The Study of Poetry • Paragraph 294
Stage 1 of 6

Read it through once

“The truth in God’s breast Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed: Though He is so bright and we so dim, We are made in His image to witness Him: And were no eye in us to tell, Instructed by no inner sense, The light of Heaven from the dark of Hell, That light would want its evidence,-- Though Justice, Good, and Truth, were still Divine, if, by some demon’s will, Hatred and wrong had been proclaimed Law through the worlds, and Right misnamed, No mere exposition of morality Made or in part or in totality, Should win you to give it worship, therefore: And if no better proof you will care for, --Whom do you count the worst man upon earth? Be sure, he knows, in his conscience, more Of what Right is, than arrives at birth In the best man’s acts that we bow before: And thence I conclude that the real God-function Is to furnish a motive and injunction For practising what we know already. And such an injunction and such a motive As the God in Christ, do you waive, and ‘heady, High-minded’, hang your tablet votive Outside the fane on a finger-post? Morality to the uttermost, Supreme in Christ as we all confess, Why need WE prove would avail no jot To make Him God, if God he were not? Where is the point where Himself lays stress? Does the precept run ‘Believe in Good, In Justice, Truth, now understood For the first time’?--or ‘Believe in ME, Who lived and died, yet essentially Am Lord of Life’?* Whoever can take The same to his heart and for mere love’s sake Conceive of the love,--that man obtains A new truth; no conviction gains Of an old one only, made intense By a fresh appeal to his faded sense.”