“Hath God indeed given appetites to man, And stored the earth so plenteously with means To gratify the hunger of His wish, And doth He reprobate and will He damn The use of His own bounty? making first So frail a kind, and then enacting laws So strict, that less than perfect must despair? Falsehood! which whoso but suspects of truth, Dishonours God, and makes a slave of man. Do they themselves, who undertake for hire The teacher’s office, and dispense at large Their weekly dole of edifying strains, Attend to their own music? have they faith In what, with such solemnity of tone And gesture, they propound to our belief? Nay—conduct hath the loudest tongue. The voice Is but an instrument on which the priest May play what tune he pleases. In the deed, The unequivocal authentic deed, We find sound argument, we read the heart.” Such reasonings (if that name must needs belong To excuses in which reason has no part) Serve to compose a spirit well inclined To live on terms of amity with vice, And sin without disturbance. Often urged (As often as, libidinous discourse Exhausted, he resorts to solemn themes Of theological and grave import), They gain at last his unreserved assent, Till, hardened his heart’s temper in the forge Of lust and on the anvil of despair, He slights the strokes of conscience. Nothing moves, Or nothing much, his constancy in ill; Vain tampering has but fostered his disease, ’Tis desperate, and he sleeps the sleep of death. Haste now, philosopher, and set him free. Charm the deaf serpent wisely. Make him hear Of rectitude and fitness: moral truth How lovely, and the moral sense how sure, Consulted and obeyed, to guide his steps Directly to the FIRST AND ONLY FAIR. Spare not in such a cause. Spend all the powers Of rant and rhapsody in virtue’s praise, Be most sublimely good, verbosely grand, And with poetic trappings grace thy prose Till it outmantle all the pride of verse.— Ah, tinkling cymbal and high-sounding brass Smitten in vain! such music cannot charm The eclipse that intercepts truth’s heavenly beam, And chills and darkens a wide-wandering soul. The still small voice is wanted. He must speak, Whose word leaps forth at once to its effect, Who calls for things that are not, and they come.