How many chatterers of a creed
Think doubt the gravest sin,
Unmindful of her double birth--
For worry is her twin.
Ah! Christian atheism seems
The most insulting kind,
For, though the tongue says, God is love,
The heart is deaf and blind.
How he who marks the sparrow's fall
Must be aggrieved to see
These loud lip-champions manifest
Such infidelity!
Each fretful line upon their brow,
Dug by the plow of care,
Is treason to their pledge of faith
And satire on their prayer.
O just to hold, without one fear,
The strong, warm Hand above,
With orthodoxy of the heart--
The childlike creed of love!
None such can be a heretic;
Nay, only he forsooth
Who lives the falsity of doubt,
But prates the cant of truth.
--Frederic Lawrence Knowles.
Worry and Fret were two little men
That knocked at my door again and again.
"O pray let us in, but to tarry a night,
And we will be off with the dawning of light."
At last, moved to pity, I opened the door
To shelter these travelers, hungry and poor;
But when on the morrow I bade them "Adieu,"
They said, quite unmoved, "We'll tarry with you."
And, deaf to entreaty and callous to threat,
These troublesome guests abide with me yet.
Yet, in the maddening maze of things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed trust my spirit clings:
I know that God is good!
--John Greenleaf Whittier.