God whose ghost in arch and aisle Yet haunts his temple--and his tomb; And follows in a little while Odin and Zeus to equal doom; A God of kindred seed and line; Man's giant shadow hailed Divine.
And now there comes a stanza of haunting beauty, the ethic creed set to music, a pathetic pleading, a self-abasement, in the presence of the Immensities around us, and yet a passionate vindication of man's right to sit in judgment on an idol-god such as this!
O streaming worlds, O crowded sky! O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot.
The lesson of history and comparative religion could not be more perfectly summarised. The sovereignty of conscience could not be more masterfully asserted. Of old we learned that man was "made in the image of God," but now we see that the--
God of our fathers, known of old-- Lord of our far-flung battle-line--
he to whom we still raise our supplicating cry--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget--lest we forget!--[2]
we know that he is made in the image of man. Unless a movement of retrogression sets in; unless we have to submit to a paralysis of moral stagnation, the day must inevitably come when the "Lord God of Hosts," "the Man of War," "the God of Victories," whom Spanish viceroys and captains are incessantly invoking in their proclamations, will be swept into oblivion with the curse of war which gave them birth. But that hour of retrogression and decay shall never sound for humanity. A nation here, a people there, may drop out of the ranks; the last remnant of empire may fall from their unworthy hands, but as I have faith in the eternal order, as I bow before the everlasting Power which makes for moral progress, I know that war has served its purpose amongst men, and that the day _must_ come when it will be finally abolished as unworthy of rational beings. At any rate, the war-god is not he in whose image the perfected man was made, for--
This was what Man in his violent youth begot.
And as the mist of the phantom deity floats aside, there dawns a fairer vision of the veritably Divine presence on the reverent soul of the poet. No eye of man hath ever beheld him: it is a vision of the spirit. And as the language of souls is silent, he can say nothing of his God, though he is so conscious of his everlasting presence. If even his solemn speech, the voice of the poet, "far above music," could tell of his God, then would he be but the idealised image of himself. He may think, he does think far more deeply than the most adventurous theologian, but he may never speak. The mind must commune with itself.