THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 WAR AND WORSHIP; 
 
 A POEM, 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY BEDLOW. 
 
 CONVICTIONS BASED ON RECOLLECTIONS OF THE REVOLTS or 1848. 
 
 While the officers attached to the expedition 
 under the command of Lieut. W. F. Lynch were 
 camped at Ain-Jiddy (En Gedi) on the shores of 
 the Dead Sea, a messenger from Jerusalem brought 
 tidings of the revolutionary state of Europe and the 
 spirit of "Popular Rule" animating all parties 
 arrayed against the dominant powers. The fol 
 lowing verses were suggested at the time and place 
 above mentioned, roughly sketched in Syria, and 
 completed in Palestine and New York. 
 
 HENRY BEDLOW. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY, 
 igoz.
 
 PS 
 
 WAR AND WORSHIP. 
 
 I. 
 
 'Mid palms and cacti bivouacked, 
 
 Reclused from worldly cark and care, 
 A din of conflict freights the air, 
 
 And cloistral calm with tumult racked. 
 
 Clairaudient in my solitude, 
 Yet dubious if the stir proclaim 
 A strife in Freedom's cherished name, 
 
 Or mock heroics of a feud ; 
 
 Some factious brawl, corrupt in deed ; 
 A demagogic enterprise, 
 To cozen, dupe and victimize 
 
 The purblind gulls of others' greed ; 
 
 626018
 
 Its hurly-burly warlike made, 
 
 With cannon roar and clarion ring, 
 And yet a ruffian ranting thing, 
 
 A brawling mob's fanfaronade ; 
 
 Or rallying slogan, wild huzza, 
 
 Rude shock of armies, hissing bombs, 
 The carbine-clatter, roll of drums, 
 
 The maddening, murderous coil of war ; 
 
 Its 'larums weird, its frenzied shrieks 
 Of women in sacked cities, when 
 The red streets clogged with armed men, 
 
 But dead each finding him she seeks. 
 
 And clairvoyant, do I behold 
 A vision of portentous scope, 
 All serfdom marshalling to cope 
 
 With despotisms manifold ? 
 
 A fond prophetic sight that sees 
 The bonds of slave and villeinage, 
 Rent in the stress of manhood's rage : 
 
 The doom of old feudalities ?
 
 II. 
 
 Will Freedom once more count her gains ? 
 Will outraged masses heed her calls, 
 And, firm of purpose, rend the thralls 
 
 And fetters of a race in chains ? 
 
 Can this be riff-raff hate of Law ? 
 
 Or slavery so debased the man 
 
 That bugle-blast and rataplan 
 Signal for Riot, not for War ? 
 
 Or, feudatory forces spent, 
 
 Do serfs behold with ravished eyes 
 The light of Freedom's dawn, and rise 
 
 Rejoicing in the glad portent ? 
 
 Or see with slumbrous gaze the gleams, 
 To take the sluggard's drowsy view, 
 And, folding arms, turn to renew 
 
 The sorc'ry of beguiling dreams ? 
 
 5
 
 Has alien rule their souls debauched, 
 Accepting fate, nor wroth nor shamed, 
 Where unmarred manhood would have flamed 
 
 Like rick and harvest riot-torched ? 
 
 As if the war-drum's loud alarms, 
 Its rhythmic throb and wild tattoo, 
 Were but a mirthful mob's halloo, 
 
 And not a fervid call to arms ? 
 
 III. 
 
 Resigned to darkness, will they cast 
 Their blinkard-eyes on light and rail, 
 Or, roused to loftier aims, prevail 
 
 Against the slave's ignoble past ? 
 
 Frenzied with Power's long abuse, 
 The doors of mercy on them shut, 
 Do they arise resolved to put 
 
 Their helot thews to Freedom's use ?
 
 Seeing her dayspring rout the gloom, 
 And all their wrongs, as phantoms dire, 
 Fleeing like herds from prairie fire, 
 
 To perish in predestined doom ; 
 
 They whom an empire, ruthless strong, 
 By tithe and tax and wanton wars, 
 To outrage, spoil and greed, no pause, 
 
 Have maddened with inhuman wrong, 
 
 To whom the hate of despot brings 
 Revolt to break their galling chain, 
 And summons manhood back again, 
 
 Ere throttled in the clutch of kings ; 
 
 Awaiting not the law's repeal, 
 
 Which might a milder sway ordain, 
 But steeled no longer to remain 
 
 Coerced, beneath the iron heel, 
 
 Have now submission's limits reached, 
 And slave, transfigured to the Man, 
 Make Insurrection lead their van, 
 
 Marching with Havoc's hounds unleashed, 
 
 7
 
 In undrilled Riot's huddled strife, 
 
 Where License reigns, and Law is dumb, 
 And individual rights succumb 
 
 With equities of civic life. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Is it a rascal rabble-trick ? 
 
 Is Freedom's purpose festered thus ? 
 
 And this mere sputum and the pus 
 Of ulcerous bodies politic, 
 
 Corrupt at heart ? their aim to rob, 
 To roister, ravage, loot and kill ; 
 Murder, the Sergeant of their drill, 
 
 Their force's Sovereign head, King Mob ? 
 
 Who would not have the wide world free 
 From Absolutism's reckless whims ; 
 And hear rejoicing " Sanctus " hymns 
 
 Of franchised hosts to Liberty ?
 
 Loved Liberty ! man is not loth 
 To own Semitic cult for thee, 
 Thou threefold Holy Deity ! 
 
 Freemen's " Lord God of Sabaoth." 
 
 While no base acts their aims betray, 
 This is not venal, but doth wear 
 Veridic Revolution's air : 
 
 Let Freedom bless the bold essay. 
 
 V. 
 
 She comes to judgment ! Sovereign Lords, 
 Anointed Kings, Khedives, Bashaws, 
 Satraps and Sultans, Kaisers, Tsars, 
 
 Caliphs and Khans, tyrannic hordes, 
 
 Beneath whose rod of mastery pine 
 A world of tributary souls, 
 Defenseless under loathed controls, 
 
 Mocking a godhead Right-Divine,
 
 The days of expiation dawn ! 
 Retributive upon her throne, 
 The lightnings belted at her zone, 
 Her straight brows trenched in righteous scorn- 
 She sits ; her clear, imperious eyes 
 Glowing with holy flame, which lights 
 Oppressive wrong, and thus invites 
 The verdict of her dread assize. 
 
 Or, ranging through the realms, her tread 
 Startles old empires and despair, 
 Makes cheeks of ruling tyrants wear 
 
 The blenching of a fateful dread. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Great mother of the earth's oppressed, 
 
 To thy sole refuge turn for aid, 
 
 The wronged, down-trodden and betrayed, 
 To be of thy true-cheer possessed.
 
 Then comes the hour, for come it must, 
 When misrule bears such foul renown, 
 That sceptre and the triple crown 
 
 Roll in a world-wide battle dust. 
 
 These are but symbols ! still through these 
 Have come man's many woes and worst : 
 Both priest and king have proved accurst, 
 
 And sorrow's drafts drank to the lees. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Strange ! that laws judged by modern lights, 
 Mere Custom based on ancient wrong, 
 Should yet, maleficent and strong, 
 
 Be chronicled as vested rights ; 
 
 That Title, Privilege and Caste, 
 In Usurpation's womb conceived, 
 And birth in violence achieved, 
 
 Should rule us from the barb'rous past.
 
 Homage exacted as a due 
 
 To an ancestral " What Has Been," 
 The enforcement of an ancient lien 
 
 Upon the freedom of the New. 
 
 A parasitic vogue no less, 
 
 This servile sycophantic fawn 
 
 To bonded Midas ; trucklings borne 
 
 To Title low-bred caddishness 
 
 Transmitted from past feudal days, 
 And now to Caste precedence trends : 
 Such bent needs drastic purge, to cleanse 
 
 Republics from Patrician sways. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Though Biblic-gloze of slavery bar 
 The slave's revolt, be not perplexed ; 
 Presumptuous priestcraft forged the text 
 
 For Freedom, strife is Holy War.
 
 To Revolutions she has given 
 
 True warrant for revolt ; as though 
 An archangelic trump should blow 
 
 Authoritative right from Heaven. 
 
 Then as when earthquakes rend a realm, 
 And down through ravine, gulch and rent, 
 Structures unbased are headlong sent, 
 
 Mountains arise, and floods o'erwhelm; 
 
 So when her tremors stir all hearts, 
 
 Yawn gulfs, from Right divorcing Wrong ; 
 Old tottering frauds, not over-strong, 
 
 Vanish in void ; Freethought upstarts. 
 
 Freethought ! strong utt'rance ! bold ideas ! 
 Beneath whose firm, diffusive strength 
 Roll priestcrafts, creeds and thrones at length, 
 
 The mockery of enfranchised years.
 
 IX. 
 
 They wake a tumult in the heart, 
 These despots of a life's brief hour, 
 With their fastastic freaks of power, 
 
 Forcing just rule and right apart ; 
 
 A God's indissoluble plan 
 
 Dishonored by besotted fools, 
 Whose Saturnalias of misrules 
 
 Debauch the manhood of the man. 
 
 When wrong makes civic progress halt, 
 And man's rule null, 'twill ever be 
 Brought clear to view, that he may see 
 
 Some broken Law of God the fault ; 
 
 A Law which cannot know divorce 
 From the God-purpose it enfolds. 
 Never to be repealed, it holds 
 
 Eternally effective force. 
 
 14
 
 A truth for endless time enscrolled, 
 Results of His disprized laws, 
 Effects, as sternly following cause, 
 
 Were Cosmos back to Chaos rolled. 
 
 On wrongful act amend will hinge, 
 And Retribution's gates swing wide, 
 For efflux of that ruthless tide, 
 
 That baleful justice called Revenge. 
 
 When direful " Reigns of Terror " come, 
 And "Right Divine" and "Privilege" 
 Pay bloody tribute to the rage 
 
 Of the aroused, red-handed Slum ; 
 
 Then Crime holds Freedom as its fag, 
 While Riot masquerades as War, 
 With License in triumphal car, 
 
 And Liberty a murderous hag.
 
 X. 
 
 Now hamlet, town, and seething mart, 
 A Revolution's force controls ; 
 The throbbing drums and carmagnoles, 
 
 Rhythmic with passion's wrathful heart. 
 
 The Babeled streets are swarmed, as when 
 Sounds the red revelry of war, 
 While yells and cursings, near and far, 
 
 Reveal the headlong rage of men. 
 
 A raucous clamor fills the air, 
 With hint of peril in its ring, 
 Harsh, truculent and menacing, 
 
 From mobs which threaten and which dare. 
 
 Discord by day each region roams, 
 A nameless dread pervades the nights, 
 Darkness made lurid with the lights 
 
 Of blazing ricks and flaming homes. 
 
 16
 
 Men gaze with fierce, malignant stare, 
 In every face dread purpose lies ; 
 Mouths closed determinedly, and eyes 
 
 Spectral with hunger or despair. 
 
 Children anaemic, want-distressed, 
 And haggard mothers, carcass-thin, 
 Beg with a skull's horrific grin, 
 
 As if their deathful stint were jest. 
 
 No whining beggar's sniveled cant, 
 No cringing cadger's feigned distress, 
 But supplicating eyes, express 
 
 Famine's unutterable want. 
 
 All tender hearts compassion wrings, 
 For frenzy shows in varied ways ; 
 Some kneel in prayer, or in their craze 
 
 Curse God, and drop to die poor things 
 
 Scenes to bring tears and pale the cheek, 
 Unless one's soul is self-immersed, 
 Or with the cynic's nature cursed, 
 
 And heart as hard as Burmah-teak.
 
 XI. 
 
 The masses, fierce and malcontent, 
 So long from human rights estranged, 
 Resolve to have subjection changed 
 
 By Battle's grim arbitrament. 
 
 Where'er despotic Force parades, 
 
 There stern opposing Manhood stands 
 And women flout its hireling bands 
 
 From roofs and bristling barricades. 
 
 Is this the mad, protesting shriek 
 
 Of suffering peoples, roused at length 
 To action, measuring wrathful strength 
 
 With that brute face that kept them weak ? 
 
 Grave Discontent's disorder tends 
 
 To broader issues ; gathering throngs, 
 Inflamed by speech and martial songs, 
 
 Riot in Revolution ends. 
 
 18
 
 And thus aesthetic form essays, 
 
 While crowds by swift accretion swell, 
 With hostile forces, equable, 
 
 And drilled in war's strategic ways. 
 
 Kingdoms by feud and faction rent, 
 From town and village, vale and holt, 
 Battalioned serfdoms in revolt, 
 
 These rustic legions supplement. 
 
 XII. 
 
 To free their race from slavery's ban, 
 Armies to battle-fields pass by, 
 To prove how Christ-like men can die, 
 
 In ransom of their brother-man. 
 
 In sullen bitterness with wrong, 
 
 Instinct with freedom's earnest bent, 
 Souls with envenomed passions rent, 
 
 With torrent purport speed along. 
 
 19
 
 Throughout the night the stir is heard 
 Of tramping multitudes ; nor ceased 
 When the vague dawn-light in the east 
 
 Roused earliest chirp of waking bird. 
 
 When from the dusk evolved the day, 
 Onward still streams the human tide, 
 Afar and near, and spreading wide 
 
 O'er fell and field and dusty way. 
 
 The farmer from the half-ploughed soil, 
 The coulter in the furrow left, 
 The craftsman in his calling deft, 
 
 Drudges, in coarser forms of toil ; 
 
 From handicrafts of every turn, 
 
 From foundry, stithy, forge and mill, 
 From factory, furnace, loom and till, 
 
 Come yeomen, peasant, churl and kern. 
 
 Trade quits its counter, clerks their desks ; 
 Tailor on yardstick binds his shears, 
 And with him follow pikes and spears 
 
 Alike extempored, war's grotesques.
 
 The weaver spurns his loom and thrums, 
 To web and shuttle gives the slip, 
 Marching in martial fellowship 
 
 With rabble from the teeming slums. 
 
 The miner hurries from the pit, 
 
 The smutted collier shirks his work ; 
 The cook, with bold, belligerent yerk, 
 
 Unscabbards from the roast, the spit. 
 
 Beside the stripling, war-imbued, 
 
 Steps bookish-scholar, no more bowed ; 
 The city bully, bold and loud, 
 
 Now aptly in the hostile mood. 
 
 In labor's homely guise they come, 
 In all a warlike bent abounds, 
 While near and far-afield resounds 
 
 The loud tantara of the drum. 
 
 With " tally ho " some keep the pace, 
 As if the game were up and gone, 
 And cry of "yoiks" and winding horn 
 
 Were a "tantivy" to the chase. 
 
 21
 
 XIII. 
 
 The fields are mantled green with May, 
 Yet hosts which tramp above that sod, 
 Come not to view the works of God 
 
 In springtide's radiant array 
 
 But eyes with lurid glitter lit, 
 
 With volleyed shot, and bayonets fixed, 
 Striving, in battle-wrangle mixed, 
 
 To put God's image under it. 
 
 With sons of toil the hill-scarps swarm, 
 Not clad in gala-dress of war, 
 But every heart firm to the core, 
 
 And sombre as a rising storm. 
 
 The clamor of the forming crowd, 
 A muttering distant thunder seems ; 
 Their eager bayonets' restless gleams, 
 
 The lightning of that lurid cloud. 
 
 22
 
 What fearlessness has Freedom lent 
 To them, so dareful-glad to die ? 
 Once abject bondsmen, they defy 
 
 The power that seemed omnipotent. 
 
 Though battle-clang their requiem, 
 'Tis life life of the baited slave 
 That holds more terror than the grave, 
 
 More dread than sudden death to them. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Embattled on the vantage-slopes 
 Of the free hills, their legions lure 
 A myriad eyes the cynosure 
 
 And pole-star of a people's hopes ; 
 
 There, like inexorable Fates, 
 Their serried lines afar defined ; 
 Rude-weaponed yet for war aligned, 
 
 Facing the foes that Freedom hates ; 
 
 23
 
 Their smelted ploughshares wrought to guns : 
 When scythes as swords from scabbards leap, 
 They who have sown the wind will reap 
 
 The whirlwind ! so the adage runs. 
 
 For like a cloud-burst these will pour 
 
 Their levy on the hated foe, 
 
 In undammed cataclysmic flow, 
 With inundating rush and roar. 
 
 XV. 
 
 When Freedom like a power divine, 
 Turning the dew that wets the plain 
 Red with the blood of votaries slain, 
 
 The water once more changed to wine ; 
 
 The soil that the libation quaffs 
 Will ever be renowned for breed 
 Of valiant men and noble deed 
 
 Such magic have her wizard drafts. 
 
 24
 
 From action there is still surcease, 
 
 While on the slopes, which dew still wets, 
 Glint, meteor-like, the bayonets, 
 
 Where Freedom holds her fortalice. 
 
 From ranks now mute no sound is heard 
 
 Above the voices of command, 
 
 In tragic preparation stand 
 The columns which await "the word." 
 
 XVI. 
 
 The vision changes ! On the plains 
 An onslaught rages fierce and fell, 
 The uproar of a dread pell-mell, 
 
 Where men are fiends, and torment reigns. 
 
 The sylvan landscape, dew impearled, 
 With nature's sorrow seems tear-wet, 
 Veiled tragedies, by sight unmet, 
 
 In fire-mist of battle furled. 
 
 25
 
 The file-fires of the legions flash, 
 
 And, 'neath the tread of hostile men, 
 The meadows lie a quaggy fen 
 
 With wild-flowers in a sodden plash. 
 
 The scene grim havoc's home appears, 
 
 With shot-ploughed pastures, fallowed leas, 
 Torn woodland groves, whose wounded trees, 
 
 Weeping their hurt, shed ambered tears, 
 
 Blight, waste and ruin, near and far, 
 
 Ravage and devastation dire, 
 
 Soil swept as by a prairie fire ; 
 All sylvan charm dispelled by war ; 
 
 The vale and meadow, moor and heath, 
 Stamped deep with desolation's brand, 
 Battle and Murder's Promised Land, 
 
 A trysting-place of Man, with Death ! 
 
 26
 
 XVII. 
 
 The limpid stream that wound along, 
 Melodious in its sinuous run, 
 A liquid Memnon, which the sun 
 
 Seemed to have touched to endless song, 
 
 Lies swamped throughout its placid bed, 
 Pent up in pools its minstrel flow, 
 Its meadow-course a dismal slough, 
 
 Its ferns and mosses guled with red. 
 
 Disks of the daisies, vermeil-dyed, 
 
 Their ivoried rays now death-like white- 
 In dabbled grass a piteous sight 
 
 With paler dead lie side by side. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 The brazen tubes of bugles blare, 
 And, like a strident storm of steel, 
 I see the dragoons charge, and reel 
 
 Before the volleying hollow square. 
 
 27
 
 Dense, serried ranks meet the assault, 
 And as when billows smite the bluff, 
 Baffled, recoil at its rebuff, 
 
 And, like spent force, collapse or halt ; 
 
 They halt, retreat, reform, recharge ; 
 
 Again the deadly volleys sound ; 
 
 The unhorsed, bleeding, strike the ground, 
 Their steeds, unreined, fly wild, at large. 
 
 A decimated force reforms 
 
 To breast that death-evolving square, 
 
 And, in heroic frenzy, dare 
 The blizzards of its leaden storms. 
 
 With rowels dripping red, these ride ; 
 
 Upon their saddles bending low, 
 
 As if saluting Death, they go, 
 For freedom will not be denied.
 
 XIX. 
 
 Slain horses heaped in battle's stress, 
 Serve " coignes of vantage " for a few 
 To force the foremost files, and hew 
 
 A pathway for the rearward press. 
 
 From mounded slain their horses span 
 The bristling space with mighty leaps ; 
 Crushing the line in mangled heaps, 
 
 Its bayonets goring horse and man. 
 
 The barrier yields, thus brayed and trussed, 
 While, through the swirl of smoke and murk, 
 The sabres flash relentless work, 
 
 Aided by pike and spear-head thrust. 
 
 A stalwart few with hearts aflame, 
 Against outnumbering forces hurled, 
 Make records that amaze the world 
 
 Hewing a bloody path to fame. 
 
 29
 
 Like pioneers in wildwoods free, 
 
 With score and mark and boles laid low, 
 These through the human jungle go 
 
 Blazing a road to Liberty. 
 
 The broken square, in wild melee, 
 Engirt as by a garrot-belt 
 Of pike and sabre, sink and melt, 
 
 As snowflakes in a scrolling sea. 
 
 Strewed lie the wounded, heaped the slain, 
 Within those lines so torn and trenched 
 By battle-bolts, and storms that drenched 
 
 The summer dust with purple rain. 
 
 XX. 
 
 The loud-lunged cannon's seismic shocks, 
 The hurly-burly of the war, 
 By peaceful herdsmen heard afar 
 
 As roar of seas on basalt rocks ; 
 
 30
 
 The scud of battle's murk and rack, 
 Sweeping o'er fields to distant shires, 
 Goads in King Mob restrained desires 
 
 For foray, plunder, rape and sack. 
 
 Clamor enhanced by stert'rous lungs, 
 By hoot and gibe and ribald shouts, 
 By quip and sneer and scoffing flouts, 
 
 A frenzied tournament of tongues ; 
 
 The ring of sabres, helmets split, 
 
 The bayonet's fret in struggle locked ; 
 
 The rush, the roar, the brave hearts shocked 
 
 By death-cries of their comrades, hit ; 
 
 The ping of bullets, rifle-sped, 
 
 The swish of balls, the screech of shells, 
 The savage dash and demon yells 
 
 Of ranks when they behold their dead ! 
 
 Impetuous hoofs the earth affray 
 When reinforcements hurtle past, 
 And as before the stormwhirl blast, 
 
 The rooted ranks, like forests, sway. 
 
 31
 
 Colliding masses undulate, 
 
 Embattled forces ebb and flow, 
 Fortune, perplexed to which side go, 
 
 Swayed by a vacillating Fate. 
 
 XXI. 
 
 When seas, gale-driven, raid the land, 
 Fretting away the beveled beach, 
 Thrust deltas in the shallow's reach, 
 
 Spread out the bluffs as spongy sand, 
 
 And littoral lines deflect their trend, 
 Thus, in the fight's infuriate tide, 
 When tragic multitudes collide, 
 
 The files of battle swerve and rend, 
 
 Losing their rectilinear form, 
 
 As foe-ward rolls the raging coil ; 
 And dead and dying fleck the soil, 
 
 As flotsam wreck, tossed up by storm. 
 
 32
 
 Behold where firing-files have curved, 
 In coast-line undulations bent ; 
 Here looped in gulfs, there prominent, 
 
 Where a bluff boldness never swerved, 
 
 And all the interspaces wide, 
 
 Hillocked with battle's jetsam, spread 
 In shapes of moribund and dead, 
 
 There left, as by a reflux tide ! 
 
 XXII. 
 
 Down before thrust of lance or pike, 
 With churl and clown, the noble goes ; 
 Their blood in red conjunction flows 
 
 Sweet saints in heaven ! they look alike ! 
 
 Pity from human hearts has fled, 
 
 While uncloyed rage takes brutal shapes, 
 And, as the wine-press crushes grapes, 
 
 Behold the vintage of the dead ! 
 
 33
 
 Red in the lurid sunshine flood, 
 
 The brandished sabres flash and hack, 
 Raging in fury of attack 
 
 A Seljuck sateless lust of blood. 
 
 And now the heavy guns assail, 
 
 And rank and file and columns gape 
 Before the hurtle of the grape, 
 
 Before the bursting shell's mitraille. 
 
 In jungle-growth, awaiting chance, 
 
 Swart ambushed fiends lie crouching low, 
 Till on the foremost ranks of foe 
 
 Their storm of metal checks advance. 
 
 Loud roar defiant throats of doom, 
 Shrill battle-cries and bugle-calls ; 
 The bursting shrapnel-shards and balls, 
 
 Staining the soil with crimson rheum, 
 
 Spread Murder's fratricidal reign : 
 Fear-blind, unmastered horses tread, 
 Hoofs to the fetlocks, dripping red, 
 
 With reek and carnage of the plain. 
 
 34
 
 Of Bedlam scenes, no lull, no lack ! 
 Horrors through all the blood-lust run 
 Orgies of slaughter every one 
 
 A homicidal maniac. 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 The wounded strew the hill and heath, 
 In anguished eyes a look of hate ; 
 While some, in stoic calmness, wait 
 
 The crowning dignity of death 
 
 Death for a good mankind will share, 
 Death on the crucial field of strife ; 
 Yielding their manhood, love and life, 
 
 Casting their all in fealty there. 
 
 Some, cursing despots, ere they die 
 Cheer onset with their failing breath, 
 For Freedom's triumph, counting Death 
 
 A synonym of Victory. 
 
 35
 
 To others, gently does it come, 
 
 As if a beatific dream 
 
 Brought childhood back, and, smiling, seem 
 To hear the cradle-songs of home. 
 
 All sights, all sounds are types of dread : 
 The yells of hate when comrades die, 
 The terrored horses' horrent cry, 
 
 Their hot hoofs trampling the cold dead. 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 While ranks with equal forces cope, 
 And vapor veils the lower land, 
 Those rude battalions waiting stand 
 
 Unleashed upon the upland slope, 
 
 Though imminent the conflict swells, 
 Their stubborn forces ruffled not, 
 Though fretted with the whistling shot, 
 
 And harried by the shrieking shells. 
 
 36
 
 And far-afield, on left and right, 
 
 On that Aceldama of Death, 
 
 A mist hangs poised, a cloud-land wraith, 
 The vapored demon of the fight ! 
 
 But now, as on the lethal plain 
 
 Death harvests in their brother-ranks, 
 And blattering Catlings mow their flanks, 
 
 As scythemen in the August grain, 
 
 Restraint no longer balks desire ; 
 For, all alight, their sombre line, 
 Lit by their volleying musket-shine, 
 
 From flanks to centre frilled with fire, 
 
 Sends red-disaster on the foe, 
 Ere in the tragic chaos mixed, 
 With muskets leveled, bayonets fixed, 
 
 To check advancing files, they go ; 
 
 37
 
 XXV. 
 
 While aiding forces, ambush-screened, 
 Hidden by schistous-rock and heath, 
 Pour unremitted streams of death 
 
 From deadly rifles magazined. 
 
 Then sounds the bugled " Charge ! " and all 
 Their thousands, as an unit wrought, 
 Their weapons from the shoulder brought, 
 
 Down to the horizontal fall ; 
 
 And on the foemen loping, leap 
 
 In "double-quick," with shout and whoop, 
 As unjessed hawks on quarry swoop, 
 
 Made deadly from their downward sweep. 
 
 As waters stored in tarn or pond, 
 By brimming affluents, freshet-fed, 
 Rise swirling, foaming, gathering head, 
 
 At last burst dike, and, freed from bond, 
 
 38
 
 Rush with relentless havoc down 
 The valley's slant, and in their tide 
 Spread death and desolation wide, 
 
 To homestead, hamlet, thorp and town ; 
 
 So from the hill-slopes where they stood, 
 On and over the roaring plains, 
 As torrents flushed by boisterous rains, 
 
 They dash, a flashing, thund'rous flood ! 
 
 The fields are deluged left and right, 
 As onward, in marauding leap, 
 Obstructions vanish in their sweep, 
 
 In maelstrom vortices of fight. 
 
 Steel sun-bursts in the lurid hordes 
 Like lightnings play in rising storm, 
 As following horsemen charge and swarm, 
 
 A hurricane of flashing swords. 
 
 Unchecked, unbaffled, they o'erride 
 Burrock and dyke, as human checks, 
 Till all the fields are strewn with wrecks, 
 
 As seashores stormed at full springtide. 
 
 39
 
 A cataract ! no pause it knows ; 
 
 No bulkhead barrier balks the flood ; 
 
 But on, incarnadined with blood, 
 Its course in mad vendetta flows. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 Ere yet in flux full force prevails, 
 Its onward coming some espy, 
 And, terrored by its onrush, fly 
 
 Like swirling leaves in autumn gales ; 
 
 While others, non-contentious, stood, 
 Engrossed, and to amazement stirred, 
 That vital movement seen, and heard 
 
 The roar of its relentless flood. 
 
 More dread than ocean's tidal reel, 
 Turbid with deep-sea ooze, to set 
 At naught all human force or let 
 
 This, crowned with foam of tossing steel. 
 
 40
 
 XXVII. 
 
 The turf takes lavish tints of red ; 
 To bayonet-lunge and savage shout 
 The foremost lines recoil in rout, 
 
 And broader strewn the field with dead. 
 
 Pitiless force ! a ravening brute ! 
 Its jungle-hunger keen from fast, 
 So leaps the fold, and carnage vast 
 
 Attests a tigerish glut of loot. 
 
 For not a face which, scowled and grim 
 With an unsated hate, but seals 
 Some foeman's fate with blows he deals, 
 
 As Death strides hand-in-hand with him. 
 
 t 
 
 For all the accreted wrongs of Might 
 Find hate-expression in their acts : 
 Measure for measure ! nothing lacks, 
 
 And Vengeance revels as Delight. 
 
 41
 
 Retired forces still intact, 
 
 Beholding assured doom abroad, 
 
 Scorn flight, and though to silence awed, 
 
 Await unmoved the dread impact. 
 
 Then to the onslaught's ruthless trend 
 A solstice pause a breathless hush 
 As prelude to the frenzied rush, 
 
 When stubborn lines of battle bend 
 
 And break : then Havoc, thus let loose, 
 Holds Molock by the free red hand, 
 With Slaughter, of the triune band, 
 
 Proclaiming neither halt nor truce. 
 
 The centre pierced, the fight is won ; 
 The huddled flanks in panic halt, 
 Confronted by oblique assault 
 
 From file on file in echelon. 
 
 Before a tyrant-hating race 
 
 Some hireling troops fly far-afield, 
 Or to the free-born yeomen yield, 
 
 Trusting to Freedom's lenient grace. 
 
 42
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 And now the bugles sound recall, 
 
 And, in the blurred and blood-red sun 
 (Endorsement of the action done, 
 
 With promised darkness as its pall), 
 
 A sullen veil of powder-cloud 
 
 Moves slowly leeward from the plain, 
 Revealing dying and the slain, 
 
 And wounded men in anguish bowed. 
 
 Now swells a fierce exultant tone, 
 As Conquest to the cities comes, 
 Welcomed in flames of blazing homes 
 
 Then silence, where the hearths are lone ! 
 
 The 'larums of the conflict cease ; 
 The bugle and tempestuous drum, 
 The cannon's rending uproar, dumb 
 
 All folded in the hush of peace, 
 
 43
 
 As if a cataract's flood should pour 
 To depths abyssmal, suddenly ; 
 Leaving its air-born din to be 
 
 A tingling silence nothing more ; 
 
 All sound engulfed in stillness vast, 
 Yet haunted bv a tumult's thrill 
 
 m 
 
 Once heard, and hearing weirdly still, 
 The phantom-roar of battle past 
 
 Delusions which our griefs create, 
 
 When, heart-bereaved, we seem to hear 
 The household stir of dead and dear, 
 
 Knowing the home is desolate. 
 
 The fields from battle clamor free, 
 
 The woodland birds, on venturous wing, 
 O'er the sad meadows poise and sing : 
 
 Nature's unconscious irony ! 
 
 As specks, beyond the murk of war, 
 That veiled blood-sodden soil below 
 Gier-falcon, lazar-kite and crow, 
 
 Scenting the festal carcass, soar. 
 
 44
 
 XXIX. 
 
 If subject peoples would be free, 
 Then every weapon's astral glint 
 Should prove a herald-star, to hint 
 
 Where lies redeeming liberty. 
 
 Low sinks the sun ; the day is done ; 
 Though silent now the battle's rave, 
 Its shot-torn, raveled banners wave, 
 
 Proclaiming Freedom's purpose won. 
 
 'Mid tattered standards, shattered files, 
 Haggard and gapped victorious bands, 
 Paled by their pathos, Freedom stands, 
 
 And, in her holy triumph, smiles ! 
 
 She smiles on one whose dying grip 
 A havocked staff, of flag bereft, 
 Sustains : a ribboned remnant left, 
 
 Of Peril's fearful fellowship. 
 
 45
 
 An omened sight to look upon, 
 Nimbused in sunset's after-glow 
 Those shredded buntings' rippled flow, 
 
 Riddled to shapes of gonfalon ! 
 
 XXX. 
 
 No bugled boast ! no vaunting fife ! 
 
 War's blood-shot vision grown more calm ; 
 
 Each ravaged flag an Oriflamme 
 Floating above a " Holy Strife." 
 
 Up from the underworld arise 
 
 The sombre shades of daylight's pall ; 
 And vesper-shadows softly fall, 
 
 As closing lids o'er weary eyes. 
 
 The tragic field grows weird and wan 
 As twilight deepens o'er the slave, 
 Who gave to Freedom life God gave, 
 
 Made worthless by the crime of man. 
 
 46
 
 Night falls apace . On field of dread 
 The pale moon looks, as if in pain, 
 Where foes on foes lie swathed like grain : 
 
 Grim windrows of ungarnered dead. 
 
 Mothers, obeying Love's behests, 
 
 Within death's cold, impassive grasp, 
 In piteous mockery, seem to clasp 
 
 Their babes to unsustaining breasts, 
 
 Or to a vital anguish yield, 
 
 O'er form of daughter, dead, defiled ; 
 
 While wife distraught, and homeless child, 
 Roam, moaning, o'er the woeful field. 
 
 The slaughter ended, vampire bands 
 Render the lull of horrors brief. 
 After the victor skulks the thief, 
 
 And corpses stripped by hideous hands. 
 
 W T ar ever sows its rueful path 
 
 For gruesome product, Science saith ; 
 A harvest-time of dole and death, 
 
 With " Typhoid " as an aftermath. 
 
 47
 
 Oh righteous cause, but fateful day ! 
 
 I look through tears upon the plain. 
 
 Accursed War ! Oh piteous slain ! 
 They're brothers all ! hush ! come away. 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 When 'gainst mild rule the rabble plot, 
 And riff-raff riot stalks abroad, 
 Dons Phrygian cap, girds Spartan sword, 
 
 Great Freedom's forehead flushes hot, 
 
 As shamed to feel her aims profaned, 
 Seeing men so pervert her trust, 
 Claiming her aid with lips of lust, 
 
 With hearts so foul and guilt-ingrained. 
 
 Lay not your unregenerate hands 
 Upon the ark of her pure cause, 
 Feigning the acts of righteous wars, 
 
 Lest lightnings scathe your impious bands. 
 
 48
 
 If, Freedom, in thy hallowed name, 
 Grim Insurrection, gathering head, 
 From realm to realm, incentive spread 
 
 To souls who lack thy sacred flame, 
 
 
 
 And, prompted by a senseless hate 
 Of social laws which bind the race 
 In civic virtue's linked embrace, 
 
 Invite an anarchistic state, 
 
 Smite the blasphemers ! putting down 
 The right arm of revolt, and stay 
 The demagogue's seditious sway, 
 
 That falsifies thy fair renown. 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 For Freedom's state is not sustained 
 By brawling malcontents, nor bands 
 That Riot breeds, and Mob commands, 
 
 Nor wrongs of despotisms, feigned ; 
 
 49
 
 Nor slaves accepting slavery's shame ; 
 But, protest spurned, petition mocked, 
 Revolt in Freedom's cradle rocked, 
 
 With Freedom seal eternal claim. 
 
 If, sanctified by Her pure fires, 
 They rise to have their wrongs redressed, 
 Encourage heart ! embolden breast ! 
 
 Make keen the blade for their desires ! 
 
 Let holy madness thrill their veins, 
 Till through their cause such passion runs 
 That widows arm their only sons, 
 
 And slaves brain tyrants with their chains ; 
 
 And despots learn how dread a thing 
 It is to rouse a people's hate, 
 Choosing to balk predestined fate, 
 
 Shunning the perilled state of King 
 
 A title freemen will not trust, 
 
 Held by the brotherhood of men, 
 As by the compeered citizen 
 
 Preposterous claim for equal dust ! 
 
 50
 
 Rarely from crime have Sovereigns shrunk 
 When subject to the priest's intent ; 
 The Crown before the Mitre bent ; 
 
 Monarch, to coadjutor monk ; 
 
 Coordinating royal plans 
 
 With those of Churchdom's evil sway, 
 For man's oppression ; every way 
 
 Its ignominious partisans. 
 
 All tyrannies have myrmidons, 
 
 Scum-mercenaries, whom they pay, 
 For murder at so much a day, 
 
 And raping mothers, slaught'ring 
 
 sons; 
 
 The realms perplexed, with feud and schism 
 'Twixt royal greed and public weal ; 
 A people's rule constrained to deal, 
 
 At last, with clearest absolutism.
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 While strife and faction threatening swarm 
 Around the Old World's feudal holds, 
 What blest tranquillity enfolds 
 
 My own dear land amid the storm ! 
 
 Starward with ever changeless gaze, 
 Progressing in her path benign, 
 Visioned with some predestined fine, 
 
 Undreamed in childhood's primer days ; 
 
 Casting the larval-shell of birth 
 From pupa-chrysalid, to rise, 
 Winged for a flight of high emprise, 
 
 Among the potencies of earth ; 
 
 In good, ascendant 'mong mankind, 
 Holding a cheering light, whose ray 
 Of Nadir-night makes Zenith day, 
 
 And freedom sought for all to find. 
 
 52
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 When nations, weary of the cant 
 
 Of the dogmatic pietist, 
 
 And, made by culture, wise, resist 
 The claims of the Hierophant, 
 
 And ruthless rule fails to divorce, 
 From honored labor, half its store ; 
 And peaceful masses dwell no more 
 
 Will-shackled in the grip of force ; 
 
 Then feuds will perish, wars will cease, 
 Freedom invoked, a God adored, 
 And all mankind, in full accord, 
 
 Chant paeans to perpetual peace. 
 
 The birth of love and kindly laws, 
 And loud the people's anthem swells, 
 Melodious riot of the bells 
 
 Aiding humanity's applause. 
 
 53
 
 XXXV. 
 
 Though now, not vexed with war, like these, 
 Nor Insurrection's vandal rage, 
 Who knows that thy historic page 
 
 May not claim grave appendices ? 
 
 Thou'rt Freedom's Life-Guard, yet forsworn ; 
 For Slavery, like pysemic taint, 
 Poisons thy force, and thou art faint, 
 
 Like a young Samson lewdly shorn. 
 
 Thy foes are internecine ! Dense, 
 
 Myopic blindness ! not to see 
 
 Th' antithesis of Liberty 
 That stultifies thy proud pretense. 
 
 Their bonds of Union do not bind ! 
 Trusting in Freedom's home to bide, 
 And make their Slave-Colossus stride 
 
 Athwart the Haven of mankind. 
 
 54
 
 Not these alone the foes to heed, 
 
 Nor worst of despots gun and sword ; 
 Chief among thralls, and most abhorred, 
 
 The bondage of Belief and Creed. 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 INTERLOCUTORY. 
 
 The world is full of noble deeds, 
 
 The Doers' paths rose-leaved with Fame ; 
 
 No primrosed ones my days may claim, 
 Brambled and pranked with idlest weeds. 
 
 If God, my purpose blessing, would 
 Look kindly on the grain I sow, 
 Scattered in human hearts, to grow 
 
 And ripen for the general good, 
 
 Blessing my brother-man, then I, 
 
 Cheering my joyless years, may boast 
 I helped through life, my uttermost, 
 
 To slay a God-dishonoring Lie. 
 
 55
 
 XXXV. 
 
 Though now, not vexed with war, like these, 
 Nor Insurrection's vandal rage, 
 Who knows that thy historic page 
 
 May not claim grave appendices ? 
 
 Thou'rt Freedom's Life-Guard, yet forsworn ; 
 For Slavery, like pyaemic taint, 
 Poisons thy force, and thou art faint, 
 
 Like a young Samson lewdly shorn. 
 
 Thy foes are internecine ! Dense, 
 
 Myopic blindness ! not to see 
 
 Th' antithesis of Liberty 
 That stultifies thy proud pretense. 
 
 Their bonds of Union do not bind ! 
 Trusting in Freedom's home to bide, 
 And make their Slave-Colossus stride 
 
 Athwart the Haven of mankind. 
 
 54
 
 Not these alone the foes to heed, 
 
 Nor worst of despots gun and sword ; 
 Chief among thralls, and most abhorred, 
 
 The bondage of Belief and Creed. 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 INTERLOCUTORY. 
 
 The world is full of noble deeds, 
 
 The Doers' paths rose-leaved with Fame ; 
 
 No primrosed ones my days may claim, 
 Brambled and pranked with idlest weeds. 
 
 If God, my purpose blessing, would 
 Look kindly on the grain I sow, 
 Scattered in human hearts, to grow 
 
 And ripen for the general good, 
 
 Blessing my brother-man, then I, 
 
 Cheering my joyless years, may boast 
 I helped through life, my uttermost, 
 
 To slay a God-dishonoring Lie. 
 
 55
 
 To no malignancy inclined, 
 
 But done to cure distorted lives, 
 
 And, like the surgeon's probes and knives, 
 
 Though seeming cruel, yet are kind. 
 
 And earth might never more hear prate 
 The Pulpit's strategists of fraud, 
 Their blasphemies denounced and scored 
 
 With everlasting human hate. 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 The Church is gospel-armed, and rife 
 With equipage for human woe, 
 Wide-jawed for prey, the deadliest foe 
 
 Of larger intellectual life. 
 
 Humanity's uncultured throng, 
 
 Debauched and credulous, sustains 
 Its tumored Lie, which now remains 
 
 Th' imposthume of an embossed wrong. 
 
 56
 
 From hence aborts a dangerous breed, 
 Debarred from culture, bound to stay, 
 Through ignorance, the spoil and prey 
 
 Of sacerdotal guile and greed ; 
 
 A state whose sequents none can gauge, 
 Holding, in ever procreant prime, 
 Germs of venality and crime, 
 
 To stain the annals of the age. 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 
 Must Superstition ever blind 
 Humanity to Truth, and laud 
 Gross records of a barbarous horde 
 
 As God's revealments to mankind? 
 
 Are there no tyrannies but thrones ? 
 Beneath the Priest's empiric rule, 
 Believing man weak, hood-winked fool !- 
 
 In abject bondage, trusts and groans. 
 
 57
 
 Are there no slaves save those who wear 
 Fetters of metal ? Faith will breed 
 Helots of dogma, cult and creed : 
 
 Are such less worthy Freedom's care ? 
 
 Bankrupt of life's delights, to go 
 
 Scourged to their graves by human ill, 
 Slaves of the priest's relentless will, 
 
 Ruled by a Christ-masked ruthless foe. 
 
 Must faith in falsehood still be kept, 
 Though cultured Prejudice assign 
 To an Intelligence Divine 
 
 The fraud of Priests, in guile adept ? 
 
 How long will generations heed 
 
 The fictions filched from Pagan store, 
 To be their manual evermore, 
 
 And guidance in their utmost need ?
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 From immemorial solitude 
 Of prehistoric times there ran 
 Babble of paleolithic man 
 
 The unshamed races of the nude 
 
 Which, in the course of seons, came, 
 
 Through Star, and Sun, and Serpent cult, 
 And grosser worships, to result 
 
 At last in an Akkadian frame 
 
 Of allegoric gospel ; planned 
 
 By Astrologic Holy-Sees, 
 
 With esoteric mysteries, 
 Which few could ever understand 
 
 (Thus all discovery defy), 
 
 To be " God's Word," and so rule earth, 
 Throughout its peopled length and girth, 
 
 WlTH A CHICANE, PRESUMPTUOUS LIE ! 
 
 59
 
 Then back, from alien bonds unbound, 
 Came Israel from the Orient, 
 With dreams of shekel cent-per-cent, 
 
 To Zion, and marts trade-renowned. 
 
 Still in inherent bondage held 
 By habits they could not ignore, 
 They tricked their God and Biblic lore 
 
 In " outfit " of moth-eaten Eld. 
 
 " Old clothes " of Babylonian myth, 
 Bartered when slaves, Chaldean-made, 
 The staple of that stock-in-trade, 
 
 Religion now is costumed with. 
 
 XL. 
 
 In astronomic mythos bides 
 
 The secret of that knavish plan, 
 Wherewith the priest befools the man 
 
 A scheme which Allegory hides. 
 
 60
 
 Of Pagan deities no lack ! 
 
 As sun-types in the cults of old, 
 Gods in mutation signed and rolled 
 
 Throughout the girdling Zodiac. 
 
 Messiahs, Buddhas, every one 
 Of all the gods to Pagans known, 
 Pass o'er the constellated zone, 
 
 Precessioned as th' incarnate sun. 
 
 And Christs have come and passed like these 
 Such Gentile allegories wrought 
 God-avatars by mythos brought, 
 
 Circling through cyclic Neroses. 
 
 And on the globe's solsticial-cross, 
 There crucified, and sepulchred 
 In Winter's dark, find death deferred, 
 
 To rise in Life's redeeming force. 
 
 Here the Christ-fable seems to be 
 To its inception clearly traced : 
 The scheme of man's salvation based 
 
 On spurious myth-typology. 
 
 61
 
 The Sun-god Christ's career thus given 
 In signs zodiacal ; and there 
 The stars the gospel fraud lay bare 
 
 The fable found, sun-typed in heaven ! 
 
 Conspicuous truth to him who weighs 
 Belief in reason's scales, and drilled 
 In allegoric lore, or skilled 
 
 In metaphor of by-gone days. 
 
 To every faith on Earth that's been 
 The Sun-God is the master-key, 
 Unlocking every mystery 
 
 From Brahma to the Nazarene. 
 
 Thus on veiled fact delusion feasts, 
 
 And thrives, till Truth's shekinah comes, 
 And, with its radiant presence, dooms 
 
 The dismal Dynasty of Priests. 
 
 Fooled by a God-revealed pretence, 
 Making man's gross imaginings 
 His gospel-falsity of things, 
 
 Acts of Divine Intelligence 
 
 62
 
 A Church, established on that base, 
 Becomes a potency in wrong, 
 With guile and fraudulency strong, 
 
 To blind, enslave, degrade the race. 
 
 XLI. 
 
 Are martyred " masses" doomed to die, 
 Of half the charms of life bereaved, 
 And, ever trusting, be deceived 
 
 BY ONE INTERMINABLE LlE ? 
 
 Of one more evil to beware 
 
 With which th' unstinted world is rife ; 
 
 To quicksands on the shores of life 
 One more illusion, one more snare? 
 
 Through brake and quickset, graveward plod ? 
 
 Is Justice lapped in indolence, 
 
 And niggard of Omnipotence 
 Etheric Force which man calls God ? 
 
 63
 
 A creed whereby the Christian views 
 (Through bigotry's demented whim) 
 As truth, that suffering pleasures him, 
 
 And therefore baits his chosen Jews. 
 
 This graceless monster to endure 
 A sore affront to common sense ; 
 From loathing him, the abstinence, 
 
 Merit to make Salvation sure. 
 
 XLIII. 
 
 To any Heaven, a sheer disgrace : 
 By an allotment wrongly made, 
 It should have been reversed instead, 
 
 And Hell's archangel in his place. 
 
 Though doubtful if Apollyon well 
 
 Could suffer long such sing-song fate ; 
 But, hating dullness, abdicate 
 
 In favor of more cheerful hell. 
 
 66
 
 Against such Gorgons reason wars. 
 
 Abhorrent to the cultured thought ! 
 
 Yet by gross-minded priestcraft wrought 
 As imaging Primordial Cause. 
 
 A dream that vulgar mind controls, 
 Where ignorance holds cruel sway ; 
 Such scarecrow Gods weak hearts affray- 
 
 The nightmares of unwakened souls. 
 
 Yet Christians such belief avow 
 Religion in which scholars trace 
 The tokens of a breech-clout race : 
 
 Is Demon worship extant now ? 
 
 A worthier god " Isaiah " planned, 
 And " Micah," than a fiend like this, 
 The Demon of the Genesis, 
 
 By all unbiased natures banned. 
 
 67
 
 XLIV. 
 
 When through the weird primeval seas, 
 That, Chaos-born, knew yet no calm, 
 Hideous-Octopodise swam, 
 
 With Saurian monstrosities ; 
 
 And reptiles of Jurassic times 
 
 Swarmed land, swam seas and winged the air, 
 
 If embryo man coeval were 
 With forms of Oolitic slimes ; 
 
 The inborn "god-idea," unripe, 
 
 Might in the protoplasmic mind 
 
 Favor a Mesozoic kind, 
 A god of Jehovistic type. 
 
 By Evolution's laws expressed 
 
 In the brute man, this God evolved, 
 From all divine allure absolved, 
 
 A free development's arrest. 
 
 68
 
 Pantheons of like grade have thus 
 To the black ranks of falsehood fled, 
 All, metaphorically, dead 
 
 As Pharaoh of the Exodus. 
 
 Beshrew such bestial gods and grim ! 
 The Man, with gentle manhood fraught, 
 Is nearer to Divineness brought 
 
 Than Yahveh or the Elohim. 
 
 XLV. 
 
 Must God to mortals ever be 
 Anthropomorphic to their view ? 
 The simulacrum of a Jew, 
 
 Made monster by theanthropy ? 
 
 Concept of Deity, alloyed 
 
 By mixing in the barb'rous plan 
 The savage prehistoric man, 
 
 Evolved from Pithecanthropoid. 
 
 6 9
 
 God-modeling Priests, do you not see, 
 In matrix pouring man and myth, 
 In flux with godhead, you therewith 
 
 Have cast a pagod prodigy ? 
 
 Gross moulding art ! vile plastic plan ! 
 The human still in brutish grade, 
 With mythic god amalgamed, made 
 
 A most ungodly god for man. 
 
 Could naught but brutal falsehood quell 
 Man's errant nature ? naught else lead 
 To virtue, and to goodly deed, 
 
 But horrors of prospective hell ? 
 
 Is his a love to emulate ? 
 
 Or justice, that this Ghoul decrees 
 
 For error, endless agonies, 
 Which is but an eternized hate ? 
 
 'Tis not the laic soul that feasts 
 On visions of unending pain 
 For erring man ; such hatreds reign 
 
 Alone in demon-hearts of Priests. 
 
 70
 
 For Priests, since man's invented fall 
 For human childhood and its prime, 
 Have fashioned gods in every clime, 
 
 And typefied themselves in all. 
 
 XLVI. 
 
 From finite limits ne'er exempt, 
 
 Can mortal man life's mystery solve? 
 Or, from this God in vogue, evolve 
 
 A loving Father ? vain attempt ! 
 
 There is no God like this, abhorred ; 
 
 None, save in the degraded mind ; 
 
 Falsehood and cruelty combined, 
 With its base passions in accord. 
 
 Vile parody of Power Supreme ! 
 
 Which, by a cozening sect portrayed, 
 
 Has blasphemed God, fooled man, and made 
 
 Religion but a Bedlam dream ; 
 
 71
 
 A fable schemed by priestly arts 
 In days of ignorance and lust ; 
 A monster that excites disgust. 
 
 Not worship of the loving hearts ; 
 
 No loftier aim than power and pelf 
 And arbitrary rule to win ; 
 A priest-made god of human kin, 
 
 The image of his beastlier self. 
 
 XLVII. 
 
 Who dare to mock The Lord of Truth, 
 Proclaiming love for gods like this ? 
 A Heaven of mere psalm-singing bliss ; 
 
 Hell, to fill fiends with tearful ruth. 
 
 Shameless imposture ! strangely odd 
 That man, of Reason justly proud, 
 Should be in supplication bowed, 
 
 Before this most preposterous god. 
 
 72
 
 Subvert the idol ! straighten knees ! 
 Erect, arise and kneel before 
 A Presence worthier to adore 
 
 Than fabricated gods like these ! 
 
 Above such morbid horrors rise ! 
 Pretendedly beloved as true : 
 This Mumbo-Jumbo of the Jew ! 
 
 Th' embodied form of gross surmise. 
 
 XLVIII. 
 
 Wherein have we the right to boast, 
 Or Anthropophagi revile, 
 Breed of some lone Pacific isle 
 
 Or Kongo's, or Biaffra's coast, 
 
 In making hideous gods, expert ? 
 Who worship one with fervid air, 
 Till, unpropitious to their prayer, 
 
 They daub its camoised nose with dirt ? 
 
 73
 
 As well that human faith should be 
 In M clock of the bloody rites, 
 Or Demon of Gehenna's lights, 
 
 Or goat-hoofed Pan of Arcady ; 
 
 In Gods of Battle, Gods of Peace, 
 In Siva, Vishnoo, Baal and Bel, 
 In negroid Buddha, and as well 
 
 In all the rabble gods of Greece. 
 
 From Egypt's clime, as fair results, 
 
 Serapis, Isis, Apis, Ra, 
 
 Osiris, or the Latin Lar, 
 Penates of the household cults, 
 
 As well in Obi and Voodoo, 
 Or Theurgy and magic runes, 
 In cantrip, thaumaturgic tunes, 
 
 The fetish-rites of Timbuctoo ; 
 
 As well to crossed-legged Brahma bow, 
 Or Punjab-gods for Sakti's sake, 
 The Lingam, Yoni and the Snake, 
 
 And reverence the Holy Cow ; 
 
 74
 
 As to the phantoms, priest-devised, 
 To fright the souls of simple men, 
 Making the human mind a den 
 
 Of monsters apotheosized. 
 
 XLIX. 
 
 For Christianity creates 
 
 No longer faith that binds and blinds 
 
 The large majority of minds, 
 Save those of marked degenerates. 
 
 Cored with an astrologic pith 
 
 Of sun-god worship : swathed and rolled 
 In cere-cloth of beliefs of old : 
 
 The embalmed mummy of a Myth. 
 
 Yet if, in this more cultured age, 
 
 Some show hereditary taint, 
 
 Faith is but hypocritic feint, 
 Masking a coward vassalage ; 
 
 75
 
 Or issue of the pious kind 
 Of fable dealt to innocence ; 
 While flaccid yet its waxing sense, 
 
 Stamped on the child's receptive mind. 
 
 L. 
 
 Man knoweth not the Primal Cause 
 In blind Hyrcynian mazes hid, 
 Which nothing mortal e'er will thrid 
 
 To find the Image he implores. 
 
 To vestal heights of mountains flee, 
 Pour out thy soul in tearful prayer, 
 Yearning to know if God be there, 
 
 Yearning to know what God may be. 
 
 Search endless space and time, and steep 
 Thy heart in lovingness, and call 
 Where art Thou, God ? From each and all, 
 
 Silence unutterably deep. 
 
 76
 
 Outvoice the controversial roar 
 Of ocean tempested ; and let 
 Concurrent Universe abet 
 
 The questioning thou'lt hear no more. 
 
 In painful longing be not led, 
 Tortured by an expectant ear, 
 An answering voice thou wilt not hear, 
 
 Though thou wert patient as the dead. 
 
 In atoms to the Cosmos wrought, 
 In mind, in matter, light and air, 
 In all that is, and everywhere, 
 
 HE is impalpable as thought. 
 
 LI. 
 
 Can Finite grasp the Infinite, 
 
 Gaze on transcendencies that dim 
 The vision of the Cherubim, 
 
 Who, while adoring, veil their sight ? 
 
 77
 
 As vain for human mind to guess 
 Abstraction's form, as to expand 
 Eternity ; or understand 
 
 An unhorizoned Nothingness. 
 
 The Inconceivable by Man ! 
 
 Essence of Space ! Primord'nate Law, 
 
 Limitless Energy ! before 
 Matter's Eternity began. 
 
 Of Him we cannot postulate 
 
 Relation with nor Time nor Space, 
 Delusions of our mortal race, 
 
 Mere fictions of a finite state ! 
 
 His all-pervading essence sent 
 Through His Majestic Universe, 
 Cognate with substance most diverse : 
 
 In every atom immanent. 
 
 Beyond Imagination's reach ! 
 To Man, unthinkable as light 
 To the " born-blind , " or human sight 
 
 To simple mollusk on the beach. 
 
 78
 
 Beyond the concept or the thought 
 Of earthly or seraphic mind, 
 Vain all ambitious search to find 
 
 Creative Power, the Godhead sought. 
 
 Though all things perish, He no less 
 Remains pure Spirit, 'biding Love, 
 Whose arcane influences move 
 
 Through Nature's steadfast Everness. 
 
 LII. 
 
 Speechless with reverence I stand, 
 O Thou transcendently Obscure ; 
 Almighty ! Pitilessly Pure ! 
 
 Godhead's superlative of Grand. 
 
 With bastard births the age is thronged, 
 And creed-born malformations live, 
 With God, as Father putative, 
 
 His name by such abortions wronged. 
 
 79
 
 To this, true Culture crieth truce ! 
 No longer should the earth defame 
 His should-be-honored Holy Name, 
 
 By service in ignoble use, 
 
 Whose hallowed attributes to teach, 
 Priesthoods are but as senseless stocks. 
 His infinite Perfection mocks 
 
 Their stinted knowledge, thought and speech. 
 
 LIII. 
 
 Stated in aphorism terse, 
 
 Man's glory is in " pride of place " ! 
 
 For he with Him stands face to face 
 GOD is HIMSELF THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 Finite holds no divining-rod 
 For searching Infinite ; and He 
 Is no objective entity : 
 
 NATURE'S TOTALITY is GOD ! 
 
 80
 
 Yet, till the soul, immaculate, 
 
 Purged of all carnate grossness, stands 
 Pure spirit 'mid pure Spirit bands, 
 
 In loftiest archangelic state ; 
 
 Until the faculties are held, 
 
 By which that soul can measure space, 
 The confines of th' Eternal trace, 
 
 The human paradox dispelled, 
 
 Through epochs of progression, show 
 No taint of matter's crass control 
 Upon the pure discarnate soul, 
 
 Can it the God the Father, know. 
 
 None drawing vital breath, as one 
 Cere-clothed in mortal flesh, jejune, 
 The human larva's coarse cocoon ! 
 
 In gross materialism spun, 
 
 And claimed as pabulum by Death, 
 Who through his limitations views 
 His God's moralities a Jew's 
 
 And brutal creeds his shibboleth, 
 
 81
 
 From Fetish on to Fetish plods, 
 Evolving Deity of varied plan, 
 In workmanship no better than 
 
 Mud idols of the Rajpoot Gods. 
 
 LIV. 
 
 Assoil me, Abba ! Thou art just ! 
 Nearer to be to Thee my goal, 
 Attained by my progressive soul 
 
 Through paths of wonder, love and trust. 
 
 In merciless lucidity 
 
 All hearts lie open to Thy view ; 
 
 We know Thou lookest us thro' and thro': 
 
 THOU ART, WHAT THOU ALONE CANST BE. 
 
 Baffled, in human helplessness, 
 
 Within imagination's scope 
 
 Thou art not, yet we wondering grope 
 With hearts insatiate : ALL is GUESS! 
 
 82
 
 Dreaming my spirit part of Thine, 
 This body, wondrous fashioned clay ! 
 Must humbly go its mortal way, 
 
 My soul absorbed in the Divine ; 
 
 Or its evolving force succeeds 
 The heights of being to explore, 
 Standing immaculate before 
 
 THE ETERNAL WILL ; where sequence leads, 
 
 Beholding Universes wound 
 
 In Evolution's endless chain ; 
 
 Interdependent, to remain 
 Ever in Altruism bound. 
 
 Through termless time, in bourneless space, 
 Cognate with boundless floods of soul 
 That countless Universes roll, 
 
 Progressive, to behold His face.
 
 LV. 
 
 Lacking the spirit-sight to see, 
 Blind, on a wonder-deep I drift ; 
 Heart-grateful for the sensuous gift 
 
 That lets me feel His Sovereignty. 
 
 The world is full of wrong and strife, 
 Yet patiently I draw my breath ; 
 Since He has made the dust of death 
 
 The breath of everlasting life, 
 
 In spiritual spheres of bliss, 
 
 Exempt from carnate wrong and hate : 
 But love with love commensurate 
 
 As balm for pain endured in this. 
 
 Gladdened with hope no longer dim, 
 Godward and goodward ; without stain, 
 Immaculate at last, to gain 
 
 Transcendent joy beholding Him. 
 
 84
 
 LVI. 
 
 Are priests Thy earthly agencies ? 
 
 Christ hated Pharisees who preach : 
 
 A delegated mouthpiece each, 
 Of Thy Consummate Wisdom these ? 
 
 Enormity of bold pretence ! 
 
 Immeasurable blasphemy ! 
 
 Boundless presumption ! which must be- 
 To the Creator grave offence ! 
 
 No " Hypostatic Union," His ! 
 Or the man-element in Him 
 Would wreck their papal Sanhedrim 
 
 With Love's most rude antithesis. 
 
 And, bliss in Heaven growing weak, 
 The saints might pretermit their lays, 
 Cheer dullness with delighted gaze 
 
 On antics of their simian clique. 
 
 85
 
 Who could foresee their destined fate 
 Were God like their Judaic Joss ? 
 Partaking of the Anthropos, 
 
 A vicious gaseous-vertebrate ? 
 
 The pismires in the garden walks, 
 The wise-eyed Owls in ivy-tod, 
 Know quite as much as they of God, 
 
 For all their cant and verbiage talks. 
 
 Have their lips th' anointing chrism, 
 Explaining Bible-themes, perplexed, 
 And as " Thy Word " affirm the text 
 
 In all its odious literalism ? 
 
 Giving trite-truths perverting trends 
 To suit a preconceived intent ; 
 And quadrate with the priestly bent, 
 
 A selfish means to sordid ends ; 
 
 Perverting man's instinctive sense 
 Of sacred truth by Jesuit guile, 
 Through every form of fraud and wile 
 
 Making mentality more dense ; 
 
 86
 
 Or theorems of God advance 
 
 As guides through doctrinal morass, 
 Illumined by mephitic gas 
 
 From cess and slough of ignorance ; 
 
 Or with dogmatic precepts prod 
 Doubters in paths to true belief 
 Of their crass bigotries : as if 
 
 Creeds were love-philters for their God. 
 
 LVII. 
 
 In vain their Sacred Order Caste 
 
 On blockhead skulls lays Holy Hands : 
 That rite no gift of brains commands, 
 
 Though a "bestowing" function classed. 
 
 Yet naught the priests' assurance daunts 
 As knowing God, lie-brazened band ! 
 Too false to truth to take their stand 
 
 With honest bivalves, owls and ants. 
 
 87
 
 Promoters of an effete lore, 
 
 They teach ; but of what worth their schools, 
 
 Save to form serviceable tools 
 With which to enslave the " masses " more ? 
 
 They hold no doctrine that exalts ; 
 
 Their rites are pagan mummeries : 
 
 Dark ages' puerilities 
 Their dogmas and their motives false. 
 
 Were there no virtues on the earth, 
 Nor morals, till their scheme evolved, 
 From astronomic myth, and solved 
 
 The value of man's credent worth ? 
 
 LVIII. 
 
 Prospective Heaven cannot appease 
 Their sanctimonious worldliness, 
 Nor calm their cravings to possess 
 
 Earth's carnal temporalities. 
 
 88
 
 They who on paltry pulpit heights 
 Of theologic Horebs stand, 
 To show the Almighty One at hand, 
 
 By their vile marsh miasmic-lights. 
 
 Religion called ! yet proves to be 
 
 (Hiding their aim) a mask for these 
 The few to live in idle ease 
 
 Upon the duped Majority, 
 
 And draw from the benighted Poor 
 
 A fund of this world's wealth, that seems 
 Greater than hoarding-miser dreams, 
 
 Which by Christ's creed they should abjure. 
 
 As much life's enemies as are 
 
 Disease and Death, their guile destroys 
 Life's stinted sum of earthly joys 
 
 With those of some vague heaven afar ; 
 
 Holding their natures love-subdued 
 
 By a hoax-sacrifice Divine, 
 
 And through their simple trust, design 
 Exploiting them through gratitude. 
 
 89
 
 Malignant spawn of Church, that ilk ! 
 
 Worst foes of human weal that breathe ! 
 
 The pharisaic-souled who seethe 
 The kid in its own mother's milk. 
 
 LIX. 
 
 When will the pillaged "masses" find 
 The Church to be a foe to fear? 
 How long ere the oppressors hear 
 
 The execrations of mankind ? 
 
 As in the past, so now no less, 
 Its secret knaveries abound, 
 And wrongs unparalleled, when found, 
 
 Save in the Devil's diocese. 
 
 Throughout all lands, all realms, all climes, 
 On concrete falsehood based and built, 
 Cemented by red-handed guilt : 
 
 A hideous lazar-house of crimes. 
 
 90
 
 Nor should the Protestant decry 
 The cognate cheat, the allied trick, 
 A consanguineous heretic 
 
 To little of the larger lie. 
 
 To solemn affirmation true, 
 
 Numbers no Pagan rites affect : 
 But one recalcitrating sect, 
 
 Dog-like returning to its spew ; 
 
 Bestowing an apostate's name 
 
 On Rome's sworn enemy and now, 
 False to its Reformation vow. 
 
 Joins hands in fellowship with shame. 
 
 Thus branded, it were vain to shrink 
 As one in union not o'er-fond, 
 Though coupled in a cognate bond 
 
 Like vowels in a diphthong link.
 
 LX. 
 
 In Papal dominance a Ghoul ! 
 Devitalizing men ! yet feigned 
 A Christ-like love of them, but reigned 
 
 With Bismarck blood-and-iron rule. 
 
 Fiend of the Octopodise ! 
 
 With cupping tentacles outspread, 
 By which all forms of thrift were bled : 
 
 ARCH-ENEMY OF LIBERTY. 
 
 Resultant of an age, amiss 
 
 In barbarous deed and bestial sin : 
 The man without the brute within, 
 
 Made it the curse it was and is. 
 
 The spirit's unseen universe 
 
 Throngs with the souls this Church sent there 
 Through paths of anguish and despair, 
 
 And blasted with its Christian curse. 
 
 92
 
 Of victims manifold, that were 
 
 To literal " jaws of darkness " thrown, 
 To-day the oubliette-hinge's groan 
 
 Echoes their agonized demur. 
 
 Murder its ceremonial haunts 
 In Torture's screech of agony, 
 The moans of martyrs these should be 
 
 The miserere of its chants. 
 
 Its litanies, a dismal rune 
 
 Of sobs and plaints, and harrowing prayer, 
 Screams and mad laughter of despair, 
 
 Blood-spattered fiend from cowl to shoon ; 
 
 Conjoined with shriek from Boot and Flame, 
 Heart-rending cries from Rack and Wheel, 
 The Virgin's grim embrace of steel, 
 
 Mercies invoked in Christ's dear name. 
 
 Blood, sacramental robes impests ! 
 
 Blood taints the Palliums, Albs and Stoles ! 
 
 Blood on the grimed anathemaed souls 
 Of those who wrought its fell-behests ! 
 
 93
 
 LXI. 
 
 Never to selfish means averse, 
 With sombre interests ever rife, 
 The Incubus of Higher Life, 
 
 And Degradation's foster-nurse ; 
 
 How long will it have force to flaunt 
 Sham potencies for souls that grieve ? 
 How long will cultured minds believe 
 
 Its doctrine's consecrated cant ? 
 
 Or its Religion miscalled " true " 
 That once bound feudal earth in gyves 
 Of proof-armed ignorance, and strives 
 
 To rivet shattered mail anew ; 
 
 Restoring mediaeval times : 
 
 And retrogressive horrors come ! 
 With fire-and-fagot martyrdom, 
 
 As holy sanctifying crimes. 
 
 94
 
 Reviving days of Heretics, 
 
 To Torquemada tortures forced : 
 And blameless souls a holocaust, 
 
 Flaring the dark, like flaming ricks. 
 
 LXII. 
 
 Days which posterity still mourns, 
 When men by toxic faith were crazed, 
 And like to torches Hebrews blazed, 
 
 And witches crackled, too, like thorns. 
 
 Decades when knowledge lay inert, 
 
 Cadaveric : Ignorance its pall ; 
 
 When God was naught and Church was all ; 
 Eras of Pestilence and Dirt ; 
 
 Ages of Priestcraft's shallow tilth, 
 With harvests of exuberant crime, 
 Of public foulness, private grime : 
 
 Epochs of frailty, faith and filth. 
 
 95
 
 A state which reechy monks advance 
 To quite a sanctifying grade : 
 A close conforming grime displayed 
 
 To Dirt's canonic ordinance. 
 
 LXIII. 
 
 Dare not its creed or ritual blame, 
 Or go anathamaed to thy death, 
 Make " I believe " thy shibboleth 
 
 Or, like a human fagot, flame. 
 
 Its virus-cup drank to the lees, 
 
 Its ruthless grasp of simple minds, 
 Reason debauched the sight it blinds 
 
 With cowls of inane sanctities, 
 
 And law of pious-fraud controls, 
 
 Fearless of God whom it blasphemes, 
 As sanctifying worthless schemes 
 
 Of nostrum-rites, for curing souls. 
 
 96
 
 Oh ! woeful realms bereft of joys 
 
 That Freedom brings, and Freemen prize 
 Take heed ! for thus Cassandra-wise 
 
 They warn "these times" unheeding Troys. 
 
 LXIV. 
 
 In its subjection, Races die 
 
 Anaemic from degeneracies ; 
 
 Of cruel bonds and tyrannies 
 Ever the unscrupulous ally. 
 
 Nations with vertebrate power bent 
 To shore this tottering faith of Rome, 
 Losing dynastic force, become 
 
 Decadent empires, doomed and spent. 
 
 Clairvoyant ! why should I be dumb, 
 Though giving to the world, unsought, 
 The visions of a sight o'erwrought, 
 
 The foregleams of results to come? 
 
 97
 
 Behold their destiny in this ! 
 
 Faction and Feud, the paupered Purse, 
 
 Cabal, Sedition's secret curse, 
 Retributive as Nemesis. 
 
 Imposture yielding bitter fruits ! 
 Corruption, Treason, Fiscal Cheats, 
 Riots, Rebellions, Wars, Defeats, 
 
 Acting as Parcse substitutes. 
 
 Vile forms of tyranny abide, 
 
 Ruled by the gutter and the ditch 
 Nobles, in worthless titles rich, 
 
 But beggars in all else beside. 
 
 Hordes of recanting votaries, lust 
 
 For impious act ; their Priests they nag, 
 Spit on their ivory Christs, and drag 
 
 The Agnus Dei in the dust. 
 
 Church pageant naught but insult meets, 
 In loathsome missiles Mobs delight, 
 Its pomp reduced to fearful plight 
 
 By ordure from the reeking streets.
 
 And nameless horrors still to be, 
 
 When Law lies dead, and License raves, 
 And o'er their desolation waves 
 
 The baleful flag of Anarchy ; 
 
 While through a still-pursuing fate, 
 
 Which their retrenched puissance saps, 
 To debile impotency lapse 
 
 As Powers effete or inchoate, 
 
 Which to Oblivion recede, 
 
 And fossiled in the Ages' drifts 
 Lie hidden, 'till some Future lifts 
 
 Their Past, to heirs of saner creed. 
 
 Without, perchance and who were loath ?- 
 Supernal Power designs to keep 
 The rotting faith, a midden-heap 
 
 For Liberty's intenser growth ? 
 
 A richer compost could not be 
 
 Than offal which has martyred man 
 Since Orthodoxy's flux began 
 
 Sewage of Mariolatry. 
 
 99
 
 LXV. 
 
 Why not to Thammuz cult resigned 
 And not to this, so modern crude ? 
 An Adonean pulchritude 
 
 A likelier " fetch v for womankind, 
 
 Though men might not be of the host 
 Who worship Mary ! Mary's fame 
 Was polyandric, and became 
 
 Polygamous with man and ghost. 
 
 s 
 
 Her sex's mind, with aptness scored, 
 Proves vantage for the priestly guild 
 A bigot-base on which to build 
 
 The superstructure of a fraud. 
 
 Well knowing this, and the effect, 
 The female child is put in train, 
 For stamping on its plastic brain, 
 
 Life-long delusions of the sect.
 
 For she is mother of the race, 
 
 And at her knees the man-child taught 
 A false belief so cunning-fraught, 
 
 Even wiser years may not efface. 
 
 Thus myriad mother, legioned priest, 
 Pervert the child-world's plastic mind 
 With fabricated facts which blind, 
 
 Maturity till life has ceased. 
 
 And thus a propaganda schemed, 
 For sowing holy tares broadcast : 
 A Devil's harvest, far more vast 
 
 Than Pope or Cardinal e'er dreamed. 
 
 LXVI. 
 
 A faith with Orthodoxy shod, 
 
 Tramples all doubt, nor leaves intact 
 Man's warder, Reason ; thus, in fact, 
 
 In routing that, assails his God ; 
 
 101
 
 The True God of the inner man, 
 The spiritual essence, made 
 His guard, his guide, his helpful aid, 
 
 Throughout his being's mortal span. 
 
 Its record never can appease 
 
 The kindly heart's instinctive hate ; 
 Its joy in cruelty, innate, 
 
 The curse of all Hierarchies. 
 
 The kindliest nature will rebel ! 
 Mercy, with Fury-rage beset, 
 Making the tenderest hearts regret 
 
 That for its dole there is no hell. 
 
 Its juggling priests, its tonsured knaves, 
 Degrade the man to human brute, 
 And, armed with power absolute, 
 
 Convert their dupes to abject slaves. 
 
 102
 
 LXVII. 
 
 With ignorance the septic root 
 Of sacerdotal rule : from whence 
 Issues decretal, "abstinence" 
 
 From " knowledge," and its " mystic fruit " 
 
 Establishing a world-wide thrall, 
 Convinced, if mankind disobey, 
 Nourished by " fruit forbidden " THEY, 
 
 Not contumacious man, must fall. 
 
 For Knowledge, thus enlightening man, 
 Would make their guerdon dearly earned, 
 Their vicious purpose seen and spurned, 
 
 Spoiling their Scarlet-Woman plan. 
 
 To issues of their teachings blind 
 
 Throughout their miscalled Holy See : 
 The embodiment of tyranny 
 
 That dwarfs the Tarquins of mankind. 
 
 103
 
 But when the dens and dives and stews 
 Know their abuse, with slaughter lusts 
 They'll make reprisal holocausts 
 
 Cry quits with Saint Bartholomews. 
 
 They know not yet the how or when 
 Till freedom points the time and path, 
 And they arise in hideous wrath, 
 
 Like maw and claw from wild-beast den. 
 
 LXVIII. 
 
 'Twixt what is known and preached, a schism ; 
 
 And mythos made to mask as Truth. 
 
 They know God's attributes forsooth, 
 Whose mental state is sciolism ! 
 
 The lust of sordidness their dower, 
 
 The mammon muck-rakes of the earth ; 
 The human soul of trivial worth, 
 
 To harpagons of wealth and power. 
 
 104
 
 Their craft is subtle, vulpine, dark. 
 
 For knowledge there is no advance ; 
 
 But swarming hordes of ignorants 
 Prove quarry for the Hierarch. 
 
 Of dismal Superstitions, worst 
 
 Of all, infecting souls with dread : 
 Crime to the heart, Crime to the head 
 
 Denounced, condemned, proscribed, accurst. 
 
 LXIX. 
 
 Beliefs which pure ideals smirch, 
 Traditions which proved facts belie, 
 And rites of purest pagan dye, 
 
 Embodied as a Holy Church ; 
 
 All honesty in fable sunk, 
 
 And chicane gospel-script o'erlaid 
 With texts its iron rule to aid ; 
 
 Mere forgeries of the lying monk. 
 
 105
 
 They plagiarized the classic trick 
 
 Of heroes apotheosized, 
 
 Honored with holy shrines, and prized 
 As Gods parthenogenetic. 
 
 Their holy truths, mere drama, spiced 
 With flavors of the mummied past, 
 God after God enhanced the cast, 
 
 The plot, denouemented with Christ. 
 
 Its rites exalt not, but deprave ; 
 
 It breeds a stolid, brainless brood ; 
 
 Few of the virtues of the good, 
 But all the vices of the slave. 
 
 LXX. 
 
 The poor, the humble sons of toil, 
 The lowly-born, its prop and stay ; 
 A cowled and tonsured caste betray, 
 
 And hold in durance as their spoil. 
 
 106
 
 Its power, the active cause and chief 
 Of all their ills of want and crime; 
 Besetting Ignorance in time 
 
 Coherent with pervert belief. 
 
 Dogma-obsessioned hordes that feast 
 On gospel-garbage live and die, 
 The victims of an impious lie, 
 
 Dupes of a Church, its creed and priest ; 
 
 Their hate of slavery subdued 
 By their God-vicars self-ordained, 
 Their mental badge of slave retained 
 
 And fostered by rank hebetude. 
 
 More barbarous than Turanian Huns, 
 Though dwelling in instructive light, 
 They still remain, in its despite, 
 
 As brainless as chloride nuns. 
 
 Disciples these in priest-controls, 
 Whom cloistral idleness relieves 
 From worldly lure ; yet who believes 
 
 Their bodies convents of pure souls ? 
 
 107
 
 LXXI. 
 
 Born, bred and reared in ignorance, 
 Struggle for higher-life suppressed ; 
 Delights of knowledge scorned, unguessed, 
 
 At war with culture a I 'entrance ; 
 
 In fable from their cradles steeped, 
 And forgeries of ages past, 
 Foes of all useful doctrine classed 
 
 With proven fact, by Science reaped ; 
 
 Their search for Truth of no avail ! 
 
 She dwells not in the wells defiled 
 
 By Superstition ; still beguiled, 
 Though knowledge holds the Holy Grail. 
 
 Their burdens all life's worth enthrall ! 
 
 To their real source of suffering, blind ; 
 
 Ever pursuing hope, to find 
 A heart-ache at the core of all. 
 
 108
 
 For such must life with grief abound ? 
 
 Seeking its gold and gath'ring dross, 
 
 Bearing in poverty their cross, 
 With thorns their toil-worn foreheads crowned ? 
 
 Reason debauched and long adust, 
 
 The burthen of their faith abides, 
 
 And their most worshipped, guards and guides, 
 Fooling their simple, patient trust. 
 
 Thus ever doomed to haunt the prison, 
 The sepulchre of buried Truth, 
 With fruitless search and useless ruth : 
 
 The tomb is there ! but Truth has risen. 
 
 LXXII. 
 
 Reared in the blasphemies of Faith, 
 'Gainst reasoning sense a war is waged, 
 Their earthly misery assuaged 
 
 By that true Mercy men call Death. 
 
 109
 
 Earth has lost all delight and lure, 
 Misfortune's flood they fail to stem, 
 The world is weariness to them, 
 
 " Life is disease and Death the cure.'' 
 
 To pain no mitigating pause, 
 Nor to their weariness repose, 
 Until upon their misery close 
 
 The tomb's inexorable doors. 
 
 To their well-being most unwise, 
 Soddened in reek of ignorance ; 
 Their hells endured, as in advance 
 
 Of heirship of a Paradise. 
 
 Weak bondsmen to the lying lip ! 
 
 Boeotians, duped by spurious fears ! 
 
 To them this " Righteousness " appears- 
 Poor helots of prelatic whip ! 
 
 Their fetters neither gall nor wound ; 
 Proud of the shackles that they wear, 
 Are they less slaves because they bear 
 
 Their vassal chains by Faith festooned ? 
 
 no
 
 Truth's attar'd incense they love not ! 
 But, like the perfume-loathing cur, 
 Slink from it with a dread demur, 
 
 But yet will reek with carrion-rot. 
 
 They see a falsehood richly shrined, 
 Nor doubt it truth, and do not dare 
 To lift the Isis veil, and stare 
 
 Wild-eyed at fraud that lies behind. 
 
 Will trust like theirs ne'er be outworn ? 
 
 Their fatal folly never cease ? 
 
 Leaving, like silly sheep, their fleece 
 Ever on Cunning's hedge and thorn ? 
 
 LXXIII. 
 
 Are these not sons of God likewise ? 
 Is Christ the only one who died 
 Disprized, belied and crucified, 
 
 Towards Heaven lifting anguished eyes?
 
 The only one, in agony, 
 
 Whose trembling lips in protest groaned, 
 And upward lifted head, who moaned, 
 
 "My God, hast Thou forsaken me?" 
 
 The only ones, thorn-crowned-deviced, 
 Nail-pierced by ingrates, lies and loss, 
 Unsolaced on their secret cross, 
 
 Who bear the stigmata of Christ ? 
 
 Or was He but the type of all, 
 
 In life's probation, who have found 
 Spear-thrusts, in crucifixions bound, 
 
 And drank its hyssop and its gall? 
 
 True liegemen ! whom no wrongs provoke, 
 By spiritual sway enthralled, 
 And by tyrannic-temporal galled : 
 
 Thus burthened with a double yoke ; 
 
 In sacerdotal bondage crushed, 
 
 Their sense of vital wrong unstirred, 
 The voice of their despair unheard, 
 
 In death's eternal coma hushed.
 
 There is no chance for Freedom's aid, 
 For minds made leprous by foul creeds ; 
 There is no refuge for their needs, 
 
 Save from the mattock and the spade. 
 
 LXXIV. 
 
 Most human institutions rest 
 
 On Force ; therefore by force alone 
 Can they be wrecked and overthrown, 
 
 And "Bad" supplanted by the "Best" 
 
 Not till awakened man despairs 
 Of Fabian methods, and essays 
 Righting the vicious wrong, and brays 
 
 The priesthood at the altar-stairs ; 
 
 Or, roused to a consuming ire, 
 Dooms to a shapeless ruin all 
 Tokens of their pernicious thrall, 
 
 With cyclone razzias of fire ; 
 
 113
 
 And where its trickster shrines have been 
 And flourished in malefic might, 
 No stone on stone to mark the sight, 
 
 Naught but chaotic ruin seen ; 
 
 While Faith, Rite, Creed and Dogma fall, 
 Swept to some Hinnom's vague abysm, 
 With all their pious Ku-Kluxism, 
 
 Like sweepings of a Kaffir-kraal 
 
 Careless of what such deeds forebode ! 
 Though crucial wars leave lands forlorn, 
 Often, through sorrow, good is born, 
 
 And true reforms achieved in blood. 
 
 Better the Nation win the name 
 Agnostic rather than of Sect 
 Of tainted creed, with fraud-defect, 
 
 And doomed to be the era's shame. 
 
 Destined to fall in cognate line 
 With like delusions of the race, 
 And totter from its worthless base, 
 
 Like by-gone Faiths once held Divine. 
 \ 114
 
 Though Christ were truly nailed to cross, 
 Redeeming man from literal hell 
 (Arrant untruth), yet 'twere not well 
 
 The fable lack suggestive force. 
 
 A legend of the Sanskrit brand, 
 Known to the earlier world to be 
 A myth of Heliolatry, 
 
 Before it cursed this Western land 
 
 As Christian faith, the scourge and bane 
 Of civil Liberty, and binds 
 The weazen hearts and shallow minds 
 
 Of brainless bigots in its train. 
 
 If crucifixion once sufficed, 
 
 In fable, to redeem mankind, 
 
 A freedom-loving race might find 
 Its guerdon in enacting Christ. 
 
 ****** 
 Once from the cross, and seeming dead, 
 
 Scorning sepulchral bonds to rise 
 
 Immortal from the sacrifice, 
 With glory's nimbus garlanded,
 
 LXXV. 
 
 The mills of God may slowly grind, 
 But yet they grind austerely fine, 
 For those who check a gift divine, 
 
 Dwarfing the Reason of mankind. 
 
 For that is His most precious gift 
 To man, whereby he kills or quells 
 Misdoing brute that in him dwells, 
 
 Scornful of aid from priestly shrift. 
 
 Atonement must be made for sin ! 
 Punition not as man-devised, 
 A torment not exteriorized ! 
 
 OUR HEAVENS AND HELLS ARE BORNE WITHIN. 
 
 They need not dread a God austere, 
 Nor tremble at THE GREAT ASSIZE ! 
 That's scheduled with more potent lies : 
 
 They'll have their soul's remorse to fear. 
 
 116
 
 LXXVI. 
 
 Beyond what carnate sense conceives, 
 Modes of sensation may prevail 
 In that new state beyond the veil, 
 
 Where mind its discipline achieves, 
 
 There the discarnate soul may find 
 Content supreme, or pain for sin, 
 Cognate with evil held within ; 
 
 Its bliss or torment states of mind. 
 
 And in progression feel the spell 
 Of good abjured and evil wrought ; 
 The life-renewed, with anguish fraught 
 
 Its Immortality, its Hell ! 
 
 Death ends not sorrow nor distress, 
 Nor passions that delight, yet cloy. 
 Nor will it in the grave enjoy 
 
 Nirwana's peace of nothingness ; 
 
 117
 
 No sackcloth-shrift beyond the grave ! 
 
 No hell for sin's purgation there ! 
 
 But sorrow counterfeits despair, 
 " For from ourselves no Christ can save." 
 
 LXXVII. 
 
 Strange ! that on Freedom's soil should be 
 A wrong so gross, and not create 
 A protest fierce, articulate, 
 
 Against this alien tyranny. 
 
 For Freedom's Minster should be purged, 
 Its evil-workers exorcised, 
 As from the Zion temple Christ 
 
 The sordid money-changers scourged. 
 
 All teaching is a scheme o'erwrought ! 
 
 What strength of nutriment in Schools 
 
 Diluted by the flood of fools, 
 As affluent to knowledge taught ? 
 
 118
 
 Its rule, the metaphoric pen, 
 
 Where wallow in their foul mischance 
 The herds transformed by Ignorance, 
 
 THE CIRCE OF THE SOULS OF MEN. 
 
 LXXVIII. 
 
 Its influence in government 
 Is felt in evil ; chiefly here. 
 Freemen have its control to fear : 
 
 A mental-helotry its bent. 
 
 Its secret agencies forestall 
 
 All wholesome forms of civic rules ; 
 
 In City Councils, Public Schools, 
 And every Board Municipal. 
 
 Through Club and College permeates 
 Its subtle tampering, unrelaxed 
 In all the fundamental acts, 
 
 Forming the functionings of States. 
 
 119
 
 Congress, Convention, Bar and Bench, 
 All courts Judicial, witness-box, 
 Grand Juries and the prisoner-docks 
 
 On these its crafty-workings trench. 
 
 By germs of Jesuit-virus strewn, 
 Through all decretal syndicates 
 Few of this Wardenry of States 
 
 Against the toxic taint immune ! 
 
 Army and Navy, every branch 
 Embodies a confederate band ; 
 Imperilling that loyal stand, 
 
 No discipline can render staunch 
 
 In times of Peril to the frame 
 Of constitutional government : 
 A Church's empire imminent, 
 
 To the Republic's fame and name.
 
 LXXIX. 
 
 Conditions which await result 
 
 Expected, if not preordained ! 
 
 This New- World-Power possessed, maintained 
 A stronghold of the Papal Cult ! 
 
 God's Vicar Vaticaned in Rome, 
 Veridic Press-reports declare, 
 Intends (for failing crops elsewhere) 
 
 To make this land " His Harvest Home " ! 
 
 So sweetly tolerant we appear 
 
 Of the designing priestly league, 
 
 So listless of this Church-intrigue 
 To root its Ritualism here, 
 
 Such parasites to Papal force ! 
 
 So blind to its most plain intent ! 
 
 Till brought (its victim) to lament 
 Imperilled Freedom or its loss 
 
 121
 
 To be restored by civil war, 
 
 And all its soul-revolting scenes ; 
 With supplemental grewsome means, 
 
 That lack the warranty of law. 
 
 The Public voice bestows no stress 
 In its rebuke of these Church-pacts, 
 Perchance discredits them as facts ; 
 
 Or has the Pope dragooned the Press ? 
 
 LXXX. 
 
 Its fiat fetters noblest minds, 
 Palsies the weak to impotence, 
 Blunts the keen edge of common-sense, 
 
 With those whom fallacy still binds. 
 
 While from the mold of crumbling creeds, 
 A fungoid growth of dogma springs ; 
 Such noxious and unwholesome things 
 
 As cryptal gloom of error breeds.
 
 The birthright of the Poor its prey, 
 The crucifix becomes a pledge 
 Of their enslavement, fatal badge ! 
 
 Human dumb-beasts of burden they! 
 
 Discipled criminals in time, 
 
 Infesting gutters, glutting slums, 
 Such are their choice elysiums, 
 
 Fetid with moral sludge and slime. 
 
 For ignorance makes crooked the soul, 
 Misshape concordant moulds the mind ; 
 In one distortion both combined, 
 
 Thus apt for criminal control. 
 
 And there as foul diseases bide, 
 
 And like to beasts of prey from thence, 
 Issue at times a Pestilence : 
 
 Bubonic plague personified. 
 
 When Mob-law civic rule assails, 
 
 Riot from thence its garbage spews ; 
 The slough and wallow of the stews, 
 
 And excrete of cloacal jails. 
 
 123
 
 In haunts of vice they dwell at ease, 
 But swarm from their mephitic pens, 
 From Degradation's hideous dens, 
 
 As Democratic potencies. 
 
 Thus from this source results are due 
 In monstrous tyrannies of ill : 
 The sovereign and despotic will 
 
 Of gutter, brothel, jail and stew. 
 
 Crass ignorance and roguery stand 
 As bulwark to the cleansing bent 
 Of every favored movement, meant 
 
 For foulness, lustrumed from the land. 
 
 LXXXI. 
 
 Banality of Franchise ! when 
 
 In ballot-power true manhood's made 
 Coequal with this felon-grade, 
 
 The brutehood of the Dive and Den. 
 
 124
 
 Briarean Mob ! of arms no lack, 
 
 But brains proportioned to its mood, 
 In ratio of amount for good, 
 
 As Falstaff's bread to Falstaff's sack. 
 
 Will statesmen long condone th' abuse 
 Of Faction's glozing efforts, made 
 To use these colleagues, and to raid 
 
 The public purse for private use ? 
 
 Results denounced, condemned, deplored, 
 The age beholding them, aghast 
 At crime illimitably vast : 
 
 All office honey-combed with fraud. 
 
 A curse to county, town, and state : 
 
 Ballot debauched, the franchise scorned, 
 By rabble from the slums suborned, 
 
 Debasing the electorate. 
 
 Hence "sham majority" achieves 
 
 A priestly project : an intent 
 
 To yield a City's government 
 As spoil to felons, roughs and thieves. 
 
 125
 
 Thus hoarded funds of Peter's Pence 
 
 In amplitude expand, and serve 
 
 As sinews of religious verve, 
 In cultivating Ignorance. 
 
 Fair field of sacerdotal toil ! 
 
 A baneful swamp, ploughed, drained and 
 ditched, 
 
 And by a midden-cult enriched, 
 Of Crime, becomes a fecund soil. 
 
 LXXXII. 
 
 Let mourning edge all civic rolls, 
 For honest-rule is dead and cold, 
 Corruption henceforth will uphold 
 
 The lying verdict of the Polls. 
 
 For through the cities' dens and dives, 
 And by their scoundrel-populace, 
 This buckramed danger and disgrace, 
 
 This odium of the nation, thrives. 
 
 126
 
 'Twixt Church design and this, no schism ! 
 In flexile bonds its conscience writhes : 
 'Tis pleasant penance, taking tithes 
 
 From Jubilees of scoundrelism. 
 
 Religion-named ! yet it includes 
 
 Methods political, to school 
 
 Its priestly agencies, to rule 
 Triumphant blockhead-multitudes. 
 
 Hence Office with the knave is rife, 
 And pensioned from the cities' wealth, 
 Past-masters in the schemes of stealth : 
 
 The official curse of civic life. 
 
 Trusting and credent unto death, 
 Fanatic in devotion, none 
 Can formulate what may be done, 
 
 Through impulse of perfervid faith. 
 
 Their secret ways defying search, 
 Officials made of slum-born rogues, 
 Whose flood of spoil no doubt embogues 
 
 The coffers of the Holy Church. 
 
 127
 
 True to the law of Pedigree, 
 
 Of brutish stock the brute is born : 
 
 The Church, cold-blooded, voids its spawn, 
 
 These, its reptilian progeny. 
 
 They govern th' exploited town, 
 
 Who should in jails find penal work, 
 Yet in whose venal shadow lurk 
 
 The cassock and the tonsured crown. 
 
 To no corrupting means averse, 
 Virtue they slur, not vice decry ; 
 Their propaganda financed by 
 
 The lootage of the Public Purse. 
 
 LXXXIII. 
 
 Amid the wrongs which earth have cursed, 
 
 Degrading God, enslaving man, 
 
 Since Creed was schemed and Fraud began, 
 This Holy Church is wholly worst. 
 
 128
 
 Thearchic insolence, the base 
 
 On which is reared the chartered crime, 
 Despotic since its earliest prime, 
 
 The bold debaucher of the race. 
 
 Its Christianity has stood 
 
 As if with human misery charmed, 
 And, with its cruel tenets armed, 
 
 Proclaimed the wickedness of Good ; 
 
 And shed more blood, wrought more distress, 
 Than all its cognate pagan creeds 
 Combined, and sown its thorny seeds, 
 
 Brambling the earth with wretchedness. 
 
 There's not within the planet's pale 
 Barbaric spot or culture-graced 
 On which a Church has not been placed 
 
 Or where its cult does not avail. 
 
 Each point a strategist might deem 
 
 Expedient in a war-campaign 
 
 To hold intact and to retain 
 For a choice subjugating scheme. 
 
 129
 
 To found in perpetuity, 
 
 The synonym of human ill, 
 
 This Church a clerical Bastille 
 Of manacled humanity. 
 
 Has Heaven a God supreme and wise 
 Who fails the wrongs of men to curb ? 
 No horrors of His earth disturb 
 
 The calm of His unpitying skies. 
 
 Once blasphemy its climax gained 
 
 When for a thousand years, aye, more, 
 This Church presumed to God ignore, 
 
 Usurped His throne and ruled and reigned ; 
 
 Fouled earth with hieratic lust, 
 Where crime and cruelty abode, 
 Making the life that God bestowed 
 
 Of lesser value than the dust ; 
 
 By massacres purveying death, 
 
 Goodness impeached by rampant Crime, 
 With reason strangled in the slime 
 
 And sputa of a viscid Faith ; 
 
 130
 
 Engendered Hate and stifled Mirth, 
 Ranked Cruelties as special arts, 
 Choked tearful Pity, hardened hearts, 
 
 And banished Mercy from the earth ; 
 
 Encouraged Ignorance and spurned 
 
 Skilled Knowledge from its hostile path, 
 Sworn foe of Progress, venting wrath 
 
 On all that bore the stamp of learned; 
 
 * 
 
 Embittered friends, Affections killed, 
 Poisoned the Truth, at Virtue sneered, 
 Oppressed the Poor, at Misery jeered, 
 
 And homes with hate dissension filled ; 
 
 For ages made its realms a morgue 
 With Rack and Stake and Borgia's art, 
 And every sin on its foul heart 
 
 Named in Jehovah's Decalogue. 
 
 'Tis no religion, but a scheme 
 
 A hybrid cross 'twixt Creed and Greed, 
 A mongrel plan designed to lead, 
 
 In this fool-world, to rule supreme.
 
 If e'er its ignorants should swell 
 To larger legions of its cult, 
 Then Church Domdaniel the result, 
 
 And this Fool's Paradise, a Hell. 
 
 The legend of the Argonauts 
 Finds its revival in this age : 
 These holy Corsairs cruise and rage 
 
 For plunder in all earthly ports. 
 
 An Argoan quest that does not cease, 
 A papal Jason guides the search, 
 All lands a Colchis for their Church, 
 
 Shearing from fools the Golden Fleece. 
 
 LXXXIV. 
 
 A true unfktioned Upas-tree ! 
 Fecund as Banyan, every branch 
 Sends down contributories staunch, 
 
 Shadowing human Liberty. 
 
 132
 
 Shall it, in ever-spreading girth, 
 Extend its darkness-loving might, 
 And in the Optimist's despite, 
 
 Crowd Freedom from benighted earth? 
 
 A guild which first its dupes depraves 
 Through fear and ignorance, then rules 
 To make of them the bigot fools, 
 
 The easier to convert to slaves ; 
 
 The truths of Science, scorned, denied ; 
 
 Progress restrained with bigot grip ; 
 
 The eyes pnt out of Scholarship, 
 Faith blessed, ind knowledge crucified. 
 
 Now with decrepit age infirm, 
 
 Yet Cunning holds the chair of force : 
 'Twixt Pride and Power no sure divorce, 
 
 Till Pious Fraud has reached its term. 
 
 Yet with its Machiavelian trait, 
 
 To fellowship with reasoning mind, 
 To wholesome freedom of mankind, 
 
 A foe no less inveterate. 
 
 133
 
 When triple-crowned, enthroned it sat, 
 
 Its cruel craft a thing to dread, 
 
 But now the Lion's lordly tread 
 Gives place to crawl of mousing cat ; 
 
 Yet would with royal prestige shine, 
 The simple, with mock sceptre, fool, 
 Imposture as the means to rule, 
 
 Falsehood and Fraud its Right Divine. 
 
 With Crozier, Cross and Pastoral Staff, 
 Mitre, Biretta, Triple-Crown, 
 Pallium, Soutane, Stole and Gown, 
 
 No King's regalia counts the half ; 
 
 High on the Hierarchal perch, 
 
 Papa becomes a Pontifex ; 
 
 And red-robed Cardinals annex 
 Titles as Princes of The Church ; 
 
 Red, their escutcheon-color made 
 
 In memory of those days of yore 
 
 When Church was lewdly Poped, and wore 
 The scarlet garb of Babylon's Jade ; 
 
 134
 
 In fact, with sumptuous tailoring, 
 With Rosary, Cross and Crucifix, 
 With Agnus Dei, Pax and Pyx, 
 
 Out-gewgaws any Laic King. 
 
 LXXXV. 
 
 But why its sombre pomp rehearse ? 
 
 Processioned priests and Acolytes, 
 
 Holy-buffoonery's delights, 
 Past-masters of exuberant Farce ; 
 
 Such gauds the TEACHER'S spirit mocks 
 By earth-life of the pauper grade 
 The Holy Mendicant has made 
 
 The WEALTHY priest a paradox. 
 
 The Poor, the Meek, the Lowly Ones 
 Was not the Christ of these ? did not 
 His earth-life parallel their lot, 
 
 The simplest, tenderest of God's sons ? 
 
 135
 
 From Him in sequence, can it be 
 There's no hiatus in the line 
 Apostolic, from the Christ benign, 
 
 No breach of continuity? 
 
 Is this the grain of that meek seed 
 That He once sowed, or that it bears, 
 Yield of the Devil's worldly tares, 
 
 Strewn for Ambition, Pride and Greed ? 
 
 LXXXVI. 
 
 To impotence its forces trend ; 
 
 Wrenched from its grasp its temporal might ; 
 
 While on its record rests the blight 
 Of execrations without end. 
 
 What is man's boasted reason worth, 
 That such a priestly-impious plot 
 Could so have dazed it, and have not 
 
 With scornful laughter filled the earth ? 
 
 136
 
 When will the wiser world be ripe 
 To flout its God-degrading plan ? 
 Never, till in th' evolving man, 
 
 The brute becomes a worn-out type ; 
 
 Or Time its monstrous greed betrays v 
 And Laity scorns Hierophants, 
 Or Knowledge, Ignorance supplants 
 
 In mankind's every ethnic phase ; 
 
 Bearing the burden of its crime 
 As the decree of hidden Fate : 
 To rage in vain, but longer wait 
 
 The slothful force of halting time. 
 
 LXXXVII. 
 
 What factor must be deemed the chief 
 In Man's accepting its pretence 
 Except the fool in permanence 
 
 The dupe outcropping in Belief ? 
 
 137
 
 When will Oblivion's curtain drop 
 Upon this drama-act of Fraud, 
 And knaves and witlings cease to laud 
 
 The Actors with the Claquer's sop ? 
 
 Will mankind never scale its worth, 
 Bowed in assent to its demands, 
 Withhold recoil till Doomsday stands 
 
 Upon the threshold of the earth ? 
 
 Or will triumphant Freedom bring 
 Rendition of this vital theme? 
 Her footfalls to the rescue seem 
 
 Slower than leaden-footed Spring. 
 
 Protest and wrath were vainly spent, 
 Hatred, derision, scoff, disdain ; 
 All processes save Force seem vain, 
 
 Slow as stalagmite increment. 
 
 Were Time but to an hour compressed, 
 Or to an instant of his flight, 
 That I, like Islam's Sultan, might 
 
 Of magic vision be possessed, 
 
 138
 
 To see the doom that now it braves, 
 
 When angered Earth in wrath will bring 
 Confusion to the Unholy Thing, 
 
 And joy to manumitted slaves ! 
 
 LXXXVIII. 
 
 When Man, attaining perfect birth, 
 A miracle of Wisdom, stands 
 In wiser world and happier lands, 
 
 " Think ye he'll find this faith on Earth ?" 
 
 It cannot be his curse for aye. 
 Be patient still ! can we expect 
 That " darkest Afric " should be trekked 
 
 Within the cycle of a day ? 
 
 When fools from folly are estranged, 
 When Egoism forgets itself, 
 When misers give the Poor their pelf, 
 
 The Cynic to th' Altruist changed, 
 
 139
 
 No Priesthood with the present linked, 
 No monkish drivel, called " God's word," 
 But like the inept Dodo-bird, 
 
 The Christian Pietist extinct 
 
 Relicked in old ancestral schists, 
 'Mid fossilized religious thought 
 Of these (then ages past), and sought 
 
 By Lore-Palaeontologists. 
 
 LXXXIX. 
 
 Th' Ideal era reached, man may 
 Of God evolve sublimer view, 
 An ikon, space-wide from the True, 
 
 Yet not the lampoon of to-day. 
 
 Instinctively averse to tax 
 His Fancy in Belief's behalf, 
 And give of God, a photograph 
 
 With priestly blab for holy facts. 
 
 140
 
 Heirs of the ages will revolt, 
 
 Nor prove the victims of a scheme 
 Strong in effrontery : a theme 
 
 For Balaamites to dupe the Dolt. 
 
 XC. 
 
 Nature is slothfully sublime 
 
 In all progressive acts which make 
 Each process towards attainment take 
 
 The phase of Everlasting Time. 
 
 As Nebulae, in rotary stress 
 
 Whirling, condense a lucent core 
 To a sun-system, adding more 
 
 To the weird sum of countlessness ; 
 
 Till solar energy first tossed 
 Its giant outpost-planets far, 
 Each seeming but a wand'ring star 
 
 Seeking its system, strayed or lost, 
 
 T/IT
 
 Till orbital-career begun, 
 
 Through laws that rule etheric space, 
 . Wheeling in satellitious place 
 About the central magnet Sun 
 
 The mind-bewildering events 
 
 In time, since smelted Earth was hurl'd 
 
 In void, an incandescent world : 
 Plutonic bubbling continents; 
 
 Ere yet the vapored globe condensed 
 Diluvial rains, and mountain sheds 
 Poured floods, which trenched their river-beds 
 
 Through channels, obdurately fenced, 
 
 And time incalculable clears 
 
 Paths for their onrush-way to go, 
 
 And unperturbed at last, to flow, 
 Like a good life in vale of years ; 
 
 And the crude world's depression fills 
 With countless affluents like these ; 
 Forming the crisp-foamed shining seas, 
 
 Submerging fossil-salted hills 
 
 142
 
 And velds ; ere Ichthyosauri swum 
 The tepid waters, vapor-hazed ; 
 Or Dinosaurian Mammal grazed 
 
 Or browsed with Megatherium ; 
 
 Ere seismic force from oozy base 
 Thrust up the soaring mountain top 
 To altitudes which seem to prop 
 
 The stars, and shoulder concave space ; 
 
 Keeping in lonesomeness of sea, 
 With Solitude, eternal tryst ; 
 Ere verdured deltas oasised 
 
 Its impotent sterility, 
 
 Or sea-holms, in their tropic trim, 
 Basked in a sylvan flora yield, 
 While the grand Ocean-Organ pealed 
 
 Anthem in storm, in calm its hymn ; 
 
 The dateless time when life began, 
 Or when the vegetative earth, 
 After the reptile-shapes, gave birth 
 
 To higher forms of brute the Man ! 
 
 143
 
 ALons since coral zoophyte 
 
 Built through the Ocean's briny miles 
 Lagooned Atolls and palmy isles, 
 
 Destined for Cannibal delight ; 
 
 Till reef, shoal-ambushed, stabs and hews 
 Pirogues and Barks to foundering, 
 And seas in riot, wreckage fling 
 
 Isle-ward, the Golgothas of Crews 
 
 So Holy Truth is never spent, 
 Nor in constructive process halts ; 
 In self-assertion foiling False, 
 
 She too of Time is exigent. 
 
 XCI. 
 
 JEons must pass ere man will find 
 His true creation formed complete ; 
 His pious fallacies, effete, 
 
 Limboed in strata of the mind. 
 
 144
 
 His Gods, Cult, Creed, Salvation Plan, 
 In Culture's drifts found stratified, 
 As with the Cave-Bear bones abide 
 
 Tokens of rudimental man. 
 
 Triumph of Evolution ! when, 
 Compared with later genesis, 
 The masterpiece that man now is, 
 
 Mere foetus to the man of THEN. 
 
 As slowly degradations mark 
 The natural process of decay, 
 So no hysteric force will sway 
 
 The passing of the Hierarch, 
 
 Sinking to legendary gloom, 
 
 As all man's concepts thought to be 
 
 Solutions of his destiny ; 
 Life's solved Enigma and its doom. 
 
 145
 
 XCII. 
 
 Thus Evolution will express 
 
 For this " Unparagoned," the need 
 That heart and intellect be freed 
 
 From tyrannies of foolishness. 
 
 Religion is not Ethics, nor 
 Is Dogma discipline designed 
 For healthy betterment of mind, 
 
 Nor revamped fable, Holy Law ! 
 
 Though privileged and sordid crime 
 Betray not when their end's to be, 
 Seeming as if Eternity 
 
 Had been monopolized by Time, 
 
 God holdeth all things in survey 
 
 That mock our human sense of Right, 
 And to our Dark vouchsafes no Light 
 
 " HlS WILL BE DONE," IT IS HlS WAY. 
 
 146
 
 XCIII. 
 
 When loftier human impulse drives 
 The spirit of a flagrant breed 
 To emulate the nobler deed, 
 
 Which, yielding scope to Reason, thrives 
 
 By scholarship enriched at odds 
 With all Religion fable-trussed, 
 And Christian Deities, adust, 
 
 Oblivioned with the Vedic Gods 
 
 Science no longer held as foe 
 To Faith, but mighty to avert 
 From patient Truth the deadly hurt 
 
 That will from shrewd ecclesiarchs flow ; 
 
 Behold unveiling radiance play 
 Around the mysteries hidden long, 
 While earth, rejoicing, hails with song 
 
 The dawning of the promised day. 
 
 H7
 
 XCIV. 
 
 Then onward for all coming time, 
 To march as an enfranchised host, 
 Retrieving epochs grimed and lost 
 
 In sloughs of sacerdotal slime. 
 
 Avenging generations, thrust 
 To outer-darkness, where abort 
 Horrors unmatched, and ages wrought 
 
 To forms of rapine, crime and lust, 
 
 Through an ecclesiastic thrall, 
 To buttress ignorance designed, 
 Despoil the masses, curse mankind, 
 
 And push great nations to their fall : 
 
 The race no longer foul in plight, 
 
 Blund'ring through creedal-bogs, in quest 
 Of righteous paths, the priests suggest, 
 
 Misled by "ignis-fatuus" light ; 
 
 148
 
 And Reason's rays nor dimmed nor quenched 
 In the mephitic fogs of Faith, 
 With God no more a goblin-wraith, 
 
 But in all hearts as Love intrenched ; 
 
 And credent man not prone to lapse 
 To planes of pessimist distrust, 
 For Spirit will transcend his dust, 
 
 With Heaven no more a "GREAT PERHAPS." 
 
 xcv. 
 
 Then will the soul achieve desire 
 Concordant with the height it seeks, 
 Of which each true Apostle speaks 
 
 With Pentecostal tongue of fire. 
 
 Then will Hope's fond Utopias seem 
 No phantom fallacies of sight, 
 But facts of palpable delight, 
 
 And Life no vain Alnaschar-dream. 
 
 149
 
 For ignorance will ebb, and mark, 
 On shore-lines of recessions past, 
 Where all its faiths, in ruins vast, 
 
 Gods, Cults and Creeds, lie dead and stark. 
 
 The new-born century ablaze 
 
 With knowledge, Superstitions show 
 That leprous-pale, corpse-candle glow, 
 
 Seen through a swamp's miasmic haze. 
 
 XCVI. 
 
 Prophets of God, were your lips sealed, 
 
 Victims of Kabalistic spell 
 
 That baffled speech, and could not tell 
 The wondrous truths which He revealed ? 
 
 What is it that our Faith demands 
 In biblic babblings of your race ? 
 Of Godlike token no more trace 
 
 Than footsteps in the simoomed-sarids. 
 
 150
 
 The paths that Argosies have trod 
 O'er liquid cragginess of seas, 
 Reveal as much of track, as these 
 
 The trace of a Revealing God. 
 
 Beshrew the gospel's vile pretence, 
 For logic makes conviction sure : 
 All God-inspired literature 
 
 Records of Priestcraft insolence. 
 
 Of Heavenly Father not a scheme, 
 This fiction of Salvation-Plan, 
 Devised to stultify the man, 
 
 The world astound, and God blaspheme, 
 
 But master-stroke of that shrewd guild, 
 With which to make mankind its slave, 
 From cradled childhood to the grave ; 
 
 In lies of its invention drilled.
 
 XCVII. 
 
 Deluded man has been misled 
 To his dishonor, shame and ruth, 
 By yielding faith to bold untruth : 
 
 A Mythos misinterpreted. 
 
 Man has not fallen / but progressed 
 Through vast sequential-cells of life ; 
 Through aeons of zoetic strife, 
 
 Till as a Christ He stood confessed. 
 
 The Gnostic-Man / of peerless breed ! 
 So god-like in his human grade, 
 That noblest manhood has been made ; 
 
 From such a model, lapsed indeed. 
 
 But not through Adam's mythic fall, 
 But his divinest tenure killed 
 By this Hierophantic guild, 
 
 And its debasing bastard-thrall. 
 
 152
 
 XCVIII. 
 
 Christ, as a grand-ideal, then 
 Might claim allegiency, but now 
 Should we to limitations bow 
 
 Of half-developed times and men ? 
 
 With vile patristic forgeries scored, 
 All chronicles of Him appear, 
 And legends of His earth-career 
 
 Impugned by a puissant fraud. 
 
 Yet souls evolving on the plan 
 Of purest Spiritism's facts, 
 Will index what the mythos lacks 
 
 In symbolizing ideal man. 
 
 As fuller glows the glorious morn 
 
 Of a New Faith, old Creeds are spurned 
 In obloquy, and on them turned 
 
 Flash-lights of intellectual scorn. 
 
 153
 
 XCIX. 
 
 Religions by assumptions braced 
 
 Give no finality to creeds, 
 
 But " proven facts" are what man needs 
 Faith on " absolute knowledge based'' 
 
 The enigma of our being, we 
 
 Had not the faculties to solve ; 
 
 Now, Death, we know, does not involve 
 The Spirit's immortality. 
 
 Such truth The New Religion gives ; 
 There is no Death ! the immortal soul 
 From carnate bonds escapes control, 
 
 And in eternal progress lives ; 
 
 A Pharos on that mystic sea, 
 O'er which Imagination sailed, 
 Yet ne'er till now one light availed, 
 
 Beaconing Life's continuity. 
 
 154
 
 c. 
 
 Though headstones, blotched with weathered rust 
 As weary, holding up, unread, 
 The records of th' oblivioned dead, 
 
 Leaning o'er uncohering dust, 
 
 Seem with a solemn lesson fraught, 
 Which to the sorrowing spirit saith : 
 Behold the omnipotence of Death ! 
 
 Which bringeth all things unto naught, 
 
 The husk of the soul's house, at best, 
 
 To swift decay predestinate, 
 
 Its Tenant's a chimera's fate ; 
 Its immortality a jest ; 
 
 Though aching heart, too pained with grief, 
 To war with Doubt, which faith assails, 
 Throb with an anguish that prevails 
 
 In pathos of a lost belief ; 
 
 155
 
 Naught, from that form to coffin-clod, 
 Can perish utterly, which shares 
 Cosmic existence, and thus bears 
 
 The impress of the Living God. 
 
 There's nothing of which Science treats 
 That knows annihilation none 
 From Energy and Motion won 
 
 That back to nothingness escheats. 
 
 CI. 
 
 Let marvellous types all doubt disperse ! 
 Behold one fact sublimely taught : 
 The elemental atoms wrought 
 
 To a Majestic Universe ! 
 
 Think not that those involved with thee 
 Are lost ; taking thy form again, 
 Etherealized, they still remain 
 
 Thy Spirits everlastingly. 
 
 156
 
 And though in testing Life's brief time 
 The carnal must in earth attend 
 Corruption's waste, at last to end 
 
 Bone-phosphate and a little lime, 
 
 Yet, if the tree, the bulb, the flower, 
 
 Earth-planted, thence draw bloom and scent, 
 Such fruit and leafy wonderment, 
 
 Think'st thou the grave owns no like dower, 
 
 New life potentially to bring 
 
 From whence such undreamed forces lurk, 
 
 And Evolution's functions work 
 
 . _ 
 
 For every God-established thing ? 
 
 Let human hearts with hope be rife, 
 
 For from the dead why not from them ? 
 Come mystic growth, miraculous stem 
 
 And radix of Immortal Life ? 
 
 157
 
 CIt 
 
 Regardless of the gravestone moss, 
 Thy kindred whisper from the spot 
 That bond, though seeming loosed, is not 
 
 The kinship of eternal loss 
 
 Mere earthy sensuousness, the sum 
 
 Of all such gross vitalities. 
 
 What proves its dissolution, frees 
 Force-germinal of Life-to-Come. 
 
 The Alter-ego lieth there 
 
 By that remove, from carnal woes 
 Absolved ; the Primal Spirit rose 
 
 To Endless Life the Grave's despair ! 
 
 Its mouldering cheeks no tears have pearled, 
 No pang in heart, no grief, no sigh. 
 Its patient dust unchallenged by 
 
 The clamor of the work-day world. 
 
 158
 
 cm. 
 
 Factitious death the Truth belied ! 
 Consigned to ashy lifelessness 
 The carnal was yet ne'ertheless 
 
 There is no death ! WE NEVER DIED ! 
 
 Our vital spirits ever near 
 
 To thy gross earthinesses bring 
 
 A solace for thy suffering, 
 But, poor grieved heart ! thou canst not hear. 
 
 That change transitional bestows 
 Radiant-mattered life, which draws 
 Godward, through Evolution's laws, 
 
 And in the Spiritual glows. 
 
 In rays of saintly nimbus dight, 
 Death can no more its life betide, 
 Immaculate and glorified 
 
 In its own palpitating light. 
 
 159
 
 CIV. 
 
 Blissful belief ! by fact assured ! 
 
 Impugning happy eyes with tears ! 
 
 Not Fraud, whose near two thousand years 
 Of evil reign has been endured. 
 
 Persuasions which the Truth portend 
 In splendors of unearthly tints, 
 As earth-verge golden sunset hints 
 
 Another day for this day's end. 
 
 Belated Truth ! yet welcome light ! 
 
 That cheers life's penitential way, 
 
 Corona of its darkest day ! 
 Aurora of its sombrous night ! 
 
 Mindful of stinted love we gave 
 The Mother, Brother, Sister, Wife, 
 When these were vital with this life, 
 
 And careless of the certain grave. 
 
 160
 
 When on that sombre ebbing tide 
 That flows 'twixt Is and Is TO BE, 
 And fading vision fails to see 
 
 Through mists that fold " The Other Side"- 
 
 Then to the unveiled sight is given 
 
 The loved and lost ! What bliss intense, 
 O'erwhelms the franchised Spirit's sense ! 
 
 THE FIRST PROGRESSIVE STEP IN HEAVEN ! 
 
 Religion, lacking fact like this 
 A Bridge with one abutment-end, 
 The Other, that which doth impend 
 
 Above an imminent abyss, 
 
 As in a Phrase not well made out 
 An endless-life confirmed by this, 
 That Death's a mere parenthesis 
 
 Clearing the predicate of Doubt. 
 
 161
 
 cv. 
 
 Give trust in God a wider scope ! 
 
 For life ends not in ended breath, 
 
 Grasp that great Truth and make not death 
 The grim finality of Hope. 
 
 Nor be to His compassion blind : 
 
 Our days with charmed delusions fed, 
 Through Hope's fair Plaisance ever led, 
 
 And Death pathetically kind. 
 
 If worn with sorrow tearless-deep, 
 The wretched hold it not in dread, 
 No more than doth the pillowed head, 
 
 Nightly rehearsing it, in sleep. 
 
 Counting the miseries that mar 
 
 Some lives with grief and pain oppressed, 
 How grateful seems its dreamless rest ! 
 
 What anguish were Insomnia ! 
 
 162
 
 Oh sad, sad Earth ! can Science trace 
 One, 'mid the shining worlds above, 
 That seems less worthy of God's love 
 
 Throughout His Seignory of Space ! 
 
 Where still mendacious libel lives 
 To poison all the wells of Truth, 
 Embittering lives of age and youth : 
 
 Yet trained in Crime the Borgia thrives. 
 
 CVI. 
 
 There is no "word of God," save facts 
 Inscribed in Nature's marvellous tomes ; 
 Through these all " Revelation" comes, 
 
 And Science, as exponent, acts. 
 
 Through these God speaks ; no priest intrudes 
 In cringings bent ; no homage feigned ; 
 No aid in having facts explained ; 
 
 No cassock twaddling platitudes. 
 
 163
 
 Behold " God's Word :" Great Primer Type ! 
 
 Proclaims inexorable fact ! 
 
 Not theorems which Priests extract, 
 As Sodom-fruit, from growths unripe. 
 
 HE cares for Bibles not a whit, 
 
 Nor Shasters, Vedas, Alcorans, 
 
 Nor any Testament of man's ; 
 His Nature's truths are " Holy Writ." 
 
 There read divinest Verity ! 
 
 There Truth the Living God reveals ; 
 
 His Power proves, confirms and seals 
 His cognizance of Sovereignty. 
 
 CVII. 
 
 Only through Science can mankind 
 
 Towards knowledge of the God advance ; 
 And not by theoretic chance 
 
 The esoteric mystery find. 
 
 164
 
 On its serene, unvapored heights, 
 Though no Mosaic thunder roars, 
 God welcomes wistful man, and Laws 
 
 That are Eternal Truths, indites. 
 
 Not from ''thick darkness, fire, nor cloud" 
 Communeth God with tribes of men, 
 Nor writes on stone with finger-pen, 
 
 Nor with a " mighty voice " speaks loud ; 
 
 But, in the gentlest whisperings, low 
 Utters to Reason and the Soul 
 Wisdom not found 'neath cowl and stole 
 
 Nor typed in Gospel folio. 
 
 With no Apocrypha in sooth ! 
 And we can lap our souls in ease 
 In touch with Eternal Verities, 
 
 The sacro-sanctities of truth, 
 
 Throughout His Universe bestowed, 
 In idiom terse : their meaning lies 
 Clear to the searching soul and wise 
 
 God's Imprimatur of the Code. 
 
 165
 
 CVIII. 
 
 True priests and prophets there are found, 
 Who palter not with fact, to please 
 Bigots nor Sects nor Holy Sees, 
 
 But reverently " God's Word " expound. 
 
 With Books of Truth the world He fills, 
 Star-typed in volumes of the Sky ! 
 On laminated rocks that lie 
 
 Script on the everlasting hills, 
 
 In wondrous parl of Sun and Earth, 
 Moving in stately progress, through 
 The glittering empire of the blue, 
 
 Zoned in a constellated girth. 
 
 The panoramic westward trend 
 That congregated Suns rehearse, 
 With Universe on Universe ; 
 
 Remote Creations without end. 
 
 166
 
 Worlds in measureless depths of space 
 Moving to music Spirits hear, 
 And God-ordained for every sphere, 
 
 For countless systems, room and place ; 
 
 Beheld through no sect-dungeon-bars 
 The awed and impressed mortal reads 
 God's manual, as the planet speeds 
 
 Through Night's vast solitude of stars 
 
 All garrulous of Him ; and so 
 By no fraud-revelation ruled, 
 Be not by Sects so grossly fooled, 
 
 AND LET THE FETISH BIBLE GO. 
 
 CIX. 
 
 From tablets of the mind 'twere best 
 To have ITS tutelage erased, 
 And hold cerebral context, graced 
 
 As TRUTH'S GOD-WRITTEN PALIMPSEST. 
 
 167
 
 There's more of God in weed and briar, 
 More of His voice in whispering leaves, 
 More of His love in Autumn sheaves, 
 
 Than in its fabled text entire. 
 
 There's more of God in kindly balm 
 Of loving ministry to grief, 
 Than found in searching every leaf 
 
 Forming the covin Gospel sham. 
 
 Sun-lighted leas, or storm-torn crags, 
 Anthem of Ocean, song of Brook, 
 Speak more of Him than monkish book, 
 
 Inked o'er with lies on pulp of rags. 
 
 Or scenic splendors of the night, 
 With stars and galaxy aglow, 
 The sibilant hush of Earth below 
 
 Awed in the palpitating light ; 
 
 The Forest Fane, its dim defiles, 
 
 Groined gothic-like with arching boughs, 
 The aromatic dusk and drowse 
 
 Pervading all its minster-aisles ; 
 
 168
 
 Temple of mystic God more meet ; 
 O'er altars leafy baldachin 
 It's mellowed sunlight, holier than 
 
 The chandler's tallow counterfeit, 
 
 Glooming a famed basilica, 
 
 Where gaudy superflux of show 
 Insults the Want and kneeling Woe, 
 
 And God far-off so very far ! 
 
 Yet man can not conceive as fact 
 That all that's seen or is to see 
 An " always has been, and to be" 
 
 Apart from a creative act. 
 
 And not the hexaemeron fad, 
 
 Which makes ONE day in every seven 
 A quack-proprietary Heaven 
 
 For every sanctimonious Cad. 
 
 169
 
 ex. 
 
 Abyssmal mysteries are these ! 
 
 The onward and the backward way 
 Of endless progress " every day 
 
 Conflux of two Eternities." 
 
 Far better 'twere that we should praise 
 And honor antique faith forlorn, 
 The sanscrit-pagan creeds outworn, 
 
 The gospels of long-vanished days 
 
 Vyasa Legend, Hindoo Ved, 
 
 Bhagavad-Geeta-Song with these 
 The Zenda-Vesta of Parsees, 
 
 Th' inspired script of gods long dead ; 
 
 Or to Gotama Buddha pray 
 
 Who in the Holy Bo-Tree's shade 
 Seeking Nirvana, sat and said 
 
 Om! Om! Om ! Om ! the live-long day- 
 
 170
 
 Than make a fetish of the tome 
 Belittling God, and glozing men, 
 Compiled by none knows who, or when, 
 
 Save Gnostics and the Sham of Rome ; 
 
 Beguiling-priest's insensate trash ! 
 
 Culled from Akkadian myth, and made 
 As " Holy Writ" to masquerade, 
 
 Serving as orthodoxal hash, 
 
 Wherewith to nourish fools ! and thence 
 Drawing the means of sumptuous style 
 From witless dupes, whom they beguile, 
 
 Degenerates, dwarfed to impotence, 
 
 Lead lotus-eating lives, sufficed 
 
 With all contentments earth can give, 
 Act lordly, princely parts, and live 
 
 The bold antitheses of Christ. 
 
 The wine of sense drank to the lees 
 Till morbid grown in its excess, 
 All things become a weariness, 
 
 Save Power, Wealth and life-long ease ; 
 
 171
 
 Regarding Life a sensuous feast 
 For all to revel at, like swine, 
 Not Opportunity Divine, 
 
 For man to abrogate the beast. 
 
 While Bigotry all progress quells, 
 Filling the land with zealous dupes, 
 Where Scholar to the Dullard stoops ; 
 
 And Learning wears the cap-and-bells. 
 
 CXI. 
 
 Are surpliced frauds to dwell at ease, 
 Enlightened Nations as their tools, 
 And earth continue breeding fools 
 
 Of measureless credulities ? 
 
 How long to us Time's cycles seem, 
 Which are, in sight of God, a day ! 
 This wrong cannot endure alway ; 
 
 We cannot know His Wisdom's scheme. 
 
 172
 
 The life-time of a lie, in sooth, 
 Seems endless to the finite man, 
 And yet how very brief a span 
 
 In the Eternity of Truth ! 
 
 How strange that Freemen cannot see 
 This subtle power's insidious trend ; 
 Nor rise in righteous wrath, and end 
 
 Its Despotism of dupery ! 
 
 Its secret watchfulness alert, 
 
 With ever stealthy grasp, to clutch 
 The Talisman it covets much, 
 
 Which gained, were Freedom's deadly hurt. 
 
 CXII. 
 
 Dear Land ! the School's thy talisman, 
 The magian-wand that round thee draws 
 The magic circle of thy cause, 
 
 Guarding thy Freedom in its span, 
 
 173
 
 And 'gainst all shapes of Demonism, 
 All reason-killing spawn of Hell, 
 A potent necromantic spell, 
 
 With stalwart force of exorcism. 
 
 Keep it thy amulet and shield ! 
 For in constricting stress of creed, 
 Freedom is surely doomed to bleed, 
 
 Her fate ordained, confirmed and sealed. 
 
 Strangle the Python ere its coil, 
 Compressing human culture more, 
 Recalls the ''darkest age" of yore, 
 
 And Saxon-virtues prove its spoil. 
 
 CXIII. 
 
 Beshrew a priest's inveterate greed ! 
 
 Rend warp and woof of web-spun frauds 
 Disprize the altar's tinsel gauds, 
 
 Scorning the sacerdotal breed. 
 
 174
 
 Dispel chimeras ! Let all eyes 
 
 Behold with vision purged, uncloaked, 
 The hideous phantoms, priest-evoked, 
 
 Standing revealed : Impostures ! Lies / 
 
 Of Charity avoid the loss ! 
 Let it thy every act pervade, 
 A form of Love that God has made 
 
 The Universe's binding force. 
 
 Let no mere Faith thy rule debauch, 
 Sanctioning dogmas ; nor yet blind 
 The imperial faculty of mind ; 
 
 Placing in Reason's hand the torch. 
 
 CXIV. 
 
 From all contaminations freed, 
 Naught to emasculate thy might, 
 Then wilt thou, eminent in light, 
 
 Illumine "all the world indeed ;" 
 
 175
 
 And in that splendor shed afar, 
 
 A glow by altruism given, 
 
 Before the wondering worlds of Heaven 
 Earth rolls no more so sad a star. 
 
 Thy glories counting manifold, 
 
 By peoples joyed with happy days ; 
 Who jubilant, their voices raise, 
 
 Till to the stars acclaim is rolled. 
 
 From zone to zone the song will run, 
 While, as the anthemed-chorus swells, 
 Melodious conclave of the bells 
 
 Peal their responsive antiphon. 
 
 For all the steepled-tongues will chime 
 Carillon to the cadenced chant : 
 A blitheful sound reverberant 
 
 Throughout the ringing reach of Time. 
 
 And through the trumpet-coil of fame 
 The ransomed brotherhoods, o'erjoyed, 
 Blow praise abroad ; earth still uncloyed 
 
 With iteration of thy name. 
 
 176
 
 cxv. 
 
 Dear Land ! unparagoned in worth, 
 The pride of every patriot's heart, 
 The refuge of the wronged thou art, 
 
 A Peoples rule ! the hope of earth. 
 
 Unto thy inspirations true, 
 
 Tread fearlessly the path of Right, 
 Made clear by Wisdom's guiding light, 
 
 And counciled by the wisest few, 
 
 From Arctic to Antarctic snow, 
 And where the tropic-girdled earth 
 Glows in an endless summer-birth, 
 
 The echo of thy fame will go, 
 
 Till only by earth's bournes defined, 
 With hate for every form of wrong ; 
 Foe of the arbitrary strong, 
 
 Thy ^Egis bucklers all mankind. 
 
 177
 
 And where thy banner floats unfurled, 
 Its stars, as one in myth of old, 
 Will warn the shepherds of her fold 
 
 Where Freedom's cradled in the world. 
 
 The earth no more condemned to mourn 
 The inhumanities of men : 
 Nations as Christs in advent, then 
 
 The VERY GOD OF PEACE were born. 
 
 Examples, linked with precept, must 
 Relax the Despot's brutal grasp ; 
 The fetters of the slave unclasp, 
 
 Or roll unworthy thrones in dust. 
 
 CXVI. 
 
 Be not, as Propagandist, weak, 
 
 But firm of purpose, strong in strife, 
 For in the swarming mob of life 
 
 There is no freedom for the meek. 
 
 178
 
 Boldly asserting manhood's rights, 
 No virile force on shadows spent ; 
 Reason no longer impotent ; 
 
 Free to dispute the Right of Might. 
 
 Firm in revolt of priest-pretence, 
 Tainted with guile and low desire, 
 Who as the guides to God aspire, 
 
 While wallowing in the cess of sense. 
 
 Unbiased by corrupt appeal 
 
 Through selfish greed in statesman-guise 
 
 Or partisan majorities, 
 Where private gain mocks public weal; 
 
 By stainless purpose ever led, 
 
 In righting wrongs made manifest, 
 Towards Honor be thy steps addressed 
 
 Honor and Glory wooed and wed. 
 
 179
 
 CXVII. 
 
 Thou art the Chosen land where worth 
 And wisdom will establish sway, 
 Scourging all hoary wrongs away, 
 
 And all the crimes of feudal birth; 
 
 Where man, in scorn of cleric rods, 
 Will yet turn Churches into Schools, 
 When FACT and NOT ASSUMPTION rules 
 
 Those shrines of misbegotten Gods; 
 
 And changed in later times to be, 
 
 With all their ruck of Rite and Creed 
 (Warped trappings of the priestly breed), 
 
 The Junk-Shops of Theology. 
 
 And Science' guiding light appears, 
 
 And man, sustained by Truths, not Hopes, 
 No longer onward blindly gropes, 
 
 Seeking his God through grief and fears, 
 
 180
 
 Nor by invented facts allured, 
 
 Which Dupes accept, but knowledge spurns ; 
 
 To THAT as to the Godhead turns, 
 Finding Eternal Life assured ; 
 
 Not harried by the silly fake, 
 In making man, God was at loss 
 How otherwise than on the Cross, 
 
 To expiate His huge mistake. 
 
 CXVIII. 
 
 Mankind's enfranchisement thy goal, 
 
 Into Life's tragic-drama go ! 
 
 Act well thy part, it seems as though 
 God had rehearsed thee for that rdle. 
 
 Uphold the speech that frees the mind, 
 Enslaved by faith in worthless creeds, 
 Make views clear-visioned for all needs, 
 
 And thus free both the bond and blind. 
 
 181
 
 Scorning the fictions of a sect, 
 And groveling faith's credulities, 
 Wipe off the dust from callous knees, 
 
 And let true manhood stand erect. 
 
 In fetishism, nevermore, 
 
 Searching to find, with false desire, 
 
 Evolving Deity from mire, 
 Truth's holy form from mythic lore. 
 
 Braving sectarian wrath and ban, 
 Till culture has the world released 
 From Rule of Prelate, Pope and Priest- 
 Mere euphemisms of Charlatan. 
 
 And dogmas of all Holy Sees, 
 All fictions, Superstition-bred, 
 Lie like the strangled pythons dead 
 
 Beside the cradled Hercules. 
 
 182
 
 CXIX. 
 
 Avoid the curse of Church-ruled lands, 
 Lest, in some not-far-distant hour, 
 Thy grave prove but a step to Power, 
 
 Made gradient by prelatic hands. 
 
 For thy predestined fate may be, 
 In fostering Hierarchal lust, 
 That thou wilt grovel in the dust 
 
 Of darkness and credulity, 
 
 And swarming ignorance o'erwhelm 
 Thy proud embattled Ship-of-State, 
 And wreck it, through a Jesuit hate, 
 
 Though Freedom's hand were on the helm. 
 
 And to the patriot's sight appear 
 Her mournful loving eyes downcast, 
 Leaving her golden age at last, 
 
 Sad foot-prints of a grieved Astrsea. 
 
 183
 
 cxx. 
 
 Be pure in purpose, broad in plan, 
 And with unfaltering step advance 
 On that high plane of circumstance, 
 
 That makes for brotherhood of man. 
 
 For every race is kin to thee ; 
 
 Lighten the cross thy brother bears, 
 And, with a sympathy that wears 
 
 The impress of Divinity, 
 
 Aid Famine with thy bounteous hands, 
 Succor the struggling and distressed, 
 Raise up the fallen and oppressed 
 
 At home, and even in distant lands. 
 
 Among the foremost hold thy place, 
 To aid, enlighten and redress ; 
 Exemplar of all nobleness, 
 
 'Mong men the Archetypal race. 
 
 184
 
 And arbitrate thy wrongs, and so 
 Avoid the crime of warring hosts, 
 Be thou a Perikles who boasts 
 
 " None for my acts wears weeds of woe " ! 
 
 Winning a name that earth delights ; 
 
 Of the world's welfare truest friend ; 
 
 To wrong subdue and right defend, 
 The Champion of all human rights. 
 
 Till in all hearts thy cult abounds, 
 Effacing evils, ranks and castes ; 
 And with potential vigor blasts 
 
 The perpetuity of Crowns. 
 
 CXXI. 
 
 That all may glory in thy worth, 
 Magnetic glamour that invites 
 Nations to be thy proselytes, 
 
 And heirs of tributary earth. 
 
 185
 
 For Freedom's lustral floods set free, 
 Absterse the infamies that lurk 
 In Minster, Temple, Church and Kirk- 
 
 The Augeas of Feudality ; 
 
 And in marauding flow immersed, 
 Sceptre, Tiara, Crown and Stole, 
 In a detested litter roll 
 
 The symbols of a thrall accursed. 
 
 186
 
 EPILOGUE. 
 CXXII. 
 
 Perchance thy fame, evoking hate, 
 Tempts envious Powers to prevail 
 Against thee and Armadas sail, 
 
 Noting thy peace-allegiant state ; 
 
 While Britain, proud pelagic Queen, 
 Beholding from her moated shores 
 Their " leather and prunella" wars ; 
 
 Knowing her kin, looks on, serene 
 
 Though her dread symbol at her gates, 
 Regardant ! but with bristling mane 
 Horrent in anger, not in vain, 
 
 Daunting the allied foemen, waits. 
 
 187
 
 If e'er confederate force beset 
 
 Her Power, and aid become a need, 
 Be not outdone in helpful deed ; 
 
 Do not forget ! Do not forget ! 
 
 Unmindful of past taunting ways, 
 Be kin and kind, and let her see 
 How slight an air of sympathy 
 
 Brings up a smouldering love, ablaze. 
 
 And, ever coupled with thy name, 
 
 " Peace and good will to men " to be 
 With universal Liberty, 
 
 Thy pass-words to Eternal Fame. 
 
 188
 
 L'ENVOI. 
 CXXIII. 
 
 I hold in homage due the one 
 
 Who, with a mind of subtlest thought, 
 And tongue of fearless utterance, sought 
 
 By Truth not statements fiction-spun 
 
 To free a purblind class, enslaved 
 By Churchdom he who pitying trod 
 Their imbecile beliefs, rough-shod, 
 
 And their mendacious anger braved. 
 
 Thy work on earth I hold divine, 
 Thou gentlest, noblest man of man ! 
 My soul is with thee now as then ; 
 
 And loving hands stretched forth for thine. 
 
 189
 
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