From my lone turret as I look aroundO’er the green meadows to the ring of blue,From slope, from summit, and from half-hid valeThe sky is stabbed with dagger-pointed spires,Their gilded symbols whirling in the wind,Their brazen tongues proclaiming to the world,Here truth is sold, the only genuine ware;See that it has our trade-mark!You will buy Poison instead of food across the way,The lies of—this or that, each several nameThe standard’s blazon and the battle-cryOf some true-gospel faction, and againThe token of the Beast to all beside.And grouped round each I see a huddling crowdAlike in all things save the words they use;In love, in longing, hate and fear the same.
Whom do we trust and serve? We speak of oneAnd bow to many; Athens still would findThe shrines of all she worshipped safe withinOur tall barbarian temples, and the thronesThat crowned Olympus mighty as of old.The god of music rules the Sabbath choir;The lyric muse must leave the sacred nineTo help us please the dilettante’s ear;Plutus limps homeward with us, as we leaveThe portals of the temple where we kneltAnd listened while the god of eloquence(Hermes of ancient days, but now disguisedIn sable vestments) with that other godSomnus, the son of Erebus and Nog,Fights in unequal contest for our souls;The dreadful sovereign of the under worldStill shakes his sceptre at us, and we hearThe baying of the triple-throated hound;Eros-is young as ever, and as fairThe lovely Goddess born of ocean’s foam.
These be thy gods, O Israel! Who is he,The one ye name and tell us that ye serve,Whom ye would call me from my lonely towerTo worship with the many-headed throng?Is it the God that walked in Eden’s groveIn the cool hour to seek our guilty sire?The God who dealt with Abraham as the sonsOf that old patriarch deal with other men?The jealous God of Moses, one who feelsAn image as an insult, and is wrothWith him who made it and his child unborn?The God who plagued his people for the sinOf their adulterous king, beloved of him,The same who offers to a chosen fewThe right to praise him in eternal songWhile a vast shrieking world of endless woeBlends its dread chorus with their rapturous hymn?Is this the God ye mean, or is it heWho heeds the sparrow’s fall, whose loving heartIs as the pitying father’s to his child,Whose lesson to his children is, “Forgive,”Whose plea for all, “They know not what they do”
I claim the right of knowing whom I serve,Else is my service idle; He that asksMy homage asks it from a reasoning soul.To crawl is not to worship; we have learnedA drill of eyelids, bended neck and knee,Hanging our prayers on binges, till we apeThe flexures of the many-jointed worm.Asia has taught her Aliabs and salaamsTo the world’s children,—we have grown to men!We who have rolled the sphere beneath our feetTo find a virgin forest, as we layThe beams of our rude temple, first of allMust frame its doorway high enough for manTo pass unstooping; knowing as we doThat He who shaped us last of living formsHas long enough been served by creeping things,Reptiles that left their foot-prints in the sandOf old sea-margins that have turned to stone,And men who learned their ritual; we demandTo know him first, then trust him and then loveWhen we have found him worthy of our love,Tried by our own poor hearts and not before;He must be truer than the truest friend,He must be tenderer than a woman’s love,A father better than the best of sires;Kinder than she who bore us, though we sinOftener than did the brother we are told,We-poor ill-tempered mortals-must forgive,Though seven times sinning threescore times and ten.
This is the new world’s gospel: Be ye men!Try well the legends of the children’s time;Ye are the chosen people, God has ledYour steps across the desert of the deepAs now across the desert of the shore;Mountains are cleft before you as the seaBefore the wandering tribe of Israel’s sons;Still onward rolls the thunderous caravan,Its coming printed on the western sky,A cloud by day, by night a pillared flame;Your prophets are a hundred unto oneOf them of old who cried, “Thus saith the Lord”;They told of cities that should fall in heaps,But yours of mightier cities that shall riseWhere yet the lonely fishers spread their nets,Where hides the fox and hoots the midnight owl;The tree of knowledge in your garden growsNot single, but at every humble door;Its branches lend you their immortal food,That fills you with the sense of what ye are,No servants of an altar hewed and carvedFrom senseless stone by craft of human hands,Rabbi, or dervish, Brahmin, bishop, bonze,But masters of the charm with which they workTo keep your hands from that forbidden tree!
Ye that have tasted that divinest fruit,Look on this world of yours with opened eyes!Ye are as gods! Nay, makers of your gods,Each day ye break an image in your shrineAnd plant a fairer image where it stoodWhere is the Moloch of your fathers’ creed,Whose fires of torment burned for span-long babes?Fit object for a tender mother’s love!Why not? It was a bargain duly madeFor these same infants through the surety’s actIntrusted with their all for earth and heaven,By Him who chose their guardian, knowing wellHis fitness for the task,—this, even this,Was the true doctrine only yesterdayAs thoughts are reckoned,—and to-day you hearIn words that sound as if from human tonguesThose monstrous, uncouth horrors of the pastThat blot the blue of heaven and shame the earthAs would the saurians of the age of slime,Awaking from their stony sepulchresAnd wallowing hateful in the eye of day!
Four of us listened to these lines as the young man read them,—the Master and myself and our two ladies. This was the little party we got up to hear him read. I do not think much of it was very new to the Master or myself. At any rate, he said to me when we were alone, That is the kind of talk the “natural man,” as the theologians call him, is apt to fall into.
—I thought it was the Apostle Paul, and not the theologians, that used the term “natural man”, I ventured to suggest.
—I should like to know where the Apostle Paul learned English?—said the Master, with the look of one who does not mean to be tripped up if he can help himself.—But at any rate,—he continued,—the “natural man,” so called, is worth listening to now and then, for he didn’t make his nature, and the Devil did n’t make it; and if the Almighty made it, I never saw or heard of anything he made that wasn’t worth attending to.
The young man begged the Lady to pardon anything that might sound harshly in these crude thoughts of his. He had been taught strange things, he said, from old theologies, when he was a child, and had thought his way out of many of his early superstitions. As for the Young Girl, our Scheherezade, he said to her that she must have got dreadfully tired (at which she colored up and said it was no such thing), and he promised that, to pay for her goodness in listening, he would give her a lesson in astronomy the next fair evening, if she would be his scholar, at which she blushed deeper than before, and said something which certainly was not No.