His mood alarm’d me, yet could I protest:
“Nay, Haydn, nay! I do not love the world:
I long to leave it; yes, all thought of it.”
“How much less worldliness is found,” he ask’d,
“Within the Church than in your world so call’d?—
The Prince of this World is not nice in choice
Of equipages; where he cannot check,
He mounts the car of truth and grasps the rein;
And when the Devil drives, he drives for home.
‘The world,’ what means this, but the world alone,—
The mass, devoid of mind, truth, spirit, love?—
But holds no church the same?—A mass?—ay, ay.
Devoid of mind?—Why not?—But show the place
It crowds not reason out to edge in faith.—
But ‘faith,’ say you, ‘is reasonable’?—Ay,
When in it there is reason; when the thing
In which it trusts is truth. But ah! too oft
Just prick the forms, and back of them you find—
What?—truth?—nay, nay, a priest—a man, forsooth,
Who differs from the rest of men in clothes,
In wearing worn-out habits, which the need
And progress of our times have cast aside;—
Ay, wearing them o’er body, mind, and soul;
Though all who think know well that moods, whose range
Is girt by customs past, (which could alone
Prejudge thought’s present range) fit prejudice;
And this is in behind your Church’s forms.
“You say, perhaps, ‘the Spirit formed the forms
To fit the life’?—they fitted life that was;
But life, if life, will grow; the life of love
Has not yet fill’d the scope around, above,
Of heavens that for it wait. What form’d the forms
Can still be forming them.—If forms exist
Wherein no Spirit works, no present life,—
The things are hollow; and a hollow form
The Devil flies for, like a flying squirrel
For hollow tree-trunks; and when once within,
But half disguised inside his robes of white,
Loud chanting out mere ceremonious cant,
He tempts toward his hypocrisy an age
That knows too much of Christian life, at last,
For heathen life to tempt it.
“Judge by fruits:
Here you—God gave you beauty—to be seen!
And grace to bless this dear, sweet home. What power
Would snatch you from us? make a very hell
Of what might else be heaven?—Think you ’tis love?
Not so; it only hates love; plays the part—
Not of the Christ who yielded up his life,
But of the world that made him yield it up;
It only trusts in force, in force that lies;
And now that it can hold you with a vow
Which but deceit could claim that God enjoin’d,
It seizes you to plunge you down, down, down,
To feel the full damnation of a faith
That can believe the voice within the soul
A lying guide which cannot be obey’d
Without foul consciousness of inward sin,—
To plunge you down, and hold you till the cells
Of your pure, guileless heart, all stain’d and steep’d,
Drip only dregs of stagnant viciousness!”