h minds?
Blinded by dust? What can they do in heaven,
A state of spiritual means and ends?
Thus must I doubt--perpetually doubt.

_Lucifer_--Who never doubted never half believed.
Where doubt, there truth is--'tis her shadow. I
Declare unto thee that the past is not.
I have looked over all life, yet never seen
The age that had been. Why then fear or dream
About the future? Nothing but what is, is;
Else God were not the Maker that he seems,
As constant in creating as in being.
Embrace the present. Let the future pass.
Plague not thyself about a future. That
Only which comes direct from God, his spirit,
Is deathless. Nature gravitates without
Effort; and so all mortal natures fall
Deathwards. All aspiration is a toil;
But inspiration cometh from above,
And is no labor. The earth's inborn strength
Could never lift her up to yon stars, whence
She fell; nor human soul, by native worth,
Claim heaven as birthright, more than man may call
Cloudland his home. The soul's inheritance,
Its birth-place, and its death-place, is of earth;
Until God maketh earth and soul anew;
The one like heaven, the other like himself.
So shall the new creation come at once;
Sin, the dead branch upon the tree of life
Shall be cut off forever; and all souls
Concluded in God's boundless amnesty.

_Festus_--Thou windest and unwindest faith at will.
What am I to believe?

_Lucifer_-- Thou mayest believe
But that thou art forced to.

_Festus_-- Then I feel, perforce,
That instinct of immortal life in me,
Which prompts me to provide for it.

_Lucifer_-- Perhaps.
_Festus_--Man hath a knowledge of a time to come--
His most important knowledge: the weight lies
Nearest the short end; and the world depends
Upon what is to be. I would deny
The present, if the future. Oh! there is
A life to come, or all's a dream.

_Lucifer_--And all
May be a dream. Thou seest in thine, men, deeds,
Clear, moving, full of speech and order; then
Why may not all this world be but a dream
Of God's? Fear not! Some morning God may waken.

_Festus_--I would it were. This life's a mystery.
The value of a thought cannot be told;
But it is clearly worth a thousand lives
Like many men's. And y