Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!
Thou great First Cause, least understood!
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that thou art good,
And that myself am blind
Yet gave me, in this dark estate,
To see the good from ill;
And, binding Nature fast in Fate,
Left free the human will:
What Conscience dictates to be done,
Or warns me not to do--
This, teach me more than hell to shun,
That, more than heaven pursue.
What blessings thy free bounty gives,
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when man receives:
To enjoy is to obey.
Yet not to earth's contracted span
Thy goodness let me bound,
Or think thee Lord alone of man,
When thousand worlds are round.
Let not this weak, unknowing hand
Presume thy bolts to throw,
And deal damnation round the land
On each I judge thy foe.
If I am right, thy grace impart
Still in the right to stay;
If I am wrong, O teach my heart
To find that better way.
Save me alike from foolish pride
Or impious discontent,
At aught thy wisdom has denied,
Or aught thy goodness lent.
Teach me to feel another's woe,
To hide the fault I see:
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me.
Mean though I am--not wholly so,
Since quickened by thy breath:--
- O
- lead me wheresoe'er I go,
Through this day's life or death.
This day, be bread and peace my lot:
All else beneath the sun
Thou know'st if best bestowed or not,
And let thy will be done.
To thee, whose temple is all space,
Whose altar, earth, sea, skies,
One chorus let all being raise!
All Nature's incense rise!
And now we come upon a strange little well in the desert. Few flowers
indeed shine upon its brink, and it flows with a somewhat unmusical
ripple: it is a well of the water of life notwithstanding, for its song
tells of the love and truth which are the grand power of God.
John Byrom, born in Manchester in the year 1691, a man whose strength of
thought and perception of truth greatly surpassed his poetic gifts, yet
delighted so entirely in the poetic form that he wrote much and chiefly
in it. After leaving Cambridge, he gained his livelihood for some time by
teaching a shorthand of his own invention, but was so distinguished as a
man of learning generally that he was chosen an F.R.S. in 1723. Coming
under the influence, probably through William Law, of the writings of
Jacob Böhme, the marvellous shoemaker of Görlitz in Silesia, who lived in
the time of our Shakspere, and heartily adopting many of his views, he
has left us a number of religious poems, which are seldom so sweet in
music as they are profound in the metaphysics of religion. Here we have
yet again a mystical thread running radiant athwart both warp and woof of
our poetic web: the mystical thinker will ever be found the reviver of
religious poetry; and although some of the seed had come from afar both
in time and space, Byrom's verse is of indigenous growth. Much of the
thought of the present day will be found in his verses. Here is a
specimen of his metrical argumentation. It is taken from a series of
Meditations for every Day in Passion Week.