Hid there? Why? Could the girl be wont
(She the stainless soul) to treasure up
Money, earth’s trash and heaven’s affront?
Had a spider found out the communion-cup,
Was a toad in the christening-font?
Truth is truth: too true it was.
Gold! She hoarded and hugged it first,
Longed for it, leaned o’er it, loved it—alas—
Till the humour grew to a head and burst,
And she cried, at the final pass,—
“Talk not of God, my heart is stone!
Nor lover nor friend—be gold for both!
Gold I lack; and, my all, my own,
It shall hide in my hair. I scarce die loth
If they let my hair alone!”
Louis-d’or, some six times five,
And duly double, every piece.
Now, do you see? With the priest to shrive,
With parents preventing her soul’s release
By kisses that kept alive,—
With heaven’s gold gates about to ope,
With friends’ praise, gold-like, lingering still,
An instinct had bidden the girl’s hand grope
For gold, the true sort—“Gold in heaven, if you will;
But I keep earth’s too, I hope.”
Enough! The priest took the grave’s grim yield:
The parents, they eyed that price of sin
As if thirty pieces lay revealed
On the place to bury strangers in,
The hideous Potter’s Field.
But the priest bethought him: “‘Milk that’s spilt’
—You know the adage! Watch and pray!
Saints tumble to earth with so slight a tilt!
It would build a new altar; that, we may!”
And the altar therewith was built.
Why I deliver this horrible verse?
As the text of a sermon, which now I preach:
Evil or good may be better or worse
In the human heart, but the mixture of each
Is a marvel and a curse.
The candid incline to surmise of late
That the Christian faith proves false, I find;
For our Essays-and-Reviews’ debate
Begins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso’s words have weight:
I still, to suppose it true, for my part,
See reasons and reasons; this, to begin:
’Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart
At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin,
The Corruption of Man’s Heart.