs that perish in the fens?
Doth thy Shekinah still above our race
Brood, with its fire by night and cloud by day?
Doth one fleece catch the dewdrops of thy grace,
While unrefreshed is all the common clay?
Can Nature for repentance find no place,
While the smooth saint her birthright bears away?

(From “Poems,” 1896).

The Mystery of Godliness

Argument.

The existence of a Deity being postulated, as necessary to the discussion, the proposition is stated, that all Religions contain the seeds of heresy, by which they are disrupted; so that the human ideas of God never cease to be enlarged and purified.

The heresy implied in the Christian Religion is a disbelief in the story of the Fall, on which that Religion is based; for the story presupposes a God of Good and a God of Evil.

This heresy arises from Imagination, the highest faculty of the Mind, and the greatest corrector of Ignorance.

Imagination shows that the search for God must, from the very nature of the case, be eternal.

Where was the germ of yonder flower
A million summer-tides ago?
Or when shall sound the ultimate hour
Wherein the Perfect Flower shall blow?

Since all emotion is derived
And none spontaneous at the core,
And all imagination gyved
To long processions, gone before,—

Who stamped us with the minting die
Of this unconquerable need
To know the unknown Deity
And name the nameless in a creed?

Whence comes our instinct, that behind
The flimsy furniture of sense
Inheres the undiscovered Mind
From which the world had emanence?

Master of circle and of square,
Of cone and cube, of cosine, sine,
And starry parallax, declare
The definition of a line!

See! I can scratch it on the slate,
“From point to point;” a simpler thing
It seems to me to demonstrate
Than centric or eccentric ring.

“A line,” the Master makes reply,
“Pursuant Science still evades;
“Incomprehensibility,—
“An edge that infinitely fades;

“The heavens contain, and earth and sea,
“Triune dimensions; they are wise
“Who from the evidence of three
“The elemental one surmise.”

What if the physiologist
Can track the Man from shape to shape?
As rain resideth in the mist,
So man resided in the ape.

What if philosophers may boast,
Tracing to ignominious earth,
In worship of a warrior's ghost,
Immortal god-head's mortal birth?

What if Divinity recede,
Age beyond age, by Science chased,
Behind the embryonic seed,
Behind the protoplasmic paste?

Nothing is born of nothingness;
Not thence are Circumstance and Fate;
Man is the problem, none the less,
And God is still the postulate.

Religion is no Academe
Of small moralities or great,
Where ethical professors dream
New Decalogues to promulgate;

No temple where men flesh their hooks
In savoury meat, from seething pot;
No sunny garden, full of nooks,
Where Love may lurk, but God is not;

No cell for calculating grief,
That seeks for credit by distress;
Nor even an almshouse, for relief
Of widows and the fatherless;

No discipline of armoured breast
And feet with preparation shod;
No apostolic palimpsest,—
Man's fancies o'er the facts of God.

Religion worships God. But how,
If aught to judgment come, shall he,
The Spirit of the truth, allow
Religion's unveracity?

Because she loves to keep the keys,
Because she loves to bind and loose;
Because the courtier aims to please,
The advocate to make excuse;

Because she cannot brook the hint
That aught without her ken occurs,
Or God has ever gold to mint
Of other currency than hers;

Because, committed to one tale,
She must be careful to refute
God's comments, lest he should prevail
To bring it into disrepute.

For in the Sacred Citadel's
Holy of Holies,—in the Ark,
Wherein the light celestial dwells,—
There dwells a yet diviner spark.

Though priests have called it by a name
Opprobrious, yet none the less
That fierce rebellious heart of flame
Redeems their shrine from emptiness.

Not even by Faith shall God be mocked;
How can the universal rays
By any coffering creed be locked
Into the casket of a phrase?

Him not the Heaven of heaven inurns;
But Heresy in every crude
Conception of the Godhead burns
A taper of Infinitude.

Stands, in the midst of Holy Writ,
Job, the Heresiarch: in vain
His friends assailed his impious wit;
He beat them back with piercing pain.

He was not patient; man or myth,
He never bowed to kiss the rod;
But, like a storm-swept monolith,
Graven with grief, confronted God.

The God he faced was not his own;
He flouted one his friends adored:
His Vindicator lived: alone
He claimed an audience of his Lord.

Alone; unushered, unannounced
By chambering minions, louting low,
Or courtier priestlings, frocked and flounced;
Alone, and garmented with woe.

Job is Humanity; the worn
And weary pensioner of Time;
Of unsubstantial glory shorn
And foolish splendours of his prime;

Reft of the boons that turn to bane,
The gauds that crumble into dust;
The search for happiness, the vain
Aggrandisement, the foolish lust

For wealth; and tainted with a deep
Infection, from the corpses laid
In memory's tomb,—a festering heap
Of hopes dissolved and faiths decayed.

Then come the quacks of sanctity,
With futile eulogies of pain;
Then cries Religion, “Worship me!
“And thou shalt wed the world again!”

Not in his patience (which was nought),
But in his passion, Job foreran
The Christ and his rebellious thought:
The Son of God was Son of Man,

Heir of Humanity's estate
Of free-born thought that none enslaves,
The mind that cannot adulate
A God that adulation craves;

He also would not bow the knee
To Baal's Baal; therefore Scribe
And Pharisee and Sadducee
Slew him,—the custom of their tribe.

For heresy he wore the robe
Of purple and was crucified;
He dared dispute the Faith, like Job;
Religion cursed him,—cursed and lied.

Unpraiseful of an impious mind
That finds a pleasure to blaspheme,
I reverence all my fellow-kind
Nor love to doubt of what they deem.

But when the Christ, that Sabbath morn,
Walked with his friends among the wheat,
Who being an-hungered plucked the corn
And rubbed it in their hands to eat,

He answered to the foes that spied,
“Have ye not read what David did?”
Man's hunger being sanctified
Ere days were blessed or bread forbid.

As nothing sacred can evade
The sacred touch of common wit,
So Holy Writ for Man was made
And not the Man for Holy Writ.

God made the Man: and Man has made
Religion; not that God might gain
Advertisement, or be repaid
By worship of a servile brain,

But for his own delight in lore
Celestial, and the more remove
He suffer from his Home, the more
His heavenly parentage to prove.

God made the Man; and Man still makes
Revision of religious codes,
That God by Man's divine mistakes
Be uttered in a myriad modes.

So are the mists, about us wreathed,
Not stagnant; but they reel and roll,
Stirred by the very breath that breathed
When Man became a living soul.

Beyond our birth, beyond our grave,
We think Jehovah is concealed;
But Man to Man the gospel gave;
By prophets was the Word revealed.

Not in his heaven or hell; in Us
His light and darkness equal shine;
And they alone are blasphemous
Who count our nature undivine.

We are his offspring; in our blood
We bear hereditary strain,
The fashion of our Fatherhood,
In spiritual joy and pain.

Vain is the care Religion takes
To mew us in her garden-ground!
Instinctive heresy out-breaks
To God's own country, free of bound.

Not by vain chippings from without
The fortress-fane, Religion, falls;
The keenest points of sceptic doubt
Are blunted on those sacred walls.

But deep within its secret shrine,
Where never chanted priest nor choir,
A core of energy divine
Is glowing with disruptive fire.

There, as the cellule of a seed,
Instinct with strong parturient power
The foison of the world to breed,
Awaits the fertilising hour,

So lurks a fierce, expansive heat
In creed and rite and symbol pent;
To burst its bonds, when Time is meet
And prove the World a sacrament.

The children from their house of cards
One card withdraw; down rush the walls,
With laughter; for a child regards
With joy a building when it falls.

And we,—though oft from flattering lips,
That fear his anger, if unfeared,
His title unctuously slips,
“Omnipotent,”—have we not reared

An edifice upon a dream,—
That God is matched by Satan's skill?
For so the very saints blaspheme
His sovereignty o'er good and ill.

That dream withdrawn, our house, like cards
Wanting foundation, overthrown,
Like porcelain shattered into shards,
To all the corners shall be strown.

I would not quarrel with a faith
By spiritual masons built;
But substance, emptied of its wraith,
I count no more than sand or silt.

As oft on disproportioned fane,
Of architecturally crazed
Design, a structure vast and vain,
The symbol of the Cross is raised,

So stands, on more stupendous pile,
Cohesive only by cement
Of blood poured out to reconcile
Its parts of mutual disconsent,—

So stands, on theologic stone,
Scarce balanced on the topmost cope
Of tottering fabric,—pale, alone,—
The Image of the Christian hope.

Oft to the crucifix I steal
In fancy; whither sinners fly
And where so many wretches kneel
Is homely ground to such as I.

For who am I to dare to drift
From all of spiritual grace,
Or break one thread that helps to lift
The veil before the Holy Place?

But God forbid I should impute
To that pale form one dream of mine,
Or wrest his ghostly words to suit
My guesses of the world's design.

I would not company the host
That claim his sanction for their own
Ambition, and presume to boast
His sorrows for their sins atone.

The seer in Patmian exile dreamed
Of Michael's cohorts winged and white,
And legions of the Darkness, seamed
By fierce assailment of the Light.

But Milton's logic lacked a term,
That heaven from hell have wider space,
And credit to the Seraph-Worm
Be granted of the world's disgrace;

And therefore to obscure the trail
Of Sin, and bind the Reason fast
From following, he transposed the tale
And made the prophet's Future, Past;

And thereto added fair debate
And bargain made by God the Son,
Omnipotence to reinstate
And build anew a world undone.

So Christ was sent on Earth to save
The soul from penalties of sin,
When haled from dungeons of the grave
Before the heavenly Sanhedrin;

Because, though God had made the world
And called it good (and God is wise),
Yet Satan, like a worm, had curled
About the roots of Paradise;

For war had scoured the heavenly coast
(So Milton sings), and Michael sailed
Against the Dragon, host on host,
And fought and mightily prevailed;

So then to Earth the Serpent sped,
Where God his babies sought to teach
By dangling toys prohibited,
Before their eyes, within their reach.

Clothed with all colour,—sapphire, sard,
And emerald,—suited to deceive
The woman, left without her guard
Of angel watchers,—hapless Eve,—

The rebel Seraph reached the Tree
Forbidden. Lo! beneath it stood
His victim, in her sanctity
Of unenlightened womanhood:

“Thou shalt not surely die,” he said. . . .
How should she die who had the breath
Of God within her? . . . . Unafraid
She ate; “and knew not eating death.”

But what if Adam had abhorred
Participation? . . . . God forbid! . . .
She had been given him of the Lord,
And half divine was all she did.

The sower that goes forth to sow
Should first beware the field has need
Of harvesthood and fain would know
The sweet perturbance of the seed.

And hearts responsive to the sound
Insidious, of persuasive sin,
Must carry, like the garden-ground,
A welcome for what grows therein.

Had Eve possessed a soul like sand,
Without a taint of aught decayed,
Unfructifiable as land
Whereon no herbs nor forests fade,

Then her Betrayer would have sought
An acquiescent ear in vain,
And all his careful tillage wrought
No germination of the grain.

Whence came that weed-receptive soil
That grants the tare such easy root,
And grows, for bread and wine and oil,
The blighted grain and cankered fruit?

For if that law was no new mode,—
“Thou shalt not eat it, lest thou die,”—
But sequel of some earlier code
Enarchived in eternity,

Or if itself begot the curse,
By invitation to transgress,
(Since every law is either nurse
Or child, or both, of lawlessness),

The soul of Man was born germane
To sin, or else God made it so;
And Christ was sent to earth and slain
To heal a predetermined woe.

Why kept not Lucifer the tune
Of heaven's subservient harmonies?
Or is not heaven itself immune
From interdicted apple-trees?

Had God hung fruit within his reach,
Forbidding him be satisfied?
Did some alluring tempter teach
How sweet the flavour is of pride?

But he who gained enlargement thus,
And, seeking for a proselyte,
Revealed enfranchisement to us,
Was surely “Bearer of the Light.”

Will no one dare to pay the toll
Of rescue from his fiery den?
Can fallen Seraphs boast no soul
Redeemable, like fallen men?

Protesting Churches may not choose
Among the Scriptures; pleased or vext,
They have no power to bind or loose
Plain meanings of the sacred text.

God either meant that Eve should eat,
And gave the Serpent leave to plot,
Her education to complete,—
God either meant or meant it not.

If he determined her to fall,
Then are the consequences his;
But if he wished it not at all,
He is not God; but Satan is!

Religion round the primal sin
May weave confusion, like a net,
And endless sophistry may spin,—
Those cross-ways will confront her yet.

One God we worship not; but still
And ever since our Parents' Fall,
The God of good, the God of ill
We worship; not the God of All.

The God of goodness we revere
Through idol, sign, and symbol vain;
The God of evil, him we fear,—
And fear brings worship in his train.

We strive to cheat the God that dwells
Within us; that sublimer sense
That sees that all creation spells
No Master,—or, Omnipotence;

No double-natured monster,—twin
With twin conflicting, ghost with ghost;
But the one Oneness, from whom Sin
Nor Death a separate fief can boast.

“We live and move and have our being
In Him,” the heathen poet sang;
He saw a vision past our seeing,
And far beyond our voices rang

His message to a World astray,
Like sheep that wander from the farm's
Enclosure, or like babes that play
Out of the reach of mothering arms.

For if in God Man lives and moves,
In God all human things arise,
Nor ever Demon set his hooves
Or in or out of Paradise;

And heretics, accounted erst
Twice damned, as having been within
The fold, no longer are accurst:
Christ suffered for that very sin.

When by the wind of Thought is stirred
Obscure Religion, throned in mist,
“She has not said her final word”
Declares the staunch apologist.

Is it not final, then,—her creed? . . . .
Whatever conflict,—trans- or con-
Substantiation,—supersede
Homo- or homoi-ousion,

Whatever fires of hell may burn
Between the patten and the pyx,
Between the ways that priests may turn,
Between the Cross and Crucifix,

Still is irrevocably based
Her doctrine's incongruity
On Adam's disobedient taste
Of that unhappy apple-tree.

Can finitude infinitude
Contain,—a circle zoning space?
Yet so Religion would delude
Her subjects of a servile race.

Nothing is hidden from her eyes;
Not from her hill she views the main
Of Providence with “wild surmise;”
She is not puzzled to explain.

She reads creation like a scroll,
While God, the writer, turns the leaves;
The mysteries of the world unroll
And all enures as she conceives.

Better the fatuous and crude
Belief in dominating chance
Than all the luminous amplitude
Of that amazing arrogance!

Some boast, as if from Calvary's hill
They spied the meaning of their pain,
Or traced the streams of good and ill
To where they mingle in the main!

But not on Pisgah now we stand,
Nor yet from Golgotha can see
The vineyards of the Promised Land
And paths descending pleasantly.

A different prospect meets our gaze,—
Hill beyond hill, and peak o'er peak,
Long upward windings, perilous ways,
And void fields where no voices speak.

Why should we fancy, when we reach,
If ever, that most distant height,
That we shall hear the perfect speech
Of God, or see the perfect light?

Methought that in Jerusalem,
The day before the Christ was born,
I heard an ancient man condemn
A froward youth, with lips of scorn:

“Young man, refrain from foolish talk;
“Shall Israelites cry Ichabod
“Because the blinded heathen walk
“Apart from Israel and God?

“We are of Abraham, his seed;
“All Gentile wisdom is in vain;
“The secret things are ours to read,
“To us the promises pertain,

“To us the glory. He who seeks
“For revelation, in our race
“Alone will find it; for God speaks
“By prophets; never face to face.”

Methought an ape, an anthropoid,
Before the monkey, Man, had come,
Viewing his first-born was annoyed
Because the baby had a thumb.

“Whence comes this ugly strain?” quoth he;
“My wife and I were always styled
“Of purest Simian ancestry:
“What primal monster mars my child?

“I fear the race deteriorates;
“I used to think,—a day ago,—
“That Nature sometimes recreates
“Creation, bringing high from low;

“But now this theory must be thrown,
“With all the rest, to Limbo: We,
“We are the climbers, we alone,
“And none shall climb a loftier tree.”

How dare we deem that in this age
The end of all the ages lurks?
That God is printing the last page
Of the last volume of his Works?

Have we not canted of the mills
Of God, how very slow they grind?
Why should we fancy on our hills
Their sails are sped by earthly wind?

Persia and Egypt, Greece and Rome,
And vaster dynasties before,
Now faded in Time's monochrome,
In what do we surpass their lore?

Some things they knew that we know not;
Some things we know, by them unknown;
But the axles of their wheels were hot
With the same frenzies as our own.

O mad, immeasurable pride,—
In presence of a universe
Of unimagined meanings, plied
About this little wandering hearse

Of dead pretence, these clustered graves
Of old Religions, and the sods
O'er mightier nations, who were slaves
Of destiny, but thought them gods,

And face to face with this dim crowd,
Enmisted in mysterious pain,
Whose tears and torments cry aloud
For pity to the gods of gain,

To dream the riddle has been guessed,
The Sphynx outwitted, and the bride
Is waiting, gloriously dressed,—
O mad, immeasurable pride!

When preachers from their pulpits coo
No compliments to place and purse,
When Christian people cease to woo
With blessings what they ought to curse,

When Vanity no longer rules,
Sceptred with some mellifluous phrase,
With which he taps the mouths of fools
And makes them pregnant with his praise,

When Force shall bow to Intellect,
And pious coveting, the brand
Of Christian Empires, shall direct
No more the counsels of the land,

When Man on Man no longer preys,
Far less on things that cannot cry
For mercy, whom pure trust betrays
To torture, will the end be nigh.

When foul Ambition, falsely called
Self-help and many a specious name,
Has loosed his grip upon the thralled
Admirers of applauded shame;

When honesty shall rule the mart,—
Not honesty as judged by Trade,
But that great honesty of heart
That loves not to be overpaid;

That first is proud of workmanship,
Then of true dealing; last, of gain;
That never with a lying lip
Has damned a boon, or blessed a bane;

Nor ever stole the widow's mite
Or orphan's bread, by that worst wrong
That has the semblance of a right,—
Then may be deemed the end not long.

Worlds are not saved by saintliness;
The saints themselves the world despise;
The world corrupts them none the less;
We perish of hypocrisies.

Works of the flesh,

Among these St. Paul places “hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings” (Gal. v. 19—21). His inclusion of heresies is unfortunate; but I am content to err in company with my betters.

—the scornful spite
Against the thinkers of plain thought;
The Jesuitical delight
In being hated,

I have mislaid the reference, but not unrecently the Reverend Father Clarke, S.J., gave forcible expression to this feeling in a Magazine article; nor do I think it is confined to the Jesuits.

—not for nought,

If only for the imposthumed pride,
Unlet, unleeched,—the thought to dwell,
The Everlasting's blissful bride,
While Intellect is seared in hell;

In these the saints are fouler far
Than e'er the world was: let them be;
It is not theirs to make or mar
The cosmic catholicity.

“Sign of the Cross:” go see them beat
The Christian boy; go see them slay
The women, for their lion's meat:
The Christian too will have his day:

Go see the Prætor cower before
The sign of Golgotha's dark scene:
Though crosses meant to him no more
Than gibbets to the Christian mean:

Oblivious that to please your taste
Art is debauched and History fee'd;
Oblivious that the Roman based
His murders too upon a creed;

Oblivious that the Christian slew
The Christian, afterwards, and spared
No delicate torture: he would do
The same to-morrow, if he dared.

A cross the faces, row on row,
I see a flush of anger flit,
And features more fanatic glow
With indignation, in the Pit.

They would those heathen fiends were slain
And by worse tortures wish them killed,
Forgetting that they too were fain
To do the thing that God had willed.

How strange a comment on the word
That bids us love our enemies
Are these blind passions of the herd
That Art so basely strives to please,

By pandering to religious lust:
Since every Church is but a sect,
That in pet idols puts its trust,
And hates an honest intellect.

Not dreaming in his dastard soul
Endurance of the radiant sight
Of the full Sun-head, pole to pole,
In black intolerance of light,

Dense Ignorance is spread like scales
Before the eyes of men; till He,
Above the mind-horizon, pales
The rim of darkness suddenly,—

Imagination! ... All the Earth
Is pausing, with unreconciled
Impatience, for his promised birth,
Attentive as a wistful child.

Imagination,—highest act
Of Intellect; the piercing flame
That penetrates the stony fact
And bares the Thought beneath the Name.

“Dense Ignorance:” I budge no foot;
I give not back; no word I scant:
You pluck up Nature by the root,
In artificial soil you plant;

You puff her out with steam and air
Until she gain a monstrous growth,
And then invite the world to stare
At Man's despatch and Nature's sloth;

And maddened with ambitious haste
To boast you cheat the certain tomb,
The creatures that you taught to taste
Affection, you betray to doom;

Not the swift death that men desire,
The butcher's cleavage of the brain,
But the long climb of lethal fire
And slow procrastinating pain.

And you, inhuman, that ignore
Our brotherhood with these poor folk,
Who pen our sheep, who guard our door,
Endure our anger, share our joke;

Who spring upon our lap and peer
With wistful brown eyes in our face,
Who sorrow if they see a tear
And triumph not in our disgrace;

To whom we stand in place of God,
Who stand to us we know not how,
Yet know full well our frown and nod
With bliss and wretchedness endow

Their sensitive spirits: you, I say,
Believe that Man progressed from Ape!
Ah! what a pity on his way
He never took a canine shape!

Your armies pass from land to land,
With scientific murder stored,
That Christ and Mammon, hand in hand,
May leave no region unexplored.

Religion marches (so you boast)
With bayonets fixed and naked blade;
But do you think the Holy Ghost
Is Minister of War and Trade?

Or do you fancy men are led
From barracks and the seething street,
From harlots and from gin, to spread
The Gospel, by the Paraclete?

Your Gospel is the passionless
Half-dead indulgence, which is lust,
The blatant Bible of the Press,
And urban Ethics of the Dust.

Green, pleasant places you despoil
With dirt and drudgery and din,
That, scarcely clothed, your slaves may toil,
And, scarcely fed, their children spin.

You touch the sensitive wires of trade;
Your feast from others' bread is carved;
And lo! there is a fortune made,
And lo! there is a city starved.

Then with your riches,—gathered, mark!
Within the law, by rule and right,—
You buy a title and a park,
Endow a church, and dole delight

To village serfs; you hunt and shoot,
You race and bet; give balls, and prate
Of poor-laws; for the destitute
You organise and legislate.

You legislate; but do you think
You help the world along, one whit
Nearer to joy, or rive one chink
Where men can get a glimpse of it?

Are you convinced true joys reside
In clambering on another's head?
For you perchance a merry ride,
But not for steeds discomforted.

For if success be true delight,
How few that true delight may gain!
And none shall gain it, save he smite
Some other with the spurs of pain.

Ambition,—not to think and know,
But to indoctrinate and teach,—
That this is half our cause of woe
Is half what Jesus came to preach.

From the first prize we win at school,
From the first triumph in a game,
We learn the one essential rule
By which a man may fashion fame:

Trample the witless and the weak;
So you advance, what matter they?
But cultivate the strong, and seek
The heads that wear Olympian bay.

This is the pivot, sun-like sin
That holds the tether of the World,
And all his planet creatures spin,
Around the self-same motive twirled.

Not otherwise the Churches turn;
Revolving round a central need
Of Influence; for which they burn
The souls defiant of their creed.

The joys that last, the toys that tire,
Imagination well can spy;
And how the pleasures men desire
Are folly, not felicity.

The stern ascetic, if he dared,
Upon those vanities would pounce;
By threats of retribution scared,
He deems it safer to renounce.

For if he count the world as nought,
What is there to renounce? Forsooth,
Salvation may be cheaply bought! ...
Art only apprehends the truth:

And thus it stands for those who trust
In her evangel,—Love is priest
Of larger joy than Lust; for Lust
Is reveller at a funeral feast.

Unjoyous is the joy of sense,
If unconditioned by the mind;
A faint reflection, pale pretence,
An imitation base and blind.

I sat with one who, like the swine,
Swallowed the feast and never spoke,
And pouring down the plenteous wine
Was drenched like sponges set to soak.

I sat with one who made the fare
A sacrament; not viands we ate
Nor wine we drank, but wit, more rare,
And wisdom, far more delicate.

Trivial, to drink; well-nigh obscene,
To eat; but yet the mind transmutes
All actions from their semblance mean
To beauty, parting men from brutes.

Not the most ceremonial grace
From the most sanctimonious mouth
Can make the gluttonous man less base
Or save the drunkard from his drouth;

But daily bread is sanctified,
Although for daintier forms of bread
The earth is ransacked far and wide,
That boards be sumptuously spread,

And daily water too is blessed,
Though by the sun-god turned to wine,
Albeit the vintage be the best
That ever grew by Rhone or Rhine,

Not by the grace before the meat
Nor holiest sanction of the cup,
But if we spiritually eat
And if we spiritually sup.

The world is ignorant of Joy;
In mind alone she has her seat;
For there the Eternal Girl and Boy
Have play-grounds in a sure retreat;

And there the Spirit of Joy will oft
Run to those children merry and meek,
And round the pear-trees in the croft
Will play all day at hide-and-seek;

Or when the daisies fold their smocks,
Edged with fine pink, but all else white,
To guard their yellow-powdered locks
From mothy kisses of the night,

Oft will that diligent Spirit nurse
The two fair children on her knees,
And sing them many an ancient verse
Of immemorial melodies.

O dear delight of thought intense!
Not thought of counting money-bags
Or skill of adding pounds to pence,
Or pounds to pounds; not thought that drags

A length of chain in fashion's ways,
Or, fettered fast in fashion's mill,
Gyrating in a dull amaze,
Grinds out the fancied duty still;

But thought that strives to reunite
In polished facets of the mind
The broken colours of the light
Baffled in mists of human kind;

Or weaves with reasonable hands,
Into a strong enduring chain
Of texture, all the separate strands
Of all the knowledge men attain.

100

Sow not emotion; 'tis a weed
That grows in hedge-rows; every fool
Fancies his own emotions breed
The right to teach, the right to rule.

Sow not religion; 'tis a flower
That robs the sunshine of its hue,
To deck its own peculiar bower
With regal red and saintly blue.

101

But rare Imagination, caught
Like seed-down from the breezes, sow
In the world's garden; there is nought
Except this balsam for her woe.

In this all colours sweetly blent
Reflect the sun's untinctured ray,
And fashion from the firmament
Lamps to illumine human clay.

102

This filled with passionate desire
The unsullied and unservile soul
Of Socrates, to steal the fire
Whose emblem first Prometheus stole;

To steal the philosophic spark
From the reluctant gods, who knew
And feared that keen heresiarch,
Whom presently, too late, they slew.

103

Too late; the reed was borne along;
Plato and Aristotle came,
Inspiring pen and speech and song
Till every hearth possessed the flame.

The gods sent darkness; vainly sent;
The fire was handed on and on;
The vital fire of discontent
Flamed high in Novum Organon.

104

This opened Galileo's eyes
To see the mountains moving round
With Earth, diurnal, and surmise
That none immobile may be found

Of all the Suns that steadfast beam;
This guided Bruno, till he learnt
The daring, uncanonic dream
That Rome indelibly has burnt

105

Into the world-brain; Newton guessed
By this the heavenly runic rhyme,
That speaks the Infinite, expressed
In measure of the starry chime;

By this Columbus knew to steer
And Darwin to the clue was led,
And each adventurous pioneer
Unerringly was piloted.

106

Man, the more easily to live,
Has pushed his energies apart,
As if they were unrelative,
And made Religion, Science, Art

Like separate circles. They who con
The three more closely, and inspect
With eyes of trained comparison,
See that the circles intersect;

107

By contradiction showing vain
The common segments, or by stress
Of confirmation proving plain
What otherwise were foolishness;

Or making from three meanings one
Resultant meaning, as the glows
Of various colour make the sun.
All this Imagination knows.

108

Imagination stands aloof,
Watching the phantoms hurrying by;
As unsubstantial as the roof
Of phantoms, that we call the sky.

How emulously fierce their race,—
Opinion, Prejudice, and Power!
Religion, too, is in the chase,
And all the minions of the hour.

109

They jolt and jostle; their tongues have stings,
To stab their friends; they jeer and spurn
Their neighbours; poor ephemeral things;
But yet to them the struggle is stern.

But sterner still to those they crush;
Because, though phantom-like, they grind
The weak to powder, as they rush,—
The poor, the maimed, the halt, the blind.

110

With sickening heart he turns away;
God teaches him; he looks again;
And underneath these mites of clay,
Their clownish deeds and cloddish pain,

He sees a Spirit, whom God instructs,
Not hour by hour, but age by age,
And who, though oft the usufructs
Be lost of foregone appanage

111

And old estate, for ever grows
Within, accretively, by sloth
Of sure development; no rose
Of transient decades, but a growth

Like Igdrasil; that tree, whose root,
Though fibred deeply in the ground
Shared by the human and the brute,
With heavenly foliage is crowned.

112

God visits us by Intellect,
And speaks to us in Mind alone,
Far from the clash and cry of sect,
Sinners that laugh or saints that groan;

Not in the soul's mere sensuous mind,
Not in the vulpine cleverness
That deems the universe designed
For craft to batten on distress,

113

Not in the unimpassioned heart,
That thinks God's bounty is so base
That holiness must sit apart
And watch the wassailers' disgrace;

But where Imagination dwells,
And sings of all things that are true,
Not for regard of heavens or hells,
But bird-like pæaning the blue.

114

Who is the God whom we adore,
The God we worship through our tears?
The Lord of Hosts He was of yore;
What is He in the passing years?

“Like many waters” hark! the sound,—
The Seraphim, “in burning row,”
And Saints and Martyrs thronging round
Answer, “We worship whom we know!”

115

Ah! blessed sheep, within the pen
Folded content and safe! But yet,
Who shall control the thoughts of men,
That toil in dust and blood and sweat?

Companionless the soul is born;
With solitary hands, like Ruth,
To glean “amid the alien corn”
The scattered, disregarded truth.

116

I dreamt and saw that when men died,
The Father sent them all to school;
And there they jostled side by side,
The saint and sinner, sage and fool.

The saint was there because he taught,
And fattened on the proselyte;
The sinful man, because he thought
The teaching of the saint was right;

117

The wise, because they had not dared
Be fools,—“where part of wisdom lies;”
The fools, because they had not shared
The folly of becoming wise.

For God made Man, and Man the Church,
As God made Woman, Man the Wife;
And therefore Man must learn to search
For God in Man, for Law in Life.

118

Men love not scorners: yet is scorn
A weapon forged by God to cleave
The husk of truth, till truth be shorn
Of all intendment to deceive.

The tags and trappings float away,
Away the tawdry vestment floats;
Till underneath we find the clay,
Which yet is more divine than coats.

119

God with this falchion shears the flame
And carves the light from boastful suns;
And as the void conceals their shame,
From star to star the laughter runs.

But every star shall die in turn,
Till all the universe flare out;
There is no light that does not burn,
No Faith whose issue is not Doubt.

120

We cannot reach the perilous place
Where God has survey of the land;
We shall not ever see his face,
We shall not ever understand.

Who worship the Eternal, yearn
Eternally; and each advance
Is but a coign from which to learn
A larger range of ignorance.

121

Though Christian covenanters dare
To hope some day a home to find
And an inheritance more fair
Than this poor plot they leave behind,

There is no promise in their bond
That, when they penetrate this show
Of shadows, they shall gain, beyond,
The Land of Nothing More to Know.