Page:A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields.djvu/365

332 'Tis a privilege of Thy Grace To bend the stubborn human heart, But sacrilegious man usurps Thy part And wrongs Thee, Lord, before Thy face. Not by persuasions mild But tortures, is the conscience forced, in ways Unknown in earlier Christian days, And so Thy Spirit is reviled.

What cries and lamentations hoarse May show our children's sad estate! Victims of parents' sins, unfortunate, Plucked from their mothers' breasts by force And doomed, oh, woeful destiny! To bloody Moloch by inhuman hands, And to sin's pains and fatal brands, Before they know iniquity.

Ah! Born in such conditions dire, To live in fears from day to day, Marked by Remorse's furies as a prey, The heralds of eternal ire; And then to die beneath the curse, And Christ in the heart to the last resist, Yea, live and die as atheist,— O God, can any fate be worse?

The tyrants weigh us down with chains, One woe succeeds another woe, They close up heaven, they open hell below, Nor care for God, nor heed our pains. Who can withstand these men of blood? They gnash on us like ghouls in saints' gore red, They hurl us in the furnace dread, Ah! that the Angel by us stood!