eeringly
Give him a serpent, or for bread a stone?
If ye, being evil, at your children's cry
Know how to give good gifts, should not much more
Your heavenly Father His good things supply
To them who ask Him? Should He not restore
A cleansed heart within them, and renew
An upright spirit? not, what they implore
Reversing, and restraining, lest they do
The good they would,--constraining them withal
To do the evil they would fain eschew?
How wilt thou to the same original
Whence all just thoughts and pure desires proceed,
Impute corrupt imaginings, whose thrall
Enslaves anew the soul but newly freed
From their pollution? Can a hybrid growth
Arise spontaneous from unmingled seed?
Are grapes upon the bramble borne, or doth
The fig bear olive berries? Canst thou show
Twin waters, sweet and bitter, issuing both
From the same fountain? Neither should there flow
Blessing and cursing from one mouth, nor yet
From the same Providence both weal and woe.

'Vile as thou art, ofttimes in thee have met
Mercy and Truth--and Peace and Righteousness
Have kissed each other; and thine heart is set
Ofttimes to follow what is just, redress
Where thou hast trespassed, rendering; ofttimes, too,
Forgiving other's trespass: to distress
Thou grudgest not its sympathetic due
Of kindly deed, or word, or mutual tears,
Nor in vain wholly labourest to subdue
The hydra host whose foul miasm blears
Thy vision, and the distant gleam obscures
That dimly through thy prison casement peers.
E'en to the darkened dungeon that immures
Thy soul, some feeble glimmer finds its way.
Crushed beneath earthly durance, still endures
Some lingering fire below that weight of clay,
Some generous zeal, some honest hardihood,
Some faith--some charity.--And whence are they?
If not of Him whose quickening breath endued
All things with life,--and, when he looked upon
What He had made, beheld that all was good:
All good,--but chiefly man, in whom alone
Some likeness of Himself--some clouded light,
From His own countenance reflected, shone.
Doth not the sun outshine the satellite?
And shall not He who in the murkiest hour
Of sin's defilement, streaks thy dreary night
With beams that bid thee, lower yet and lower
Descending, hope, perchance, to rise again,--
Say--shall not He in holiness as powe