THE PRAYER OF A MAN RESTING

The twilight closes round me
My head is bowed before the Universe
I thank thee, O Lord, for a child I knew seven years ago
And whom I have never seen since.

Praised be God for all sides of life, for friends, lovers, art,
literature, knowledge, humour, politics, and for the little red cloud
away there in the west--

For, if he was to be grateful, to whom did he owe gratitude? Here is
the chief question he asked and answered at this time. At school he
was looking for God, but at the age of 16 he was, he tells us in
_Orthodoxy_, an Agnostic in the sense of one who is not sure one way
or the other. Largely it was this need for gratitude for what seemed
personal gifts that brought him to belief in a personal God. Life was
personal, it was not a mere drift; it had will in it, it was more
like a story.

A story is the highest mark
For the world is a story and every part of it
And there is nothing that can touch the world or any part of it
That is not a story.

And again, with the heading, "A Social Situation."

We must certainly be in a novel;
What I like about this novelist is that he takes
such trouble about his minor characters.

The story shapes from man's birth and it is as he meets the other
characters that he finds he is in the right story.

A MAN BORN ON THE EARTH

Perhaps there has been some mistake
How does he know he has come to the right place?
But when he finds friends
He knows he has come to the right place.

You say it is a love affair
Hush: it is a new Garden of Eden
And a new progeny will people a new earth
God is always making these experiments.

Life is a story: who tells it? Life is a problem: who sets it?

The world is a problem, not a Theorem
And the word of the last Day will be Q.E.F.

God sets the problem, God tells the story, but can those know Him who
are characters in His story, who are working out His problem?

Have you ever known what it is to walk along a road in such a frame
of mind that you thought you might meet God at any turn of the path?

For this a man must be ready, against this he must never shut the
door.

There is one kind of infidelity blacker than all infidelities,
Worse than any blow of secularist, pessimist, atheist,
It is that of those persons
Who regard God as an old institution.

VOICES

The axe falls on the wood in thuds,