Alfred H. Miles, ed. The Sacred Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By A Heretic and Other Poems (1891). I. CreedsWalter Chalmers Smith (1824–1908)
A
Who can believe them to-day?
Yet were brave deeds
Inspired by them once, too; and they
Made men of heroic mould
In the great fighting ages of old.
Which science has given? or the sap
On critical grounds,
Which has brought about their mishap?
Nay, these touched not a vital spot,
Though they brag of the wreck they have wrought.
From the hard, narrow letter which kept
Men’s thoughts in a prison,
Where they struggled or languished or slept;
And now we can soar high above
All the creeds but the Credo of Love.
Survivals, and now out of date;
The men were not cast
In our moulds, who endured such a weight,
So linked and compact: let them go,
They who wore them had no room to grow.
They were subtly and skilfully wrought
With logic neat;
But they are not in touch with our thought;
And they will not allow they have found
Any spot where they have not sure ground.
From the days we are living in now,
From our work and our war,
And the thoughts that are aching our brow;
And yet though they be but part true,
Vain to patch up the old, or make new.
In these latter ages of time
Would yield stuff, I trow
Thin and loose as a small poet’s rhyme—
Tags and thrums, hints and guesses, no more
With a deep, settled doubt at the core.
That now is the stage we are at;
And how shall we weave
Any faith to live on out of that?
There must go to the making of creeds
Sure hearts, girded up for high deeds.
Of unmaking, taking things down:
For the warfare we wage
We must swarm from the fortified town,
And spread out to find air and room
Beyond the old walls and their gloom.
In the Right and the True and the Good,
And in Him whose last breath
Was the prayer of a pitiful mood,
Which smites the meek spirit with awe,
And with Love, the true life of all Law.