SONG.
I.
When in the long and lonely night
That brings no slumber to mine eyes,
Through dark returns the vision bright,
The face and form that day denies,
And, like a solitary star
Revealed above a stormy sea,
Thy spirit soothes me from afar,
I mourn thee not, nor weep for thee.
II.
And when I watch the dawn afar
Awake her sleeping sister night,
And overhead the dying star
Return into her parent light,
And in the breaking day discern
The glimmer of eternity,
The goal, the peace, for which I yearn,
I mourn thee not, nor weep for thee.
III.
And when the melancholy eve
Brings back the hour akin to tears,
And through the twilight I perceive
The settled, strong, abiding spheres,
And gently on my heart opprest
Like dew descending silently,
There falls a portion of thy rest,
I mourn thee not, nor weep for thee.
IV.
But when once more the stir of life
Makes all these busy highways loud,
And fretted by the jarring strife,
The noisy humors of the crowd,
The subtle, sweet suggestions born
Of silence fail, and memory
Consoles no more, I mourn, I mourn
That thou art not, and weep for thee.
PROGRESS VERSUS GROOVES.
“How do you like your new minister, Mrs. B.?”
“Very much indeed! He is progressive—is not fixed in any of the old grooves. His mind does not run in those ancient ruts that forbid advance and baffle modern thought.”
How strangely this colloquy between a Methodist and Congregationalist fell upon the Catholic ear of their mutual friend! Comment, however, was discreetly forborne. That friend had learned in the very infancy of a Catholic life, beginning at the mature age of thirty-five by the register, the futility of controversy, and that the pearls of truth are too precious to be carelessly thrown away. Strangely enough these expressions affected one whose habits of thought and conduct had been silently forming in accordance with that life for twenty-five years!
“Old grooves” indeed! Lucifer found them utterly irreconcilable with his “advanced ideas” in heaven. Confessedly, the success of his progressive enterprise was not encouraging; but the battle and its results established his unquestionable claim as captain and leader of the sons and daughters of progress for all time.
“Modern thought!” So far as we can discover, the best it has done for its disciples is to prove to them beyond a doubt that their dear grandpapa of eld was an ape, and that they, when they shake off this mortal coil, will be gathered to their ancestors in common with their brethren, the modern monkeys!
We, who believe the authentic history of the past, can see in this boasted new railroad, upon which the freight of modern science and advanced civilization is borne, a pathway as old as the time when our dear, credulous old grandmamma received a morning call in Eden from the oldest brother of these scientific gentlemen, who convinced her in the course of their pleasant chat that poor deluded Adam and herself were fastened in the most irrational rut—a perfect outrage upon common sense—and that a very slight repast upon “advanced ideas” would lift them out of it, emancipate thought, and make them as “gods knowing good and evil.”
We all know how well they succeeded in their first step on the highway of progress. They lost a beautiful garden, it is true, of limited dimensions, but they gained a world of boundless space, and a freedom of thought and action which was first successfully and completely illustrated by their first-born son when he murmured, “Why?” and killed his brother, who was evidently attached to grooves.
They left the heritage thus gained to a large proportion of their descendants. A minority of them, it is true, prefer to “seek out the old paths” of obedience to the commands of God, “and walk therein”—to shun the “broad road” along which modern civilization is rolling its countless throngs, and to “enter in at the strait gate” which leadeth to life eternal, to the great disgust of the disciples of modern thought, who spare no effort to prove their exceeding liberality by persecuting such with derision, calumny, chains, imprisonment, and death!
Thank God this is all they can do! Rage they never so furiously, He that sitteth in the heavens laughs them to scorn. He will defend and preserve his anointed against all the combined hosts of Bismarcks, kaisers, and robber princes, who illustrate the liberal ideas that govern the march of modern civilization.