"By this, O singer, know we if thou see.

When men shall say to thee: Lo, Christ is here;
When men shall say to thee: Lo, Christ is there;
Believe them: yea, and this-then art thou seer—
When all thy crying clear

Is but: Lo here, lo there! ah me, lo everywhere!"

"Ah me, lo everywhere!" It is the Christ who is everywhere that Francis Thompson sees and sings.

Eighth Week, Seventh Day

And straightway he constrained the disciples to enter into the boat, and to go before him unto the other side, till he should send the multitudes away. And after he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into the mountain apart to pray: and when even was come, he was there alone. But the boat was now in the midst of the sea, distressed by the waves; for the wind was contrary. And in the fourth watch of the night he came unto them, walking upon the sea. And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is an apparition; and they cried out for fear. But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.-Matt. 14: 22-27.

The omnipresent, ubiquitous Christ, to whom all things bear witness, the immanent Christ whose glory breaks through the crust of things upon those who have eyes to see-this, then, is Francis Thompson's Christ.

We may recall that Dante found Christ in the midst of the host of the redeemed in heaven; and we traced that to the logic of medieval Catholicism. Yet even in that day there were those who found Christ "closer than breathing, nearer than hands or feet." In Thomas à Kempis's "Imitation of Christ," we find an intimate, present Christ, and, while Francis Thompson is essentially true to the Catholic tradition, he brings Christ down to earth and finds Him always very near. It may be that Thompson had ceased to think in purely spatial terms; it would be natural for the mystic to find the veil between

heaven and earth so very thin that he would be hard put to it to say where the one ended and the other began. Thompson was very greatly influenced by William Blake; and in Blake's prophecies it is very difficult sometimes to say whether we are in the city of his dreams or in the brick-and-mortar suburbs of London. His passage from the one to the other is swift and bewildering. And in Thompson's verse, heaven and earth jostle each other with a strange intimacy.

"O world invisible, we view thee

O world intangible, we touch thee
O world unknowable, we know thee
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee! . . .
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangéd faces
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
But when so sad, thou canst not sadder
Cry; and upon thy so sore loss

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched betwixt heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter
Cry-clinging Heaven by the hems

And lo, Christ walking on the water

Not of Gennesareth but Thames!"

"Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."

SUGGESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION

How would you describe the child mind? What did Jesus mean by saying that except we turn and become as little children we cannot enter into the Kingdom of God?

Some adverse criticism has been made of the title "The Hound of Heaven." Do you think this criticism justified in view of the theme of the poem?

Jesus once said that when men said of the Kingdom of Cod, "Lo, here" or "Lo, there," we were not to believe them. Is there any inconsistency between this and Francis Thompson's "Lo here, lo there, lo everywhere"?

CHAPTER IX

The Prophet of RighteousnessSavonarola

(1452-1498)

A hundred and eighty years after Dante had been exiled from Florence, there came thither a young Dominican monk whose name was destined to be associated with the city as intimately as Dante's own. Dante and Savonarola had much in common. Both possessed the deep historical insight and the passion for righteousness that marked the Hebrew prophets. Both plunged fearlessly into that vortex of intrigue and faction which constituted the political life of Florence, in the hope that they might deliver the city from the hands of greedy princes and their greedier friends. Both at length suffered the penalty of the prophet -exile for Dante, a martyr's death for Savonarola.

In the period between Dante and Savonarola much had happened, but the main characteristics had remained much the same. The same dissension and jealousy were tearing out the country's heart. The united Italy of which Dante had dreamed seemed no nearer; and indeed many centuries had yet to pass before the great Florentine's dream came true. As in Dante's time, so in Savonarola's, there was danger to Italy from the designs of French princes, though Savonarola and his contemporaries, reading history less deeply than their great precursor, were inclined at one time to hail the coming of a French King to Italy as a great deliverance. And the greatest trouble of all was

certainly the greed of the Papacy. The vicars of Christ were conspicuous by their lack of the spirit of Christ; and that great gulf which yawned between the temper of Rome in Dante's day and the spirit of the Gospel had become none the narrower at the end of the fifteenth century. Dante's denunciations of the avarice and the excesses of the Pope might have been repeated with equal emphasis in the Italy of Savonarola.

The great happening of the period between Dante and Savonarola was the rebirth of learning, commonly known as the Renascence. It does not belong to our present purpose to tell the story of the strange rediscovery of the treasures of antiquity, with its profound effect upon thought, literature, and art. The ancient world seemed to be brought to life again. But in the clash of old with new, there was of necessity much confusion of thought. The impact of the philosophy of Greece upon the beliefs of medieval Catholicism brought about an intellectual twilight in which many strange things were said and done; and it is full of interest to observe men in that day, as in the case of Browning and Tennyson we saw men doing the same thing in a later day, seeking to work out an intelligible position between the old light and the new.

DAILY READINGS

Ninth Week, First Day

Woe to them that are at ease in Zion, and to them that are secure in the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the chief of the nations, to whom the house of Israel come! Pass ye unto Calneh, and see; and from thence go ye to Hamath the great: then go down to Gath of the Philistines: be they better than these kingdoms? or is their border greater than your border? Ye that put far away the evil day, and cause the seat of violence to come near; that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall; that