Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke

Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton (1809–1885)

Mohammedanism

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—

A God that shrouded in His lonely light

Rests utterly apart

From all the vast Creations of His might,

From Nature, Man, and Art:—

A Being in whose solitary hand

All other beings weigh

No more than in the potter’s reckoning stand

The workings of his clay:—

A Power that at its pleasure will create,

To save or to destroy;

And to eternal pain predestinate,

As to eternal joy:—

An unconditioned, irrespective Will,

Demanding simple awe,

Beyond all principles of good or ill,

Above idea of law.

No doctrine here of perfect Love divine,

To which the bounds belong

Only of that unalterable line

Disparting right from wrong:—

A love that while it must not regulate

The issues of free-will,

By its own sacrifice can expiate

The penalties of ill.

No message here of man redeemed from sin,

Of fallen nature raised,

By inward strife and moral discipline

Higher than e’er debased,—

Of the immense parental heart that yearns

From highest heaven to meet

The poorest wandering spirit that returns

To its Creator’s feet.

No Prophet here by common essence bound

At once to God and man,

Author Himself and part of the profound

And providential plan:

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.

Thus in the faiths old Heathendom that shook

Were different powers of strife;

Mohammed’s truth lay in a holy Book,

Christ’s in a sacred Life.

So, while the world rolls on from change to change

And realms of thought expand,

The Letter stands without expanse or range,

Stiff as a dead man’s hand;

While, as the life-blood fills the growing form,

The Spirit Christ has shed

Flows through the ripening ages fresh and warm,