Classic Poem

If ever you chance, on life's highway,
To meet the infidel, Doubt,
Take up your weapons and drive him away;
For if you permit him to stop and stay,
He will blow Faith's taper out.

His hair is gray, but his eyes are bold,
And his bearing wondrous wise;
He plagued the prophets and saints of old,
And the martyrs down in their prisons cold,
With the seeming truth of the tales he told—
All learned from the father of lies.

He says the world is an earthquake's spawn,
And that life was made by chance;
That man was a fish in the ages gone—
That he changed to an ape, and still changed on
To his present grand advance.

He says the myriad worlds on high
Are only a learned dream;
That there is no earth, nor air, nor sky;
That we do not live; that we do not die;
That we are not what we seem.

He stealthily entered Eden's bower,
Disguised as an angel fair;
And when Adam and Eve, in an evil hour,
Listened and lost their holiest dower,
And fled from the sword of Almighty Power,
He followed the ruined pair.

He has hunted and haunted all mankind,
Down the paths of time since then;
Perverting the truth, misleading the blind,
And leaving confusion and wreck behind
In the hearts and homes of men.

He comes sometimes on his viewless wings
To the peasant's poor abode;
He stands with the great by the throne of kings,
And sits with the Christian that prays and sings
In the holy house of God.

Oh, then, beware, if you chance to meet
The vagrant infidel, Doubt;
Disguised as a saint, so mild and meek,
He may come when your heart is weary and weak;
But if you permit him to stop or speak,
He will blow Faith's taper out.