Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Upton Sinclair, ed. (1878–1968). rn The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest. 1915.

A Parable

Lowell, James Russell

James Russell Lowell

(American scholar and poet, 1819–1891, author of many impassioned poems of human freedom. An ardent anti-slavery advocate, it was said during the Civil War that his poetry was worth an army corps to the Union)

SAID Christ our Lord, “I will go and see

How the men, my brethren, believe in me.”

He passed not again through the gate of birth,

But made himself known to the children of earth.

Then said the chief priests, and rulers, and kings,

“Behold, now, the Giver of all good things;

Go to, let us welcome with pomp and state

Him who alone is mighty and great.”

With carpets of gold the ground they spread

Wherever the Son of Man should tread,

And in palace chambers lofty and rare

They lodged him, and served him with kingly fare.

Great organs surged through arches dim

Their jubilant floods in praise of him;

And in church, and palace, and judgment-hall,

He saw his image high over all.

But still, wherever his steps they led,

The Lord in sorrow bent down his head,

And from under the heavy foundation-stones

The son of Mary heard bitter groans.

And in church, and palace, and judgment-hall,

He marked great fissures that rent the wall,

And opened wider and yet more wide

As the living foundation heaved and sighed.

“Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then,

On the bodies and souls of living men?

And think ye that building shall endure,

Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?

“With gates of silver and bars of gold

Ye have fenced my sheep from their Father’s fold;

I have heard the dropping of their tears

In heaven these eighteen hundred years.”

“O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,

We build but as our fathers built;

Behold thine images, how they stand,

Sovereign and sole, through all our land.

“Our task is hard,—with sword and flame

To hold thine earth forever the same,

And with sharp crooks of steel to keep

Still, as thou leftest them, thy sheep.”

Then Christ sought out an artisan,

A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,

And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin

Pushed from her faintly want and sin.

These set he in the midst of them,

And as they drew back their garment-hem,

For fear of defilement, “Lo, here,” said he,

“The images ye have made of me!”