"'Sin,' that word 'sin,' so weighted as we know With sense, beyond communication deep, Of evil, of wrong, of outrage, of offence Toward God, and toward ourselves of injury Irreparable and growing ever great And greater to immortal suicide Wreaked with incredible madness on the soul-- What is that word in the light shallow speech Of pagan Greek? What but a word to mean, As if of purpose to make naught the blame, Simply the casual missing of a mark? Venial, forsooth, merely an aim not hit-- The aim right, but the arrow flying wide! Into such matrix, shallower as would seem Than could be made capacious of such sense, God must devise to pour His thought of sin! But how the thought has deepened since its mould, Still vain to match the sinfulness of sin! Humbleness--what a virtue, what a grace Say rather, yet in all the Greek no word To name it, till God's wisdom rectified A word that erst imported what was base, Mean, sordid, dastard, unuplifted, vile In spirit, pusillanimous, to name The lowly temper, best beloved in man By God, the heavenly temper of His Son! The thought at last is master of its mould, Though mould is needful for the plastic thought. "In our imagination of The True, We climb as by a ladder, round by round, Slowly toward Him, the Inaccessible, Who dwells in a seclusion and remove Of glory unapproachable, and light That makes a blinding darkness round His throne. He stoops and finds and touches us abased So far beneath Him where we grovelling lie; Nay, He lays hold of us and lifts us up; With cords, so it is written, of a man He draws us, blesséd God!--with bands of love, Of love, the mightiest of His heavenly powers! O, the depth fathomless, the starry height, The breadth, the length immeasurably large, Both of the wisdom and the knowledge, God's! Because, forsooth, we have some few steps climbed, Shall we, proud, spurn from underneath our feet The ladder that uplifted us so far, That might have raised us yet the full ascent? That ladder rests on earth to reach to heaven: Let us go on forever climbing higher, But not forget the dark hole of the pit Out of which we were digged, nor, more, contemn The way of wisdom thither reaching down And thence aspiring to the topmost heaven; Whereby our race may (so we stumble not Through pride, or like Jeshurun waxen fat Kick) reascend at length to whence we fell-- Nay, higher, and far above all height the highest, To Him, with Him, exalted to His right, To Him, with Him, in Him, Lord Christ, Who rose For us in mighty triumph from His grave, Then reascended where He was before, Ere the world was, God with His Father God, But still for us; and, still for us, sat down Forever, in His Filial Godhead Man,