Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
Be dunged with rotten death? Page 57]
In Francis Thompson's Catholic philosophy, which must be partially understood if the reader is to get at the heart of the "Hound of Heaven," the tremendous manifestations of God's attributes of power prepare us to expect equally tremendous manifestations of His attributes of love. The more prodigal God is discovered to be in lavish expenditures of omnipotence in the material universe, the more alert the soul becomes to look for and to detect overwhelming surprises of Divine Love. Hence, to Thompson there was nothing irrational in the special revelation of God to man, in His Incarnation, His death on the cross, and His sacramental life in the Church. The Divine energy of God's love, as displayed in the supernatural revelation of Himself, seems to be even vaster and more intense than the Divine energy of creation displayed in the revelation of nature. Every new revelation of God's power and wisdom which science unfolds serves only to restore a balance in our mind between God's power and God's love. The more astronomical the heavens become, the closer they bring God to us.
Another conception of God to be kept in mind, if we are to grasp the meaning of the "Hound of Heaven," is the omniscient character, the infinite perfection, of God's knowledge. God sees each of us as fully and completely as if there were no one else and nothing else to see except us. Practically speaking, God gives each one of us His undivided attention. And through this spacious channel of His Divine and exclusive attention pour the ocean-tides of His love. The weak soul is afraid of the terrible excess of Divine Love. It tries to elude it; but Love meets it at every cross-road and by-path, down which it would run and hide itself, and gently turns it back.
Francis Thompson, in an interpretation of "A Narrow Vessel," has left us in prose a description of human weakness and wilfulness reluctant of its true bliss. The following passage is an excellent commentary on the "Hound of Heaven." "Though God," he says, "asks of the soul but to love Him what it may, and is ready to give an increased love for a poor little, the soul feels that this infinite love demands naturally its whole self, that if it begin to love God it may not stop short of all it has to yield. It is troubled, even if it did go a brief way, on the upward path; it fears and recoils from the whole great surrender, the constant effort beyond itself which is sensibly laid on it. It falls back with relieved contentment on some human love, a love on its own plane, where somewhat short of total surrender may go to requital, where no upward effort is needful. And it ends by giving for the meanest, the most unsufficing and half-hearted return, that utter self-surrender and self-effacement which it denied to God. Even (how rarely) if the return be such as mortal may render, how empty and unsatiated it leaves the soul. One always is less generous to love than the other."
God walks morning, noon and eve in the garden of the soul, calling it to a happiness which affrights it. And the timid and self-seeking soul strives to hide itself under the stars, under the clouds of heaven, under human love, under the distractions of work and pleasure and study, offers itself as a wistful servitor to child and man and nature, if they will but afford it a refuge from the persistent and gentle accents of pursuivant Love. But all things are in league with God, Who made and rules them. They cannot conspire against Him. They betray the refugee. He turns in abject surrender, and is astonished to find the rest and happiness that he quested for so wildly. The Divine thwartings which had harassed the soul become a tender mystery of Infinite Love forcing itself upon an unworthy and unwilling creature. Someone has said that every life is a romance of Divine Love. The "Hound of Heaven" is a version of that romance which smites the soul into an humble mood of acknowledgment and penitence.
JAMES J. DALY, S. J.
OF "THE HOUND OF HEAVEN"
