In Granted Toll or Breath of God

“Who has first given to God, that God should repay him?”

For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. 

 To Him be the glory forever! Amen.  

Romans 11:35-36 

 Then we will no longer be infants, tossed about by the waves 

and carried around by every wind of teaching 

 and by the clever cunning of men in their deceitful scheming. 

Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into Christ Himself, 

who is the head.…

Ephes. 4: 14-15

What preciousness is depending on us to teach them Truth!

He gives to all a purposed call as breath of life instills

In frames of dust the sacred trust that breadth of days fulfills

What awesome charge! This fragile barge of froward tendency

By an obscure Divine Design, cradles eternity

He gives to each the will to reach; desire steers the hand

Where Thought conceives what deed achieves like seeds strewn on demand

Then pray we weigh and cull Thought’s sway; not driven to and fro

Or tossed about by baseless doubt when deceit’s tempest’s blow

He gives to us the glorious, grand opportunity

By His kind grace to run life’s race to certain victory

Not insecure, fearful, unsure, but shod with hope and peace

Until the fight twixt wrong and right is granted glad release

He gives to man Determined Plan; His Word, no flighty whim

Godhead ordains what grace maintains, all from, through and to Him

What awesome charge, His love at large is free to one and all

Where by His might we rise to fight and without Him, we fall

He gives; we take; futile to shake our fists at Mercy’s Fount

Time’s beckoning bears reckoning; we all will give account

Who can afford to hate the Lord or ignore what Love wills

In granted toll of deathless soul that breath of God instills

© Janet Martin

 The poem below was written in the 1800's!!

 Proof that Truth is always relevant and unchanged!

It's been a while since I've shared this one, right?

Writing like this deserves to be re-shared and reread!

This Present Crisis

James Russell Lowell  (1819-1891)

When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast

Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,        

And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb

To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime       

Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.              

Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,

When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to and fro;     

At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start,        

Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,          

And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart.   

So the Evil's triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,       

Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill,         

And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God 

In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod,       

Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.       

For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,  

Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong; 

Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast frame       

Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;—          

In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.  

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,          

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;      

Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, 

Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,     

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.   

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,  

Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?      

Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 'tis Truth alone is strong,     

And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng          

Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.       

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see,         

That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea;          

Not an ear in court or market for the low, foreboding cry   

Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly;   

Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.          

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record         

One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;          

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—       

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, 

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.     

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,          

Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,      

But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din,

List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,—    

"They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."    

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, 

Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,      

Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,

Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;—   

Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?    

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,

Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; 

Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,   

Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,         

And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied. 

Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes,—they were souls that stood alone,    

While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,   

Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline     

To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,

By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design. 

By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track,         

Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back,   

And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned

One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned   

Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.

For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands,     

On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands;

Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn,    

While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return     

To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn.     

'Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves       

Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers' graves,        

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;—    

Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time?       

Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that made Plymouth Rock sublime?          

They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts,   

Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's;

But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free,    

Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee     

The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.        

They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires,       

Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar-fires;          

Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay,

From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away   

To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day? 

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;         

They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;    

Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,          

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.

This poem is in the public domain.