Until the tyrant himself relent,
The tyrant who the first black bow bent,
Slaughter shall heap the bloody plain ;
Resistance and war is the tyrant's gain.
But the tear of love and forgiveness sweet,
And submission to death beneath his feet;
The tear shall melt the sword of steel,
And every wound it has made shall heal.
For the tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King;
And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.
THE Vision of Christ that thou dost see,
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind,
Mine speaks in Parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates, Thy heaven-doors are my hell-gates.
Socrates taught what Melitus
Loathed as a nation's bitterest curse.
And Caiaphas was, in his own mind,
A benefactor to mankind.
Doth read the Bible day and night,
But thou readest black where I read white.
Was Jesus humble, or did He
Give any proofs of humility;
Boast of high things with a humble tone,
And give with charity a stone?
When but a child He ran away,
And left His parents in dismay;
When they had wandered all day long,
These were the words upon His tongue,
'No earthly parents I confess,
I am doing My Father's business.'
When the rich learned Pharisee
Came to consult Him secretly,
Upon his heart with iron pen
He wrote, 'Ye must be born again.'
He was too proud to take a bribe;
He spoke with authority, not like a scribe.
He says, with most consummate art,
Follow Me: I am meek and lowly of heart,' As that is the only way to escape
The miser's net and the glutton's trap.
He who loves his enemies hates his friends,
This surely was not what Jesus intends,
But the sneaking pride of heroic schools,
And the scribes and Pharisees' virtuous rules;
But He acts with honest triumphant pride,
And this is the cause that Jesus died.
He did not die with Christian ease,
Asking pardon of His enemies.
If He had, Caiaphas would forgive:
Sneaking submission can always live.
He had only to say that God was the Devil,
And the Devil was God, like a Christian civil.
Mild Christian regrets to the Devil confess
For affronting him thrice in the wilderness.
Like to Priestly and Bacon and Newton,
Poor spiritual knowledge is not worth a button.
He had soon been bloody Cæsar's elf,
And at last He would have been Cæsar himself.
And thus the Gospel St. Isaac confutes,
'God is only known by His attributes.
And as for the indwelling of the Holy Ghost,
Or Christ and His Father, it's all a boast,
Or pride and fallacy of the imagination,
That disdains to follow this world's fashion,'
To teach doubt and experiment,
Certainly was not what Christ meant.
What was He doing all that time
From ten years old to manly prime?
Was He then idle, or the less
About His father's business?
Or was His wisdom held in scorn
Before His wrath began to burn
In miracles throughout the land
That quite unnerved the seraph hand ?
If He had been anti-Christ, creeping Jesus,
He'd have done anything to please us :
Gone sneaking into synagogues,
And not used the elders and priests like dogs,
But humble as a lamb or ass
Obeyed Himself to Caiaphas.
God wants not man to humble himself,
That is the trick of the antient elf.
This is the race that Jesus ran,
Humble to God, haughty to man;
Cursing the rulers before the people,
Even to the temple's highest steeple.
And when He humbled Himself to God,
Then descended the cruel rod.
'If thou humblest Thyself thou humblest Me.
Thou also dwellest in eternity.
Thine own humanity learn to adore ;
For that is My spirit of life.
Awake, arise to spiritual strife,
And Thy revenge abroad display,
In terrors at the last judgment day.
God's mercy and long-suffering
Are but the sinner to justice to bring.
Thou on the cross for them shall pray,
And take revenge at the last day.'
Jesus replied in thunders hurled,
'I never will pray for the world;
Once I did so when I prayed in the garden,
I wished to take with Me a bodily pardon.
Can that which was of woman born,
In the absence of the morn,
When the soul fell into sleep,
And archangels round did weep,
Shooting out against the light,
Fibres of a deadly night,
Reasoning upon its own dark fiction,
In doubt which is self-contradiction?
Humility is only doubt,
And does the sun and moon blot out,
Roofing over with thorns and stems
The buried soul and all its gems.
This life's five windows of the soul
Distort the heavens from pole to pole,
And lead you to believe a lie,
When you see with not through the eye
Which was born in a night to perish in a night, When the soul slept in beams of light.'
John from the wilderness loud cried
Satan gloried in his pride.
'Come,' said Satan, 'come away,
I'll soon see if You obey.
John for disobedience bled,
But You can turn the stone to bread.
God's high King and God's high Priest
Shall plant their glories in Your breast.
If Caiaphas You will obey,
If Herod You with bloody prey,
Feed with the sacrifice and be
Obedient; fall down, worship me.'
Thunder and lightnings broke around,
And Jesus' voice in the thunder's sound.
'Thus, I seize the spiritual prey,
Ye smiters with disease, give way.
I come your King and God to seize,
Is God a smiter with disease?'
The God of this World raged in vain,
He bound old Satan in His chain,
And, bursting forth His furious ire,
Became a chariot of fire.
Throughout the land He took His course,
And traced diseases to their source.
He cursed the scribe and Pharisee,
Trampling down hypocrisy ;
Where'er His chariot took its way,
The gates of Death let in the day,
Broke down from every chain a bar,
And Satan in His spiritual war
Dragged at His chariot-wheels. Loud howl'd
The God of this World. Louder rolled
The chariot-wheels, and louder still
His voice was heard from Zion's Hill,
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