Creator

John Muir

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Circa Date

circa 1887

Transcription

High and dry above your lovely billows metaphorical and hard to find when needed? Vain all thy gathered might in opposition; Its mountain waves of love shall thee upheave To heaven thy source with thy carnal will Or dead against it.

God is a mass of mercy quite unbounded; yet creatures of human kind, with senses seeming sane and quite undamaged, have said in this same old oak schoolhouse, soon this God of mercy will seize the not quite-holy, His feeble, tempted, poor, misguided creatures, and with dark hellish fury ((plunge them deep (([grows back] ‘Neath roaring raging waves of brimstone fire, than all the gathered glow of dread volcanoes that smelt the adamantine hills and boil the sea, ten thousand fold more fierce.)) O horrid monstrous notion, fit only for the devil, or that priest who first this hell invented. Who sane may thus believe we all must burn forever lost? All aged men and women of hoary hairs and deeply furrowed brows, who long have breasted lifes waves of sorrow, and of sore afflictions bitter waters Deeply drank; and they cut off in manhoods glorious prime, and rosy joyous maiden’s.

But if thou dare to damn us be assured On yonder casting seales of level justice, Enduring as thyself, we’ll surely cast thee; Wanting thou shalt prove to all thy judges, all in whom burns reasons lamp. Nor decline our jurisdiction. We are finite? True, No fault of ours. Had we powers infinite in thy most weighty case we’d use them gladly. As best we could we’ve done the needful duty of judging every evil small and large wherever found. Now yield thee humbly God.”

Shame, old schoolhouse, How dared thou stand unmoved when Calvary’s rocks rent in dismay at sight of lesser sin. Long blessed ungodly Jews, with pagans nursed in blood, Jesus accused, condemned, and crucified, as vile deceiver; But here all flooded round with heavenly light, puny, feeble men sprawling in darkness Have grasped Almighty God as best they could and damned him to his face. Such blasphemy ‘gainst wooden gods of pagans would forfeit life.

O hell-born Blasphemy! How soon thou came upon our fallen world in giant power. Long amid towering fanes and gloomy groves

Date Occurred

1856; 1860

Contributing Institution

Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library

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