Dawn and the day: the night behind me: that
Suffices me: I break the bounds: I see,

And nothing more; believe and nothing less.
My future is not one of my concerns.

Translated by Prof. Edward Dowden.

DOUBT

HELEN HUNT JACKSON

They bade me cast the thing away,
They pointed to my hands all bleeding,
They listened not to all my pleading;

The thing I meant I could not say;
I knew that I should rue the day
If once I cast that thing away.

I grasped it firm, and bore the pain;
The thorny husks I stripped and scattered;
If I could reach its heart, what mattered
If other men saw not my gain,
Or even if I should be slain?
I knew the risks; I chose the pain.

O, had I cast that thing away,
I had not found what most I cherish,
A faith without which I should perish,-
The faith which, like a kernel, lay
Hid in the husks which on that day
My instinct would not throw away!

THE BEGINNINGS OF FAITH

SIR LEWIS MORRIS

All travail of high thought,

All secrets vainly sought,

All struggles for right, heroic, perpetually fought;

Faint gleams of purer fire,

Conquests of gross desire,

Whereby the fettered soul ascends continually higher;

Pure cares for love or friend

Which ever upward tend,

Too deep and heavenward and true to have on earth their end;

Vile hearts malign and fell,

Lives which no tongue may tell,

So dark and dread and shameful that they breathe a present hell;

What mountain, deep-set lake,

Sea wastes which surge and break,

Fierce storms which, roaring from the north, the midnight forests shake;

Fair morns of summer days,

Rich harvest eves that raise

The soul and heart o'erburdened to an ecstasy of praise;

Low whispers, vague and strange,
Which through our being range,

Breathing perpetual presage of some mighty coming change:

These in the soul do breed

Thoughts which, at last, shall lead

To some clear, firm assurance of a satisfying creed.

FAITH

ALEXANDER POPE

For modes of faith let graceless Zealots fight;
He can't be wrong whose life is in the right;
In faith and hope the world will disagree,
But all mankind's concern is charity:

All must be false that thwart this one great end;
And all of God that bless mankind, or mend.
Man, like the generous vine, supported lives:
The strength he gains is from the embrace he gives.

IF THIS WERE FAITH

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

God, if this were enough,

That I see things bare to the buff
And up to the buttocks in mire;

That I ask not hope nor hire,

Not in the husk,

Nor dawn beyond the dusk,

Nor life beyond death:

God, if this were faith?

Having felt thy wind in my face
Spit sorrow and disgrace,
Having seen thine evil doom

In Golgotha and Khartoum,

And the brutes, the work of thine hands,

Fill with injustice lands

And stain with blood the sea:

If still in my veins the glee

Of the black night and the sun

And the lost battle, run:

If, an adept,

The iniquitous lists I still accept

With joy, and joy to endure and be withstood,

And still to battle and perish for a dream of good:
God, if that were enough?

If to feel, in the ink of the slough,

And the sink of the mire,

Veins of glory and fire

Run through and transpierce and transpire,

And a secret purpose of glory in every part,

And the answering glory of battle fill my heart;

To thrill with the joy of girded men

To go on forever and fail and go on again,

And be mauled to the earth and arise,

And contend for the shade of a word and a thing not seen

Iwith the eyes;

With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night

That somehow the right is the right

And the smooth shall bloom from the rough:

Lord, if that were enough?

FAITH

JOHN B. TABB

In every seed to breathe the flower,

In every drop of dew

To reverence a cloistered star

Within the distant blue;

To wait the promise of the bow
Despite the cloud between,

Is Faith-the fervid evidence
Of loveliness unseen.

From IN MEMORIAM

ALFRED TENNYSON

Proem

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,

Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

Believing where we cannot prove;

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and, lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:

Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die; And thou hast made him: thou art just.

Thou seemest human and divine,

The highest, holiest manhood, thou; Our wills are ours, we know not how: Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell: That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before,

But vaster. We are fools and slight;
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

Forgive what seemed my sin in me,
What seemed my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.

Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.