And so it was that with the deepest sense of understanding, with the deepest sympathy, without intolerance Brooke, in this one verse sets the Heathen gods where they belong and sets us where we belong in our relations to those who worship these gods and goddesses. It is all they have. We have no right to sneer and scorn until we are able to give them better. These poor Egyptians knew no other God. They said plaintively "but a God; we have none other"; and "And what shall we do now God is dying?" The crime of destroying faith in a lesser god until one has seen and can make seeable the real God is the greatest crime of civilization. And to this writer's way of thinking there is no greater sin than that of Intolerance; a sin to which a certain portion of the institutionalized church is prone. Noyes shot the fist of indignation at this type of intolerance straight from a manly shoulder when he said: "How foolish, then, you will agree Are those who think that all must see The world alike, or those who scorn Another who, perchance, was born Where in a different dream from theirs What they called Sin to him were prayers?" The Collected Poems of Alfred Noyes. Brooke saw the same thing and had great tolerance for those who worshipped the "unknown gods"; worshipped the best they knew, although it were a feeble worship. He understood their outcry that they knew not what to do, now that their god was dying: "She was so strong; But death is stronger. She ruled us long; But time is longer. She solaced our woe And soothed our sighing; And what shall we do Now God is dying?" The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. THE GOSPEL OF ONE GOD Then sweeping upward, although one must admit, with groping, reaching eagerness, this young poet tried to find, and at last did find, the one God. He mentions this God that he found more than any other one thing about which he wrote, so far as I can find. In one slender volume are more than a dozen striking references. Take for example the last fifteen lines of "The Song of the Pilgrims": "O Thou, God of all long desirous roaming, Our hearts are sick of fruitless homing, And crying after lost desire. Hearten us onward! as with fire Consuming dreams of other bliss. The best Thou givest, giving this Sufficient thing--to travel still Over the plain, beyond the hill, Unhesitating through the shade, Amid the silence unafraid, Till, at some hidden turn, one sees Against the black and muttering trees Thine altar, wonderfully white, Among the Forests of the Night." The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Or again, from "Ambarvalia": "But laughing and half-way up to heaven, With wind and hill and star, I yet shall keep before I sleep, Your Ambarvalia." The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.