s of mightier cities that shall rise
Where yet the lonely fishers spread their nets,
Where hides the fox and hoots the midnight owl;
The tree of knowledge in your garden grows
Not single, but at every humble door;
Its branches lend you their immortal food,
That fills you with the sense of what ye are,
No servants of an altar hewed and carved
From senseless stone by craft of human hands,
Rabbi, or dervish, Brahmin, bishop, bonze,
But masters of the charm with which they work
To keep your hands from that forbidden tree!

Ye that have tasted that divinest fruit,
Look on this world of yours with opened eyes!
Ye are as gods! Nay, makers of your gods,
Each day ye break an image in your shrine
And plant a fairer image where it stood
Where is the Moloch of your fathers' creed,
Whose fires of torment burned for span-long babes?
Fit object for a tender mother's love!
Why not? It was a bargain duly made
For these same infants through the surety's act
Intrusted with their all for earth and heaven,
By Him who chose their guardian, knowing well
His fitness for the task,--this, even this,
Was the true doctrine only yesterday
As thoughts are reckoned,--and to-day you hear
In words that sound as if from human tongues
Those monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past
That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth
As would the saurians of the age of slime,
Awaking from their stony sepulchres
And wallowing hateful in the eye of day!

Four of us listened to these lines as the young man read them,--the
Master and myself and our two ladies. This was the little party we
got up to hear him read. I do not think much of it was very new to the
Master or myself. At any rate, he said to me when we were alone, That is
the kind of talk the "natural man," as the theologians call him, is apt
to fall into.

--I thought it was the Apostle Paul, and not the theologians, that used
the term "natural man", I ventured to suggest.

--I should like to know where the Apostle Paul learned English?--said
the Master, with the look of one who does not mean to be tripped up if
he can help himself.--But at any rate,--he continued,--the "natural
man," so called, is worth listening to now and then, for he didn't make
his nature, and the Devil did n't make it; and if the Almighty made it,
I never saw or