For aught that my eyes can discern,
Your God is what you think good—
Yourself flashed back from the glass
When the light pours on it in flood.
You preach to me to be just,
And this is His realm, you say;
And the good are dying with hunger,
And the bad gorge every day.
You say that He loveth mercy,
And the famine is not yet gone;
That He hateth the shedder of blood
And He slayeth us every one.
You say that my soul shall live,
That the spirit can never die:
If He was content when I was not,
Why not when I have passed by?
You say I must have a meaning:
So must dung, and its meaning is flowers;
What if our souls are but nurture
For lives that are greater than ours?
When the fish swims out of the water,
When the birds soar out of the blue,
Man's thoughts may transcend man's knowledge,
And your God be no reflex of you!
One night in after life I sat with Grant Harlson, in his rooms in a great city, and he told me of this, his time of doubt and tribulation, and repeated to me the poem.
"The questions it asks have not yet been answered, so far as I know," said he, "and I do not think they can be by the alleged experts in such things."
Then a sudden fancy seized him, and he broke out with a novel proposition:
"You have little to do to-morrow, nor have I much on my hands. Speaking of this to you has awakened an old interest in me and made me curious. Help me to-morrow. We'll make up now a list of twenty leading clergymen. I know most of them personally, and some of them can reason. We'll each take a cab and each visit ten, exhibiting these verses, going over them stanza by stanza, explaining the doubts they have aroused, and asking for such solution as the clergymen have, and such solace as it may afford. That will be rather an interesting experiment, will it not?"