Englands Antiphon | Page 8

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The first of the course is The Creation. God, and angels, and Lucifer
appear. That God should here utter, I cannot say announce, the doctrine
of the Trinity, may be defended on the ground that he does so in a
soliloquy; but when we find afterwards that the same doctrine is one of
the subjects upon which the boy Jesus converses with the doctors in the
Temple, we cannot help remarking the strange anachronism. Two
remarkable lines in the said soliloquy are these:
And all that ever shall have being
It is closed in my mind.
The next scene is the Fall of Man, which is full of poetic feeling and
expression both. I must content myself with a few passages.
Here is part of Eve's lamentation, when she is conscious of the death
that has laid hold upon her.
Alas that ever that speech was spoken
That the false angel said unto
me!
Alas! our Maker's bidding is broken,
For I have touched his
own dear tree.
Our fleshly eyes are all unlokyn, unlocked. Naked for
sin ourself we see;
That sorry apple that we have sokyn sucked. To
death hath brought my spouse and me.
When the voice of God is heard, saying,
Adam, that with my hands I made,
Where art thou now? what hast
thou wrought?
Adam replies, in two lines, containing the whole truth of man's spiritual
condition ever since:
Ah, Lord! for sin our flowers do fade:
I hear thy voice, but I see thee
nought.
The vision had vanished, but the voice remained; for they that hear
shall live, and to the pure in heart one day the vision shall be restored,
for "they shall see God." There is something wonderfully touching in
the quaint simplicity of the following words of God to the woman:

Unwise woman, say me why
That thou hast done this foul folly,

And I made thee a great lady,
In Paradise for to play?
As they leave the gates, the angel with the flaming sword ends his
speech thus:
This bliss I spere from you right fast; bar.
Herein come ye no more,

Till a child of a maid be born,
And upon the rood rent and torn,

To save all that ye have forlorn, lost.
Your wealth for to restore.
Eve laments bitterly, and at length offers her throat to her husband,
praying him to strangle her:
Now stumble we on stalk and stone;
My wit away from me is gone;

Writhe on to my neck-bone
With hardness of thine hand.
Adam replies--not over politely--
Wife, thy wit is not worth a rush;
and goes on to make what excuse for themselves he can in a very
simple and touching manner:
Our hap was hard, our wit was nesche, soft, weak, still in use in To
Paradise when we were brought: [some provinces. My weeping shall be
long fresh;
Short liking shall be long bought. pleasure.
The scene ends with these words from Eve:
Alas, that ever we wrought this sin!
Our bodily sustenance for to win,

Ye must delve and I shall spin,
In care to lead our life.
Cain and Abel_ follows; then _Noah's Flood, in which God says,
They shall not dread the flood's flow;
then Abraham's Sacrifice_; then _Moses and the Two Tables_; then

The Prophets_, each of whom prophesies of the coming Saviour; after
which we find ourselves in the Apocryphal Gospels, in the midst of
much nonsense about Anna and Joachim, the parents of Mary, about
Joseph and Mary and the birth of Jesus, till we arrive at The
Shepherds_ and The Magi, The Purification, The Slaughter of the
Innocents, The Disputing in the Temple, The Baptism, The
Temptation_, and The Woman taken in Adultery, at which point I pause
for the sake of the remarkable tradition embodied in the scene--that
each of the woman's accusers thought Jesus was writing his individual
sins on the ground. While he is writing the second time, the Pharisee,
the Accuser, and the Scribe, who have chiefly sustained the dialogue
hitherto, separate, each going into a different part of the Temple, and
soliloquize thus:
Pharisee. Alas! alas! I am ashamed!
I am afeared that I shall die;

All my sins even properly named
Yon prophet did write before mine
eye.
If that my fellows that did espy,
They will tell it both far and
wide;
My sinful living if they outcry,
I wot not where my head to
hide.
Accuser. Alas! for sorrow mine heart doth bleed,
All my sins yon
man did write;
If that my fellows to them took heed,
I cannot me
from death acquite.
I would I were hid somewhere out of sight,

That men should me nowhere see nor know;
If I be taken I am aflyght afraid.
I n mekyl shame I shall be throwe.