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| ONE God the Arabian Prophet preached to man, | |
| One God the Orient still | |
| Adores through many a realm of mighty span, | |
| A God of Power and Will— | |
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| A God that shrouded in His lonely light | 5 |
| Rests utterly apart | |
| From all the vast Creations of His might, | |
| From Nature, Man, and Art:— | |
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| A Being in whose solitary hand | |
| All other beings weigh | 10 |
| No more than in the potter’s reckoning stand | |
| The workings of his clay:— | |
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| A Power that at its pleasure will create, | |
| To save or to destroy; | |
| And to eternal pain predestinate, | 15 |
| As to eternal joy:— | |
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| An unconditioned, irrespective Will, | |
| Demanding simple awe, | |
| Beyond all principles of good or ill, | |
| Above idea of law. | 20 |
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| No doctrine here of perfect Love divine, | |
| To which the bounds belong | |
| Only of that unalterable line | |
| Disparting right from wrong:— | |
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| A love that while it must not regulate | 25 |
| The issues of free-will, | |
| By its own sacrifice can expiate | |
| The penalties of ill. | |
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| No message here of man redeemed from sin, | |
| Of fallen nature raised, | 30 |
| By inward strife and moral discipline | |
| Higher than e’er debased,— | |
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| Of the immense parental heart that yearns | |
| From highest heaven to meet | |
| The poorest wandering spirit that returns | 35 |
| To its Creator’s feet. | |
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| No Prophet here by common essence bound | |
| At once to God and man, | |
| Author Himself and part of the profound | |
| And providential plan: | 40 |
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| Himself the ensample of unuttered worth, | |
| Himself the living sign, | |
| How by God’s grace the fallen sons of earth | |
| May be once more divine. | |
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| Thus in the faiths old Heathendom that shook | 45 |
| Were different powers of strife; | |
| Mohammed’s truth lay in a holy Book, | |
| Christ’s in a sacred Life. | |
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| So, while the world rolls on from change to change | |
| And realms of thought expand, | 50 |
| The Letter stands without expanse or range, | |
| Stiff as a dead man’s hand; | |
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| While, as the life-blood fills the growing form, | |
| The Spirit Christ has shed | |
| Flows through the ripening ages fresh and warm, | 55 |
| More felt than heard or read. | |
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| And therefore, though ancestral sympathies, | |
| And closest ties of race, | |
| May guard Mohammed’s precept and decrees, | |
| Through many a tract of space, | 60 |
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| Yet in the end the tight-drawn line must break, | |
| The sapless tree must fall, | |
| Nor let the form one time did well to take | |
| Be tyrant over all. | |
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| The tide of things rolls forward, surge on surge, | 65 |
| Bringing the blessèd hour, | |
| When in Himself the God of Love shall merge | |
| The God of Will and Power. | |
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