Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.

Religious Poems

Worship

“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”—JAMES i. 27.

THE PAGAN’S myths through marble lips are spoken,

And ghosts of old Beliefs still flit and moan

Round fane and altar overthrown and broken,

O’er tree-grown barrow and gray ring of stone.

Blind Faith had martyrs in those old high places,

The Syrian hill grove and the Druid’s wood,

With mother’s offering, to the Fiend’s embraces,

Bone of their bone, and blood of their own blood.

Red altars, kindling through that night of error,

Smoked with warm blood beneath the cruel eye

Of lawless Power and sanguinary Terror,

Throned on the circle of a pitiless sky;

Beneath whose baleful shadow, overcasting

All heaven above, and blighting earth below,

The scourge grew red, the lip grew pale with fasting,

And man’s oblation was his fear and woe!

Then through great temples swelled the dismal moaning

Of dirge-like music and sepulchral prayer;

Pale wizard priests, o’er occult symbols droning,

Swung their white censers in the burdened air:

As if the pomp of rituals, and the savor

Of gums and spices could the Unseen One please;

As if His ear could bend, with childish favor,

To the poor flattery of the organ keys!

Feet red from war-fields trod the church aisles holy,

With trembling reverence: and the oppressor there,

Kneeling before his priest, abased and lowly,

Crushed human hearts beneath his knee of prayer.

Not such the service the benignant Father

Requireth at His earthly children’s hands:

Not the poor offering of vain rites, but rather

The simple duty man from man demands.

For Earth He asks it: the full joys joy of heaven

Knoweth no change of waning or increase;

The great heart of the Infinite beats even,

Untroubled flows the river of His peace.

He asks no taper lights, on high surrounding

The priestly altar and the saintly grave,

No dolorous chant nor organ music sounding,

Nor incense clouding up the twilight nave.

For he whom Jesus loved hath truly spoken:

The holier worship which he deigns to bless

Restores the lost, and binds the spirit broken,

And feeds the widow and the fatherless!

Types of our human weakness and our sorrow!

Who lives unhaunted by his loved ones dead?

Who, with vain longing, seeketh not to borrow

From stranger eyes the home lights which have fled?

O brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;

Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;

To worship rightly is to love each other,

Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.

Follow with reverent steps the great example

Of Him whose holy work was “doing good;”

So shall the wide earth seem our Father’s temple,

Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.

Then shall all shackles fall; the stormy clangor

Of wild war music o’er the earth shall cease;

Love shall tread out the baleful fire of anger,

And in its ashes plant the tree of peace!

1848.