* * * * *
"And so, for love of Christ—and Thee,
I will not cease to seek and find,
In all mankind,
That hope of immortality
Which dwells so sacramentally
In Christ—and Thee."
The Fiery Cross.
He feels Christ's eternity so much that he cries out for him continually and will not be satisfied without him. He knows that he must have the Christ if he wants to grow great enough to meet life's demands. In a poem, "A Prayer for Enlargement," which I quote in full because of its brevity, one feels this dependence:
"Shrive me of all my littleness and sin!
Open your great heart wide!
Open it wide and take me in,
For the sake of Christ who died!
"Was I grown small and strait?—
Then shalt Thou make me wide.
Through the love of Christ who died,
Thou—thou shalt make me great."
The Fiery Cross.
To the Christian the following quotation will mean much. In it we hear the echo of Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy; or of that marvelous story of the regeneration of a human soul in Tolstoy's The Resurrection; an old-fashioned conversion of a human being; a Paul's on the road to Damascus experience. And the tragedy is that just about the time that the world of literature is being fascinated with this story of "Rebirth" the church seems to be forgetting it. It is told in the first verse of Ex Tenebris—"The Lay of the King Who Rose Again":
"Take away my rage!
Take away my sin!
Strip me all bare
Of that I did wear—
The foul rags, the base rags,
The rude and the mean!
Strip me, yea strip me
Right down to my skin!
Strip me all bare
Of that I have been!
Then wash me in water,
In fair running water,
Wash me without,
And wash me within,
In fair running water,
In fresh running water,
Wash me, ah wash me,
And make me all clean!
—Clean of the soilure
And clean of the sin,
—Clean of the soul-crushing
Sense of defilure,
—Clean of the old self,
And clean of the sin!
In fair running water,
In fresh running water,
In sun-running water,
All sweet and all pure,
Wash me, ah wash me,
And I shall be clean."
The Fiery Cross