Henry Abbey: Verses about Faith

When from the vaulted wonder of the sky
The curtain of the light is drawn aside,
And I behold the stars in all their wide
Significance and glorious mystery,
Assured that those more distant orbs are suns
Round which innumerable worlds revolve,—
My faith grows strong, my day-born doubts dissolve,
And death, that dread annulment which life shuns,
Or fain would shun, becomes to life the way,
The thoroughfare to greater worlds on high,
The bridge from star to star. Seek how we may,
There is no other road across the sky;
And, looking up, I hear star-voices say:
“You could not reach us if you did not die.”

In the New World, the hemisphere unknown
When, Hebrew-wise, Moriah uttered praise-
In a new land of liberty and hope,
Of golden harvests and of bread, fresh fields-
In the new Promised Land-we dedicate,
We consecrate this House of Righteousness.
Be in our hearts, Shekinah!

In all this land there is no king but God.
He is our God, and we have built to Him.
To men of every creed, who serve his law,
We make the doors of this that we have built,
As wide with welcome as are freedom's doors,
As open and as tolerant as they.
Be in our hearts, Shekinah!

Of us the Branch to whom the nations bow.
In us is testimony and the root
Whence sprang the palmy, Messianic New.
The New is of the Old to which we cling.
Not to destroy the New we plant the Old,
But that the Old may flourish with the New.
Be in our hearts, Shekinah!

The end we know not; but we wander on,
Down the regretful wilderness of time.
Nations have risen and dissolved away;
But we remain, and are together bound
As are the glad, innumerable suns,
The blazing jewels in the Almighty's crown.
Be in our hearts, Shekinah!

Here may we ever worship as we will,
With strong simplicity and manly trust.
Here may the wistful aspiration, prayer,
Fire the neglected voices of the soul.
And may Jehovah this, his temple give
The rapture of cherubic wheels and wings.
Be in our hearts, Shekinah!

Two angels stood without The City's gate
And down beside the wall where ran a stream,
And palms hung over, and the day was mild.

These angels' chosen duty was to aid
Weak comers to The City from our world.
For when they saw a spirit down the void
Mounting on weary, nigh exhausted wings,
They flew to it and helped it to The Gate.
So, often in communion with the souls
That from this life depart, these angels learned
Much of our world, which, to their sight, was like
A glowing topaz far below in space.
Beside the jasper wall where fell a stream,
And palms waved over and the light was soft,
I marveled much to hear the angels speak.
For both were weary of the long regret
That, tho' the Christ is worshiped in the world,
And tho' his name is great and spread abroad,
There are so few obedient to his will.
Still extant are the sins that wrought his death.
The envy of the chief priests and the scribes,
The avarice of false Iscariot,
The slander of the blatant multitude,
The lack of manhood, the servility
Of Pontius Pilate, these four sins, and more,
Continue unabated as the seas.
Old, savage error in the blood survives,
Ignores the truth and sullies its domain.
Of those who hopefully avow the faith,
Few for their enemies pray, or aught forgive,
Or with fair favors unkind acts return.
And fewer still judge not lest they be judged;
For most fling wide uncharities of speech,
Warped prejudice all false, or calumny.
Many evil with evil resist, nor fear
To punish those who wrong them, as if God
Were not a jealous God, and had forgot
That vengeance is his fixed, essential right
And his alone.

Both voices swelled and chimed
All variously and like cathedral bells.
Then the swift angels, with white wings outspread,
Plunged down th' abrupt, interminable gulf.
They disappeared, but soon to sight returned,
And I beheld a ray of love divine
Illumine their calm faces, as each bore
A rescued spirit Godward to The Gate.

When might made right in days of chivalry,
Hatot and Ringsdale, over claims of land,
Darkened their lives with stormy enmity,
And for their cause agreed this test to stand:
To fight steel-clad till either's blood made wet
The soil disputed; and a time was set.

But Hatot sickened when the day drew near,
And strength lay racked that once had been his boast.
Then Agnes, his fair daughter, for the fear
That in proud honor he would suffer most,
Resolved to do the battle in his name,
And leave no foothold for the tread of Shame.

She, at the gray, first coming of the day,
Shook off still sleep, and from her window gazed.
The west was curtained with night's dark delay;
A cold and waning moon in silence raised
It's bent and wasted finger o'er the vale,
And seemed sad Death that beckoned, wan and pale.

But Hope sails by the rugged coasts of Fear;
For while awakened birds sang round her eaves,
Our Agnes armed herself with knightly gear
Of rattling hauberk and of jointed greaves;
Withal she put on valor, that to feel
Does more for victory than battle-steel.

She had a sea of hair, whose odor sweet,
And golden softness, in a moonless tide
Ran rippling toward the white coast of her feet;
But as beneath a cloud the sea may hide,
Son in her visored, burnished helmet, there,
Under the cloud-like plume, was hid her hair.

Bearing the mighty lance, sharp-spiked and long,
She at the sill bestrode her restless steed.
Her kneeling soul prayed God to make her strong,
And prayer is nearest path to every need.
She clattered on the bridge, and on apace,
And met dread Ringsdale at the hour and place.

They clash in onslaught; steel to steel replies;
The champed bit foams; rider and ridden fight.
Each feels the grim and brutal instinct rise
That in forefront of havoc takes delight.
The lightning of the lances flashed and ran,
Until, at last, the maid unhorsed the man.

Then on her steed, she, bright-eyed, flushed, and glad,
Her helmet lifted in the sylvan air;
And from the iron concealment that it had,
The noiseless ocean of her languid hair
Broke in disheveled waves: the cross and heart,
Jewels that latched her vest, she drew apart.

'Lo, it is Agnes, even I!' she said,
'Who with my trusty lance have thrust thee down!
For hate of shame the fray I hazarded;
And yet, not me the victory should crown,
But God, the Merciful, who helps the right,
And lent me strength to conquer in the fight.'

The sun-bronzed Arabs, living at the base
Of Karnak's mighty ruin, see in it
The work of no man's hand. They cannot think
Its lofty beauty and majestic form,
So awe-begetting, even in decay,
Are the unaided deed of their own kind.
But, as most men are wont, when sharply faced
By problems that they do not understand,
The squalid Arabs, quite too ignorant
To seek in natural causes for a key,
Exalt their case to the miraculous
And supernatural, and so believe
That monstrous genii, in antiquity,
To please the holder of some magic ring,
Built Karnak in a night!

All governments,
Books, customs, buildings, railways, ships, and all
The stark realities that men have made,
Are but imagination's utterances.
The invisible speaks in the visible,
And over all, the high, far-reaching thoughts
Of great imaginations domineer.
First of the Magi, Zoroaster yet
Colors the Western theosophic mind,
Besides the minds of Asian myriads.
Nor have his genii lost hold on men;
But are an explanation, in the East,
Of architectural victories, which appear
Beyond the power of human hands to win.

But we, of higher credence, think not so.
Of larger literature and ampler range,
We know the same full-browed intelligence,
The same Masonic wisdom, that upreared
High-girdled Babylon and purple Tyre
And built the Temple of King Solomon,
Built also the sepulchral Pyramids,
Build Philæ, hundred-gated Thebes, and all
Those works stupendous, whose calm grandeur yet
Shows the departed glory of the Nile.

It scarce seems longer past than yesterday
That men undid the brazen clamps which held
Upon its pedestal the Obelisk-
That ray-like shaft, which Thutmes raised at On
To grace the Temple of the Setting Sun-
And found Masonic emblems there bestowed.
Such useful emblems have been found withal
In prehistoric ruins Mexican.
If other clue were needed to connect
Our modern Craft with builders of the past,
We have the evidence of what we know,-
That nothing can be operative long
And not be speculative too; for Use
Is more than manual. Intelligence
Must see the ideal in the real, and clothe
Upon the impalpable and naked truth
The palpable resemblance; it must needs
Behold in all that is material,
External, the express embodiment,
Or signature, of far more lasting things,
Which are internal, spiritual.

Swedenborg,
Upon the other worlds of heaven and hell,
His ideality imposed, and strove
To picture them, the universe and God,
Using the splendid words of holy writ
As signs and tokens of the mysteries
That, in imagination, he beheld.
But not so far the wise Freemason dares.
In square and compasses, in setting-maul,
And in the other stated working-tools
Used by the Craft, he sees an ideal use.
To him they are the emblems of such things
As have been found alike in every soul
And make the world fraternal.

Symbolism
Is the rich blood and life of Masonry.
A symbol is the solid link between
The real and the ideal. It must be
That man himself, the crown of earthly things,
Made in his Maker's image, is the true,
The only symbol of the Power Divine.
It follows that sublime Freemasonry
And heaven-born, strong-pinioned Poetry
Are one at heart; for, whatsoever be
Sincere, commensurate, symbolical,
Is native of the Muse-her work. To think
In symbols is imagination's house.
So the fast hold which Masonry has kept
Upon the minds of men for centuries-
For long millenniums-is, in truth, the same
As that of Poetry. For Poetry
Drank from the fountain of immortal youth,
Then rose in beauty, like the Morning Star,
And lit the holy, intellectual fire,
Guide of our faith and practice, that is laid
Upon Masonic altars.

When expressed
In buildings she is seen, as in the tree
The hamadryad, we but change her name,
And Architecture nominate the Muse.
But the broad tenets, on whose soil is based
Our Ancient Order, are a fertile land,
And all the arts and sciences alike
Find in it healthful sustenance, and, nursed
In genial sunshine and condensate dew,
Burst into bloom and yield abundant fruits.