Wake up! Wake up! Jerusalem—
The night is spent—
Repent! Repent!
What do ye down in Bethlehem?
Cedron is calling soft and low;
Gethsemane will never know
Again the touch of Jesu's feet:
O Nazareth,
This day the death
Of Him who loved you is your loss—
I call this to you from His cross!
THE STREAM
How many Christs have we two crucified;
How many prophets have we sawn asunder;
What wild woe have we wrought: how deep, how wide
The wrong committed! In the sky God's thunder
Threatens, His lightning cleaves the clouds apart
To show an awful Face—
The Judge is in His place
Of Judgment! Oh, the love
That we have lost! Above,
Beneath and all around us sounds the cry
Of Rachel weeping over little hands
And little feet! Her babes are dead! You, I,
Alone are guilty; for while error stands
Must all the starry Christs be crucified!
Nay, do not hang your head:
Though Christs be crucified,
And Rachel's babes are dead,
One river floweth wide
Out of the urge of God;
Of that eternal stream—
Its mother-bosom broad
With vision and with dream—
Are you, Comrade and I!
Yea, all its ancient shores
That river runneth by
Have we touched. Where it pours
Past leagues of desert-sand,
Jungles and miry places,
Palms of an unknown land,
Ferns and their fronded faces;
Have we gone forth from God!
Where slimy serpents crawl,
And crocodiles are torpid in the sun;
Where snarling tigers sprawl,
And elephants come slowly one by one
Down the yellow ridges
Of the banyan's broken bridges
To the river where the little shells are strawed;
Where chattering monkeys leap,
And the flamingo struts among the reeds;
Where parrots pause and peep,
And all day long the greedy ibis feeds:
We went flowing, flowing,
And eternally out-going
From the impulse of the mighty love of God!
Lift up your head, O my Brother, my friend!
Know that your shame is the shame of the stream—
Memory floods all its banks, but the end—
What is the end? 'Tis a realized dream
Dreamt in the depths of an infinite peace
Ere the first star of the morning arose
Over the earth! Since that river's release
From the pure spring, how it flows! How it flows,
Bears on its bosom the sorrows of man,
Sin and the wreckage of faith and of truth,
Lust and hot murder, the primitive ban:
"Eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth"!
Yet that same bosom babe Moses did bare
Safe in his cradle of wattles! Its tide
Floated the tree on which Christ, crucified,
Bled for His love of the stream and His share
Of the Past!
Lift up your head and endure!
Are we not part of the All, and as pure?