England's Antiphon, George MacDonald [ready to read books TXT] 📗

is but once begun,
There hallelujahs be.

Enlighten with faith's light my heart;
Enflame it with love's fire;
Then shall I sing and bear a part
With that celestial choir.
I shall, I fear, be dark and cold,
With all my fire and light;
Yet when thou dost accept their gold,
Lord, treasure up my mite.

How great a being, Lord, is thine.
Which doth all beings keep!
Thy knowledge is the only line
To sound so vast a deep.
Thou art a sea without a shore,
A sun without a sphere;
Thy time is now and evermore,
Thy place is everywhere.

How good art thou, whose goodness is
Our parent, nurse, and guide!
Whose streams do water Paradise,
And all the earth beside!
Thine upper and thy nether springs
Make both thy worlds to thrive;
Under thy warm and sheltering wings
Thou keep'st two broods alive.

Thy arm of might, most mighty king
Both rocks and hearts doth break:
My God, thou canst do everything
But what should show thee weak.
Thou canst not cross thyself, or be
Less than thyself, or poor;
But whatsoever pleaseth thee,
That canst thou do, and more.

Who would not fear thy searching eye,
Witness to all that's true!
Dark Hell, and deep Hypocrisy
Lie plain before its view.
Motions and thoughts before they grow,
Thy knowledge doth espy;
What unborn ages are to do,
Is done before thine eye.

Thy wisdom which both makes and mends,
We ever much admire:
Creation all our wit transcends;
Redemption rises higher.
Thy wisdom guides strayed sinners home,
'Twill make the dead world rise,
And bring those prisoners to their doom:
Its paths are mysteries.

Great is thy truth, and shall prevail
To unbelievers' shame:
Thy truth and years do never fail;
Thou ever art the same.
Unbelief is a raging wave
Dashing against a rock:
If God doth not his Israel save,
Then let Egyptians mock.

Most pure and holy are thine eyes,
Most holy is thy name;
Thy saints, and laws, and penalties,
Thy holiness proclaim.
This is the devil's scourge and sting,
This is the angels' song,
Who holy, holy, holy sing,
In heavenly Canaan's tongue.

Mercy, that shining attribute,
The sinner's hope and plea!
Huge hosts of sins in their pursuit,
Are drowned in thy Red Sea.
Mercy is God's memorial,
And in all ages praised:
My God, thine only Son did fall,
That Mercy might be raised.

Thy bright back-parts, O God of grace,
I humbly here adore:
Show me thy glory and thy face,
That I may praise thee more.
Since none can see thy face and live,
For me to die is best:
Through Jordan's streams who would not dive,
To land at Canaan's rest?

To these Songs of Praise is appended another series called Penitential Cries , by the Rev. Thomas Shepherd, who, for a short time a clergyman in Buckinghamshire, became the minister of the Congregational church at Northampton, afterwards under the care of Doddridge. Although he was an imitator of Mason, some of his hymns are admirable. The following I think one of the best:-


FOR COMMUNION WITH GOD.

Alas, my God, that we should be
Such strangers to each other!
O that as friends we might agree,
And walk and talk together!

Thou know'st my soul does dearly love
The place of thine abode;
No music drops so sweet a sound
As these two words, My God .

* * * * *

May I taste that communion, Lord,
Thy people have with thee?
Thy spirit daily talks with them,
O let it talk with me!
Like Enoch, let me walk with God,
And thus walk out my day,
Attended with the heavenly guards,
Upon the king's highway.

When wilt thou come unto me, Lord?
O come, my Lord most dear!
Come near, come nearer, nearer still:
I'm well when thou art near.

* * * * *

When wilt thou come unto me, Lord?
For, till thou dost appear,
I count each moment for a day,
Each minute for a year.

* * * * *

There's no such thing as pleasure here;
My Jesus is my all:
As thou dost shine or disappear,
My pleasures rise and fall.
Come, spread thy savour on my frame-
No sweetness is so sweet;
Till I get up to sing thy name
Where all thy singers meet.

In the writings of both we recognize a straight-forwardness of expression equal to that of Wither, and a quaint simplicity of thought and form like that of Herrick; while the very charm of some of the best lines is their spontaneity. The men have just enough mysticism to afford them homeliest figures for deepest feelings.

I turn to the accomplished Joseph Addison.

He was born in 1672. His religious poems are so well known, and are for the greater part so ordinary in everything but their simplicity of composition, that I should hardly have cared to choose one, had it not been that we owe him much gratitude for what he did, in the reigns of Anne and George I., to purify the moral taste of the English people at a time when the influence of the clergy was not for elevation, and to teach the love of a higher literature when Milton was little known and less esteemed. Especially are we indebted to him for his modest and admirable criticism of the Paradise Lost in the Spectator .

Of those few poems to which I have referred, I choose the best known, because it is the best. It has to me a charm for which I can hardly account.

Yet I imagine I see in it a sign of the poetic times: a flatness of spirit, arising from the evanishment of the mystical element, begins to result in a worship of power. Neither power nor wisdom, though infinite both, could constitute a God worthy of the worship of a human soul; and the worship of such a God must sink to the level of that fancied divinity. Small wonder is it then that the lyric should now droop its wings and moult the feathers of its praise. I do not say that God's more glorious attributes are already forgotten, but that the tendency of the Christian lyric is now to laudation of power-and knowledge, a form of the same-as the essential of Godhead. This indicates no recalling of metaphysical questions, such as we have met in foregoing verse, but a decline towards system; a rising passion-if anything so cold may be called a passion -for the reduction of all things to the forms of the understanding, a declension which has prepared the way for the present worship of science, and its refusal, if not denial, of all that cannot be proved in forms of the intellect.

The hymn which has led to these remarks is still good, although, like the loveliness of the red and lowering west, it gives sign of a gray and cheerless dawn, under whose dreariness the child will first doubt if his father loves him, and next doubt if he has a father at all, and is not a mere foundling that Nature has lifted from her path.

The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue etherial sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim.
The unwearied sun from day to day
Does his Creator's power display;
And publishes to every land
The work of an almighty hand.

Soon as the evening shades prevail,
The moon takes up the wondrous tale;
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth;
Whilst all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets, in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though in solemn silence all
Move round the dark terrestrial ball?
What though no real voice nor sound
Amidst their radiant orbs be found?
In reason's ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth a glorious voice,
For ever singing as they shine:
"The hand that made us is divine."

The very use of the words spangled and frame seems-to my fancy only, it may be-to indicate a tendency towards the unworthy and theatrical. Yet the second stanza is lovely beyond a doubt; and the whole is most artistic, although after a tame fashion. Whether indeed the heavenly bodies teach what he says, or whether we should read divinity worthy of the name in them at all, without the human revelation which healed men, I doubt much. That divinity is there- Yes ; that we could read it there without having seen the face of the Son of Man first, I think- No . I do not therefore dare imagine that no revelation dimly leading towards