Oh, slow are God’s mills in the grinding,
But they grind exceedingly small;
And slow is man’s soul in the finding,
That he is a part of the All.
Through æons and æons, his story
Is bloody and blackened with crime;
But he will come out into glory
And stand on the summits sublime.
He will stand on the summits of Knowledge,
In the splendour of Light from the Source;
And the methods of church and of college
Will all of them change by his force.
For the creeds that are blind and cruel,
And the teachings by rule and by rod,
Will all be turned into fuel
To light up the pathway to God.
This is the Truth as I hear it—
The clouds are rolling away,
And Spirit will talk with Spirit
In the swift approaching day.
War from the world shall be driven,
From evil shall come forth good;
And men shall make ready for Heaven
Through living in Brotherhood.
‘FLOWERS OF FRANCE’
DECORATION POEM FOR SOLDIERS’ GRAVES, TOURS,
FRANCE, MAY 30, 1918
Flowers of France in the Spring,
Your growth is a beautiful thing;
But give us your fragrance and bloom—
Yea, give us your lives in truth,
Give us your sweetness and grace
To brighten the resting-place
Of the flower of manhood and youth,
Gone into the dust of the tomb.
This is the vast stupendous hour of Time,
When nothing counts but sacrifice and faith,
Service and self-forgetfulness. Sublime
And awful are these moments charged with death
And red with slaughter. Yet God’s purpose thrives
In all this holocaust of human lives.
I say God’s purpose thrives. Just in the measure
That men have flung away their lust for gain,
Stopped in their mad pursuit of worldly pleasure,
And boldly faced unprecedented pain
And dangers, without thinking of the cost,
So thrives God’s purpose in the holocaust.
Death is a little thing: all men must die;
But when ideals die, God grieves in Heaven.
Therefore I think it was the reason why
This Armageddon to the world was given.
The Soul of man, forgetful of its birth,
Was losing sight of everything but earth.
Up from these many million graves shall spring,
A shining harvest for the coming race.
An Army of Invisibles shall bring
A glorified lost faith back to its place.
And men shall know there is a higher goal
Than earthly triumphs for the human soul.