Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/127

Rh Narrower than Peter’s house-top dream, His wisdom and his love with plans Poor and inadequate as man’s. It must be that He witnesses Somehow to all men that He is: That something of His saving grace Reaches the lowest of the race, Who, through strange creed and rite, may draw The hints of a diviner law. We walk in clearer light;—but then, Is He not God?—are they not men? Are His responsibilities For us alone and not for these?


 * And I made answer: “Truth is one;

And, in all lands beneath the sun, Whoso hath eyes to see may see The tokens of its unity. No scroll of creed its fulness wraps, We trace it not by school-boy maps, Free as the sun and air it is Of latitudes and boundaries. In Vedic verse, in dull Korán, Are messages of good to man; The angels to our Aryan sires Talked by the earliest household fires; The prophets of the elder day, The slant-eyed sages of Cathay, Read not the riddle all amiss Of higher life evolved from this.


 * “Nor doth it lessen what He taught,

Or make the gospel Jesus brought Less precious, that His lips retold Some portion of that truth of old; Denying not the proven seers, The tested wisdom of the years; Confirming with His own impress The common law of righteousness. We search the world for truth; we cull The good, the pure, the beautiful, From graven stone and written scroll, From all old flower-fields of the soul; And, weary seekers of the best, We come back laden from our quest, To find that all the sages said Is in the Book our mothers read, And all our treasure of old thought In His harmonious fulness wrought Who gathers in one sheaf complete The scattered blades of God’s sown wheat, The common growth that maketh good His all-embracing Fatherhood.


 * “Wherever through the ages rise

The altars of self-sacrifice, Where love its arms has opened wide, Or man for man has calmly died, I see the same white wings outspread That hovered o’er the Master’s head! Up from undated time they come, The martyr souls of heathendom, And to His cross and passion bring Their fellowship of suffering. I trace His presence in the blind Pathetic gropings of my kind,— In prayers from sin and sorrow wrung, In cradle-hymns of life they sung, Each, in its measure, but a part Of the unmeasured Over-heart; And with a stronger faith confess The greater that it owns the less. Good cause it is for thankfulness That the world-blessing of His life With the long past is not at strife; That the great marvel of His death To the one order witnesseth, No doubt of changeless goodness wakes, No link of cause and sequence breaks, But, one with nature, rooted is In the eternal verities; Whereby, while differing in degree As finite from infinity, The pain and loss for others borne, Love’s crown of suffering meekly worn, The life man giveth for his friend Becomes vicarious in the end; Their healing place in nature take, And make life sweeter for their sake.


 * “So welcome I from every source

The tokens of that primal Force, Older than heaven itself, yet new As the young heart it reaches to, Beneath whose steady impulse rolls The tidal wave of human souls; Guide, comforter, and inward word, The eternal spirit of the Lord! Nor fear I aught that science brings From searching through material things; Content to let its glasses prove, Not by the letter’s oldness move, The myriad worlds on worlds that course The spaces of the universe; Since everywhere the Spirit walks The garden of the heart, and talks Witli man, as under Eden’s trees, In all his varied languages. Why mourn above some hopeless flaw