A PRAYER FOR CHARITY. Full of mercy, full of love, Thou who taught'st the blind man's night Thine and the day's-and that thine too : Returned unto its infancy; The dumb amazed was to hear His own unchain'd tongue strike his ear; Thy powerful mercy did even chase The devil from his usurpéd place, Where thou thyself shouldst dwell, not he : Our souls unto thy glory, when Our dust shall cease to be with men. Amen. CHAPTER XVI. HENRY MORE AND RICHARD BAXTER. DR. HENRY MORE was born in the year 1614. Chiefly known for his mystical philosophy, which he cultivated in retirement at Cambridge, and taught not only in prose, but in an elaborate, occasionally poetic poem, of somewhere about a thousand Spenserian stanzas, called A Platonic Song of the Soul, he has left some smaller poems, from which I shall gather good store for my readers. Whatever may be thought of his theories, they belong at least to the highest order of philosophy; and it will be seen from the poems I give that they must have borne their part in lifting the soul of the man towards a lofty spiritual condition of faith and fearlessness. The mystical philosophy seems to me safe enough in the hands of a poet: with others it may degenerate into dank and dusty materialism. What's plague and prison? Loss of friends? Collect thy soul unto one sphere HENRY MORE'S RESOLUTION. And long acquaintance with the light Power, wisdom, goodness, sure did frame A better course than what's been run He that beholds all from on high Now place me on the Libyan soil, 225 1 It is the light of the soul going out from the eyes, as certainly as the light of the world coming in at the eyes that makes things seen. To lands where cold raw heavy mist Which leave the body thus ill bested, My inward heat more kindled is; By deep-fetched sighs and pure devotion. Yea, though the soul should mortal prove, To my last breath--I'm satisfied A lonesome mortal God to have died. This last paragraph is magnificent as any single passage I know in literature. Is it lawful, after reading this, to wonder whether Henry More, the retired, and so far untried, student of Cambridge, would have been able thus to meet the alternations of suffering which he imagines? It is one thing to see reasonableness, another to be reasonable when objects have become circumstances. Would he, then, by spiritual might, have risen indeed above bodily torture? It is possible for a man to arrive at this perfection; it is absolutely necessary that a man should some day or other reach it; and 1 The action by which a body attacked collects force by opposition. |