Christmas Eve | Page 3

the truths, quite true if stated
succinctly,
But alas for the excellent earnestness, ment,
However to
pastor and flock's contentment!
Say rather, such truths looked false to
your eyes,
With his provings and parallels twisted and twined,
Till
how could you know them, grown double their size
In the natural fog
of the good man's mind,

Like yonder spots of our roadside lamps,

Haloed about with the common's damps?
Truth remains true, the
fault's in the prover;
The zeal was good, and the aspiration;
And yet,
and yet, yet, fifty times over,
Pharaoh received no demonstration,

By his Baker's dream of Basket Three,
Of the doctrine of the
Trinity,--
Although, as our preacher thus embellished it,
Apparently
his hearers relished it
With so unfeigned a gust--who knows if
They

did not prefer our friend to Joseph?
But so it is everywhere, one way
with all of them!
These people have really felt, no doubt,
A
something, the motion they style the Call of them;
And this is their
method of bringing about,
By a mechanism of words and tones,
(So
many texts in so many groans)
A sort of reviving and reproducing,

More or less perfectly, (who can tell?)
The mood itself, which
strengthens by using;
And how that happens, I understand well.
A
tune was born in my head last week,
Out of the thump-thump and
shriek-shriek
Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester;
And
when, next week, I take it back again,
My head will sing to the
engine's clack again,
While it only makes my neighbour's haunches
stir,
--Finding no dormant musical sprout
In him, as in me, to be
jolted out.
'Tis the taught already that profits by teaching;
He gets
no more from the railway's preaching
Than, from this preacher who
does the rail's office, I:
Whom therefore the flock cast a jealous eye
on.
Still, why paint over their door "Mount Zion,"
To which all
flesh shall come, saith the prophecy?
V
But wherefore be harsh on a single case?
After how many modes, this
Christmas Eve,
Does the self-same weary thing take place?
The
same endeavour to make you believe,
And with much the same effect,
no more:
Each method abundantly convincing,
As I say, to those
convinced before,
But scarce to be swallowed without wincing
By
the not-as-yet-convinced. For me,
I have my own church equally:

And in this church my faith sprang first!
(I said, as I reached the
rising ground,
And the wind began again, with a burst
Of rain in my
face, and a glad rebound
From the heart beneath, as if, God speeding
me,
I entered his church-door, nature leading me)
--In youth I look
to these very skies,
And probing their immensities,
I found God
there, his visible power;
Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense
Of
the power, an equal evidence
That his love, there too, was the nobler

dower.
For the loving worm within its clod,
Were diviner than a
loveless god
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.
You know what I
mean: God's all, man's nought:
But also, God, whose pleasure
brought
Man into being, stands away
As it were a handbreadth off,
to give
Room for the newly-made to live,
And look at him from a
place apart,
And use his gifts of brain and heart,
Given, indeed, but
to keep for ever.
Who speaks of man, then, must not sever
Man's
very elements from man,
Saying, "But all is God's"--whose plan

Was to create man and then leave him
Able, his own word saith, to
grieve him
But able to glorify him too,
As a mere machine could
never do,
That prayed or praised, all unaware
Of its fitness for
aught but praise and prayer,
Made perfect as a thing of course.
Man,
therefore, stands on his own stock
Of love and power as a pin-point
rock:
And, looking to God who ordained divorce
Of the rock from
his boundless continent,
Sees, in his power made evident,
Only
excess by a million-fold
O'er the power God gave man in the mould.

For, note: man's hand, first formed to carry
A few pounds' weight,
when taught to marry
Its strength with an engine's, lifts a mountain,

--Advancing in power by one degree;
And why count steps through
eternity?
But love is the ever-springing fountain:
Man may enlarge
or narrow his bed
For the water's play, but the water-head--
How
can he multiply or reduce it?
As easy create it, as cause it to cease;

He may profit by it, or abuse it,
But 'tis not a thing to bear increase

As power does: be love less or more

In the heart of man, he keeps it
shut
Or opes it wide, as he pleases, but
Love's sum remains what it
was before.
So, gazing up, in my youth, at love
As seen through
power, ever above
All modes which make it manifest,
My soul
brought all to a single test--
That he, the Eternal First and Last,

Who, in his power, had so surpassed
All man conceives of what is
might,--
Whose wisdom, too, showed infinite,
--Would prove as
infinitely good;
Would never, (my soul understood,)
With power to
work all love desires,
Bestow e'en less than man requires;
That he
who endlessly was teaching,
Above my spirit's utmost reaching,


What love can do in the leaf or stone,
(So that to master this alone,

This done in the stone or leaf for me,
I must go on learning endlessly)

Would never need