Page 1 Advertisements Column 6

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3790, 19 February 1881, Page 1

FHOM THE SPIRIT OF EDGAR A^ ¥OE. Through the alleged medium of in ignorant Boonerille (Mo.) servant-girl. First appearance in the Argo :— From the throne of life eternal, - From the home of love supernal, Where the angels feet make muiic orer all the starry floor, ■■ Mortal, I have come to meet yon; ■• Come with words to greet you ; And to tell you of the glory that it mine for evermore. Once before I found a mortal, Waiting at the heavenly portal, , Waiting but to catch some echo from that ever-opening door; Then I seized his quickened being, And through all his inward seeing, > Cause;! my burning inspiration in a fiery flood to pour.* ' i .'z ,- '• , • Now I come more merely human, And the weak lips of a woman . Touch the fire from off the altar, not with burning ai of yore, : But with the holy love descending, With her chastened spirit blending, I would fill jour soul with music from thii light celestial shore. As one heart yearns for another, As a child turns to its mother, From the golden gates of glory to thii earth once more, Where I drained the cup of sadness, Where my soul was stung to madneil, And life's bitter burning billows -swept my burdened being o'er. Here the harpies and the ravens, Human vampires, sordid cravens, Preyed upon my soul and substance till I writhed in anguish sore; Life and I seemed then mis-mated, For I felt accursed and fated, Like a restlsss wrathful spirit wandering on a Stygian shore. Tortured by a nameless yearning, Like a frost-fire, freezing, burning. Bid the purple pulsing life-tide through its fevered channels pour. Till the golden bowl, life's token, Into shining shreds was broken, And my chained and chafing spirit leaped from out its prison door. But while living, striving, dying Never did my soul cease crying : " Te who guide the fateß and furies, give, oh, give me, I implore, From the myriad hosts of nations, From the countless constellations, One pure spirit that can love me—one that . I, too, can odore." Through this fervent inspiration, Found my fainting soul salvation, For, from out its blackened fire cryptl, did my quickened spirit soar, ; And my beautiful ideal Not too satntly to be real, Burst more brightly on my vision than the ; fancy-found Lenore. 'Mid the surging seas she found me, With the billows breaking round me, And my saddened, sinking spirit, in her fcrms of love upbore, Like a lone one, weak.and weary, Wandering in the midnight dreary, On her sinless, saintly bosom, brought me to the heavenly shore. Like the breath of blossoms blending, Like the prayers of saints ascending, Like the rainbow's seven-hued glory blend our souls forevermore; Earthly lust and love enslaved me, But divinest love hath saved me, And I know now, first and only how to love and to adore. Oh, my mortal fiends and brother*. We are each and a'l another's, • And the soul that gives most freely from itt treasures hath the more. Would you lose your life, you find it, And in giving lore you bind it, Like an amulet of safety, to your heart for* evermore. Is Zt Really True? And here we reach our second point: that men cannot do with Christianity as it is. Something true and beneficent they have got hold of in it they know, and they want to rely upon this, and to use it. But what men rely upon and use, they seek to give themselves account of; they seek to make clear its right to be relied upon and used. Now, the old ways of accounting for Christianity, of establishing the ground of its claims upon us, no longer serve as' they once did. Men's experience widens; they get to know the world better; they distinguish more clearly between history and legend ; they grow more shy of resource to the preturnatural. Pascal says: "In good truth, the world is getting mistrustful, and does not believe things unless they are evident to it." But no man can set this consideration at defiance more than does Pascal himself in his account of Christianity. Gleams of astonishing insight he has, as well as bursts of unsurpassable eloquence; but the basis of his whole system is the acceptance as positive history and literal matter of fact of the story of Adam's fall The historical difficulty; of taking this legend seriously, for us so decisive, Pascal nardlj saw at all 5 but he saw plenty of other difficulties. "Nothing," he obserres, " can be more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally a child born now for a crime committed six thousand years before •he came into being." Nevertheless, Pascal accepts the story, because, "without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all myste* ries^ we are incomprehensible to ourselves." That is, he sees no other way of explaining the mixture of grandeur and infirmity which he finds in man-—of desire for happiness and of inability to reach it. tto that, if we; put o»r----selves under Pascal's guidance, the necessary approach to our use of the salvation offered by the Christian religion is to believe the story of A flam's^ fall to be historically and literally true; 1 Arid hit I Continued in Fourth Page.