Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see,
  That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion’s sea;
  Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry
  Of those Crises, God’s stern winnowers, from whose feet earth’s
          chaff must fly;
  Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.

  Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record
  One death-grapple in the darkness ’twixt old systems and the Word;
  Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—­
  Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown,
  Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,
Slow of faith, how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,
But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din,
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,—­
“They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with

                sin.”

Slavery, the earthborn Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,
Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth
with blood,
Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,
Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;—­
Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

  Count me o’er earth’s chosen heroes,—­they were souls that stood
          alone,
  While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,
  Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline
  To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,
  By one man’s plain truth to manhood and to God’s supreme design.

  By the light of burning heretics Christ’s bleeding feet I track,
  Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back,
  And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned
  One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath
          burned
  Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven
          upturned.

  For Humanity sweeps onward:  where to-day the martyr stands,
  On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands;
  Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn,
  While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return
  To glean up the scattered ashes into History’s golden urn.