Classic Poem

No! the seeming is thine;
For, could all the mass
Of the universe shine
Through thy little glass;

Could the Allbeing flow
Entire into thee,
So that Substance might show
And Essence might see;

Couldst thou know what beginning
To what end belongs;
Couldst thou witness Fate spinning
The Right out of wrongs, —

Thou wouldst rise from the dark
Wherein flesh is born,
And with song like the lark
Soar into the morn.

No! the dreaming is ours;
God's life is not trance,
But the sum of the powers
Of all lives' advance.

How we struggle to live!
God urges the strife
Of all beings to give
Their lives more of life.

From the instinct that lurked
In plasm of old seas
He and we have upworked
Through myriad degrees,

Climbing higher and higher,
With gain upon gain,
Till at last the soul's fire
Is lit in the brain.

In this upward progression,
Humanity's birth
Is the highest expression
Of God on the earth.

Yet the heavens are swarmed
With worlds older far;
And what lives, angel-formed,
May people a star,

Neither spectroscope's feel
Nor telescope's ken
Shall avail to reveal
To senses of men.

But these five senses grew,
As others may grow —
Senses so searching-through,
Brain facultied so,

Seized of force by such arts,
That mind may embrace
Other mind in far parts
Of infinite space.

Other mind may be there
With powers so strange
That our own would not dare
Imagine their range.

Can these pinholes of sight
Of ours comprehend
With what uses of light
High beings may send

The quick soul through the dense
Vast darkness of naught,
And by some inner sense
See us and our thought?

And to what fuller blowth
This flesh shall unfold,
What the grandeur of growth
Its energies hold,

Man can now no more dream
Than through his life dim
In the worm there could stream
A prescience of him.

But we know that we climb;
We see that we rise —
See how time unto time
We widen the skies.

From the ten fingers' count
Of numbers, begun
In the savage, we mount
And measure the sun.

Fabled Jupiter's nods,
That Nature obeyed,
And those gorgonish gods,
Her forces, which played

Chiefest part in mankind's
Last dream before day —
All the myths from all minds
Have faded away,

Where the Self-Revelator
Immanuel stands
As the human creator
By human love's hands.

God is with us and in us
(Within is above),
And our lives work to win us
His life by our love.

Whether I will or whether
Will not as He would,
All with all things together
Work only for good.

All the wrong I commit,
Mankind so unite
To exterminate it
They strengthen all right.

So, we grow by our sins:
Iscariot betrays,
And the Nazarene wins
Through all after days.

Lo, the Wrong that hath died
To Hades is hurled,
While the Right, crucified,
Redeemeth the world.