Following are excerpts from the poem The Mystery of Godliness by Money-Coutts, Francis Burdett Thomas, 5th Lord Latimer (1852-1923), these remain some of my favorite words ever to appear in verse.
Who stamped us with the minting die Of this unconquerable need To know the unknown Deity And name the nameless in a creed?
Whence comes our instinct, that behind The flimsy furniture of sense Inheres the undiscovered Mind From which the world had emanence? (p. 3)
And hearts responsive to the sound Insidious, of persuasive sin, Must carry, like the garden-ground, A welcome for what grows therein.
Had Eve possessed a soul like sand, Without a taint of aught decayed, Unfructifiable as land Whereon no herbs nor forests fade,
Then her Betrayer would have sought An acquiescent ear in vain, And all his careful tillage wrought No germination of the grain.
Whence came that weed-receptive soil That grants the tare such easy root, And grows, for bread and wine and oil, The blighted grain and cankered fruit?
(pp. 40-2)
When by the wind of Thought is stirred Obscure Religion, throned in mist, âShe has not said her final wordâ Declares the staunch apologist.
Is it not final, then,âher creed? . . . . Whatever conflict,âtrans- or con- Substantiation,âsupersede Homo- or homoi-ousion, (p. 52)
But thought that strives to reunite In polished facets of the mind The broken colours of the light Baffled in mists of human kind;
Or weaves with reasonable hands, Into a strong enduring chain Of texture, all the separate strands Of all the knowledge men attain. (p. 99)
Sow not emotion; âtis a weed That grows in hedge-rows; every fool Fancies his own emotions breed The right to teach, the right to rule.
Sow not religion; âtis a flower That robs the sunshine of its hue, To deck its own peculiar bower With regal red and saintly blue.
But rare Imagination, caught Like seed-down from the breezes, sow In the worldâs garden; there is nought Except this balsam for her woe. (pp. 100-1)