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THE RATIONALISTS, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: We know their golden torches first caught fire
Last Line: Man entered as a stranger.


WE know their golden torches first caught fire
And gleamed for wakening consciousness, when life
Stood up and lifted hands from mother earth,
To feel the fore-glow of a magic dawn
Quicken the heart and smoothe the wrinkled brow
With thought of a new colour. So there came
Shadow of softness in the ferine eyes,
And peerings to envisage the new road
That led, by many a march of toil and grief,
Along the way to love. Won from the brute
By path of parentage, shared with the fish
And fowl and ape, that bright evangel came,
Lingered upon the journey, spoke its word
In a thin whisper through the heart of things;
Then, o'er the brink of instinct, at a breath
Into a clarion leapt with consciousness,
To perish never on the ears of men.

How came it, stubborn captains of good will,
Ye won your lonely battles, fainting not
Nor faltering? Unto what goal unseen
Was bent the purpose of your stern advance
Upon the snowy mountain peaks of life?
Now crushed and dimmed, now trembling to expire,
Again your beacons, through the age-long night
Of human agony, a pharos burned,
Unquenchable as the unsleeping stars,
For stormy earth. And while the norm of men
Still tore you from your torches, hurled you down,
And, in the name of gods and kings and creeds,
Stamped out your radiant lives, or sought all ways
Your light to banish; yet there never lacked
Another hand to snatch the burning link
Death made you drop, holding it high again
Clear on the pinnacles in upper air
Where only Reason breathes.

And looking back
To the sharp steeps your wounded bodies climbed;
Counting the perils and the plagues that leapt
Your every hold-fast to destroy and smite;
Seeing that upon the lonely quest ye toiled
Armed only with your own immortal faith
In mortal destiny; beholding now,
From the broad bastions ye won for us,
The sovereign pow'r of bitter enemies
Who barred your path; watching ye often slain
By them ye fought for; marking how your foes
Marched under prosperous banner that subdued
Even royal ones and principalities—
We ask whereof this giant faith was born
That made you mightier than embattled earth
And all her legions.

Thus the pioneers
And starry fore-runners of this our rede,
Like silver bells their steadfast answer chime
In one response harmonious.

We but found,
Ready and keen for willing hands to grasp,
A weapon Nature's self had truly forged
Through furnace fires of ages—the bright blade
Tempered by time, annealed and subtly wrought
To strength at last all-conquering. That sword
We drew and fought therewith, well knowing how
Still sharper, mightier, it must daily grow,
Since none can blunt its edge or beat it down.
On human Reason we have set our trust,
Founded our live, imperishable hope,
And proved that falchion strong enough to pierce
Substance of all unreason, and to cleave
The giant Superstition from his head
Above all heavens even to his heels
Firm set on hell.

We found mankind a coward
Who ran about to seek beyond himself
The meaning of himself, yet from himself,
And his own weakness rather than his strength,
Sucked futile answer. Yet was it not strange
To mark his folly, for the crepuscule
Of mind, when first its flickering ray set forth,
Shone on our weakness, and, mistaking it
For strength, we welcomed that uncertain gleam
And trusted it to guide our trembling steps,
Unknowing that the ultimate way lay deep
Beneath horizons only to be reached
By many a toilsome and tormented road
To future knowledge. Human Reason still
Slept like a child within his mother's womb;
While Fear, a bastard brother, first usurped
The throne and sceptre. New-born Fear it was
That over-mastered infant consciousness,
Miscalling ignorance mystery; black Fear
Set cruel spirits in the thundercloud,
Or shuddered up from the still mountain tarn,
When man beheld his image in a pool
And cried a double dogged him. Potent Fear
Froze human hearts where Death took on the robe
Terror had spun, and stealthy came and went
By night among the lodges. Coward Fear
Girt consciousness within an iron ring,
And swift had strangled Reason at the birth,
But those intrinsic laws that thought protect
The sacred cradle shielded.

Yet who charge
The fall of man on Fear, while seeing still
The archaic armouries and arsenals
Of that primeval curse yet boast the power
To loose our knees and turn our hearts to water?
Full fledged sprang Fear from Nature's own deep breast,
Ere Reason yet had learned to spell and read
Her alphabet; and cursed by sleepless dread
Of ambient unknown, man turned for aid
To greater mysteries than all he saw,
And reasons most unreasonable found
For what transcended still his infant mind.
Lurking behind the welfare he enjoyed
And evil that he suffered, now he spied
Strange, sentient beings, mightier than himself,
Who held the keys of the arcana dim
Where hid his good and evil destinies,
And active wrought to bring him weal or woe.
Herein a perilous consolation met
Our forefathers, and hence they also won
A respite from their haunted loneliness
In Nature's bosom. So at length the gods
Took shape and swelled by devious steps and slow,
Subject, as even gods, to the great force
And winged principle that doth control
Matter and mind alike. Religion grew
Through forms and rites that still bespoke the brute,
By bloody cruelties, obscenities,
And unimagined horrors, till at last
She slowly shed and sloughed and cast away
Her loathsome shards, and flew on fairer wing.
The Godhead also changed and cleaner grew,
Mending his shapes and appetites divine;
For generous man endowed the deity
With treasures he had gleaned upon his path
And ideals he had polished into gems
To build a diadem for Omnipotence:
Love everlasting, mercy infinite,
And pow'r supreme and watchful, swift to crush
All evil that denied the upward way.

And we, who speak, with one accord confessed
The beauty of this golden dream and saw
The growth, and knew the gracious wonder sprang
From fountain-heads of wakened human sense
And purer vision, deep within man's self,
Yet of an essence so sublime and sure
That only days remote would serve to sift
Its elements and prove its majesty
All man-created. For the rising faith
In a supernal Will, now purified
Beyond the gross and primal fantasies
Of gods anthropomorphic, was in truth
But a high tidal wave of human mind
And waxing intellect, still numbed and tranced
By the inveterate past, yet rolling on,
Where light of Reason, like a polar star,
Flashed on the forehead of man's stormy quest.

Spun of mirages metaphysical,
But still man made, since human brain alone
Begat each shadow and each property,
They built their cloudy shapes of the Supreme,
Laid at His feet for offering all they knew
Of goodness; and, that pious act achieved,
Endowed the Godhead with eternal life
And claimed the like themselves from His own hand
Who should, in turn, give back their gift to them.
Meantime we waited, watching, and perceived
The wondrous rainbow from our common sun
Of intellect shine brightliest on the cloud
Of man's mistaken hope; for what had we,
Who taught in terms of life and death, to set
Against this gleaming immortality?
We waited, watching, while they bade us see
The all-conquering Spectre rise and speak and do,
Set His right hand to earth, and steady it
Upon its fearful way. We sought to mark
The Will, all merciful, be merciful,
All immanent, display Its immanence;
And in that part incomprehensible
Help man to comprehend It. Yet we found
That One, who only lives in human thought,
And aspirations and unsanctioned dreams,
Could neither speak nor give one single sign
For good or evil. Showing fearless then
The fountains of their faith to human kind,
We fell upon awakened enmity
Of outraged foes and adversaries dire
Entrenched for God; for now indeed they found
Reason was ripe to martyr, fit to throw
With fury into sacrificial fires.
Then did the ministers of God proclaim
All which we held most holy to be vile;
And Reason, that declared how our account
With Nature must be reckoned, they abhorred,
Spat on for sacrilege and deadly sin—
The sin that cast the angels into hell.
In our shapes stoned they Reason, tortured it
And thrust it forth, a scape-goat for the crimes
Of fallen man. And kings and popes, allied
In service to an Everlasting King,
Loosed now their might upon us in His name,
That Reason's lamp should be for ever quenched;
For well they knew the unfaltering ray we held
Still pointed to the steep and thorny paths
No pope nor monarch sets a foot upon
Save to his own undoing.

Yet we bid
You marvel not our torch was never drowned
Or blown out of the earth. As well conceive
The infinite concourse of the nightly stars
From off the face of empyrean thrown,
Dismounted and extinguished. Man must come,
By his essential being surely drawn,
To Reason in full time, since only so
The future is fulfilled, that steadfast points
A destiny still onward, mounting still
With lustral waters to a height unknown,
But not above the mystery of thought;
Or climbing, like a trellised vine on high,
Whither the perfect fruit shall crown the whole
After the leaves have opened one by one,
And each small tendril, with its proper hand,
Played humble part to hold and bind secure
The mother plant upon her upward way
To the noon sunlight of her harvesting.

Our sanguine trust lies rooted in belief
That his salvation rests with man to reach,
Through infinite sublimities and depths
Hid in his future self, still to be won
From those unfolding petals opening
Within his quickened brain and gracious heart.
There stand the temples that within their shrines
The future of humanity must hold;
And when the great unborn to them attain,
Arrayed in robes of pure and selfless love,
For service of all human fellowship,
Then shall the trumpets of our common weal
Ring to the morning, heralding a day
Above all days the sons of men have known.
Thus judging, we in patience sought to find
If man's great dream advanced the coming day,
And if the God, that he had made at last
In image greater than himself, would point
Along the road of Reason; if He wrought
With us or all against. We asked ourselves
What they who knelt and prayed and fought and died
In His great Name were winning for the world
Or losing; if they helped, by faith and works,
To make our footsteps firmer and the earth
A sweeter, happier home. What did we find
The fruits of their obedience? Where mankind
Grew saner; where some flash of light was seen
Breaking the thunderclouds and brightening
The smoke of many altars that rolled up
Before the throne of God; where rays of ruth
And mercy and compassion struggled through,
To break the welter of man's miseries
And ignorance and bitter, frenzied zeal
For what he feared (since Fear again had woke—
Fear of the God he made to banish Fear)—
There, not the priest we found, but certain souls
Toiling amain among their fellow men
Out of majestic trust and pride they felt
In all mankind. The Humanists were they;
And speaking clear with Reason's gentle voice,
They dried full many a tear, healed many a wound,
And brought a ray of long-forgotten hope
To melancholy eyes.

But still they toil—
Still do the wise ones labour at their God
To make Him Master; still they spin new robes
And swathe Him, like a mummy, in gold cloth
Of shining dialectic; still they spin;
Still touch and touch again and yet again
The picture they have painted, while the Shape,
Aforetime clear in every awful line,
As the carved stone upon an ancient shore
That aborigines their worship paid,
Now thins away into a night-born fog
The rising sun will burn to nothingness.
His surgeons free Him of those cumbrous limbs
Faith trips upon; physicians many come
With subtle physics for the dying God,
To set the slow blood running in His veins;
His artificers lift them pillars new
To prop the crumbling roof and empty aisle
Of His time-foundered temples. And behold,
How each in all this busy hive of men
Who buzz authentic deity afresh,
Empirically spins his fresh conceit
Of the Supreme from his own stuff of brain,
Even as they who thought a monstrous Thor,
Or trundled Juggernaut upon his wheel
To plough the bosom of his worshippers.
But yet their protean Will doth silence keep,
Even as potter's clay, or sculptor's stone,
While busy men are mauling at His shape;
And still no vision of one living God
Doth dawn above all others for our eyes.
Each prophet has his plan, and they who mould
And trim and fashion, dock and dress and change,
Deny all gods save Him their wit hath made,
And flout each revelation save their own.
Yet do these artists of Omnipotence
Agree with one consent and common will
To tear from Nature her dear master-jewel
And rape her gift of consciousness away,
Giving the praise to God alone for that.
Now a new Puppet dances for the vote,
And Reason hears the sciolists proclaim
Almighty God was but a human myth.
The true God needs our shoulders; there He leans,
That man may steady His uncertain steps
And guide His Hand to mend His mangled task!
And thus the mazes of a myriad dreams
Shall surely come full circle round again,
Reach the old starting-place, and bid us launch
That vast inquiry from the egg once more,
With Reason for a guide and not the God
Man now declares a weakling. Then perchance
Our nascent sense may come at last to find
The way best trod without the tottering weight
Of finite deity to slow our steps,
Or hands of senile gods to drag us down.

To Reason's passionless tribunal brought,
All human causes swift resolve themselves
Into the foul and fair. All that we seek
And all we shun shall thrust upon our sense
In values new, when steadfast Reason tries
Upon her golden scales their weight and worth.
Honour, the Sword, Dominion, Conquest, Faith,
Justice and Mercy, Might and Right and Truth,
Shall take another colour till we find
A world where Reason reigned would be a world
Man entered as a stranger.





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