Human power and human will,
Looking through each soul's surrounding,
Knows its good or ill.

Earnest words must needs be spoken
When the warm heart bleeds or burns
With its scorn of wrong, or pity
For the wronged, by turns.

But, by all thy nature's weakness,
Hidden faults and follies known,
Be thou, in rebuking evil,
Conscious of thine own.

Not the less shall stern-eyed Duty
To thy lips her trumpet set,
But with harsher blasts shall mingle
Wailings of regret.

So when thoughts of evil-doers
Waken scorn or hatred move,
Shall a mournful fellow-feeling
Temper all with love.

--John Greenleaf Whittier.

'Tis the Almighty's gracious plan,
That man shall be the joy of man.

--From the Scandinavian, tr. by Frederic Rowland Marvin.

JUDGE NOT

Judge not; the workings of his brain
And of his heart thou canst not see;
What looks to thy dim eyes a stain
In God's pure light may only be
A scar--brought from some well-won field
Where thou wouldst only faint and yield.

The look, the air, that frets thy sight
May be a token that, below,
The soul has closed in deadly fight
With some infernal fiery foe--
Whose glance would scorch thy smiling grace
And cast thee shuddering on thy face!

The fall thou darest to despise--
May be the angel's slackened hand
Has suffered it, that he may rise
And take a firmer, surer stand;
Or, trusting less to earthly things,
May henceforth learn to use his wings.

And judge none lost; but wait and see
With hopeful pity, not disdain,
The depth of the abyss may be
The measure of the height of pain,
And love and glory that may raise
This soul to God in after days.

--Adelaide Anne Procter.

THINK GENTLY OF THE ERRING

Think gently of the erring;
Ye know not of the power
With which the dark temptation came
In some unguarded hour;
Ye may not know how earnestly
They struggled, or how well,
Until the hour of weakness came
And sadly thus they fell.

Think gently of the erring;
Oh, do not thou forget,
However darkly stained by sin,
He is thy brother yet;
Heir of the self-same heritage,
Child of the self-same God,
He has but stumbled in the path
Thou hast in weakne