Kingless Folk, and other Addresses on Bible Animals

But that day, or rather that night, has not yet arrived. It has not yet come for you young people. With you it is still the time of choosing; and if you choose Jesus, if you remember your Creator in the days of your youth, that evil day will never come at all. The cock-crowing will still be to you the trump of God; but it will call you to happiness and not to misery. It will proclaim to you the advent of the eternal dawn; and you will rise up at the voice of the bird to exclaim, "Even so, come, Lord Jesus."

Peace

"Then had thy peace been as a river." – Isa. xlviii. 18.

I sat alone in the pinewood,And mused with the falling leaves;And the Autumn breath like a requiemHymned low for the garnered sheaves.And the pensiveness of the Autumn,Like the ocean rocked to rest,Found a fitting shell-like murmurIn the heavings of my breast.For a something came from the stillness,It had touched me oft before,Sometimes in the hush of pinewood,Sometimes on the lonely shore.It came and it touched my being,Laid its finger on my brain,And there alone in the pinewoodI could pray as a child again.It was not the spell of memoryCast around me its soothing power,Nor the magic of thought that held meEntranced in that silent hour.The rarest and deepest impressionsCome from fingers, but not our own,From music unbarred and unmeasured,From language unuttered, unknown.They come, the unnamed and the dateless,They come as the waves of light,Like the murmuring breath of the pine-woods,Like the voices of the night.And they leave their deep impressionsIn the tidemarks of the soul,Those pulses that come as in secret,And roll as the billows roll.It may be in yon far region,Far above the remotest star,My glowing and growing visionMay find what those pulses are.May find in the land of the morning,In the brightness beyond the flood,That the pensive hush of the woodlandWas a breath of the peace of God.Till then I will seek the pinewoods,I will muse with the falling leaves,And watch the design in symbolsThat the silent finger weaves.And catch from the fleeting river,And the ocean so vast and broad,From the Autumn quiet and the pinewoods,How to know and worship God.* * * * * * * *