قراءة كتاب The Hound of Heaven

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‏اللغة: English

The Hound of Heaven

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المؤلف:

Thompson Francis

دار النشر: Project Gutenberg

الصفحة رقم: 6

speaking, God gives each one of us His undivided attention. And through this spacious channel of His Divine and exclusive attention pour the ocean-tides of His love. The weak soul is afraid of the terrible excess of Divine Love. It tries to elude it; but Love meets it at every cross-road and by-path, down which it would run and hide itself, and gently turns it back.

Francis Thompson, in an interpretation of "A Narrow Vessel," has left us in prose a description of human weakness and wilfulness reluctant of its true bliss. The following passage is an excellent commentary on the "Hound of Heaven." "Though God," he says, "asks of the soul but to love Him what it may, and is ready to give an increased love for a poor little, the soul feels that this infinite love demands naturally its whole self, that if it begin to love God it may not stop short of all it has to yield. It is troubled, even if it did go a brief way, on the upward path; it fears and recoils from the whole great surrender, the constant effort beyond itself which is sensibly laid on it. It falls back with relieved contentment on some human love, a love on its own plane, where somewhat short of total surrender may go to requital, where no upward effort is needful. And it ends by giving for the meanest, the most unsufficing and half-hearted return, that utter self-surrender and self-effacement which it denied to God. Even (how rarely) if the return be such as mortal may render, how empty and unsatiated it leaves the soul. One always is less generous to love than the other."

God walks morning, noon and eve in the garden of the soul, calling it to a happiness which affrights it. And the timid and self-seeking soul strives to hide itself under the stars, under the clouds of heaven, under human love, under the distractions of work and pleasure and study, offers itself as a wistful servitor to child and man and nature, if they will but afford it a refuge from the persistent and gentle accents of pursuivant Love. But all things are in league with God, Who made and rules them. They cannot conspire against Him. They betray the refugee. He turns in abject surrender, and is astonished to find the rest and happiness that he quested for so wildly. The Divine thwartings which had harassed the soul become a tender mystery of Infinite Love forcing itself upon an unworthy and unwilling creature. Someone has said that every life is a romance of Divine Love. The "Hound of Heaven" is a version of that romance which smites the soul into an humble mood of acknowledgment and penitence.

JAMES J. DALY, S. J.

OF "THE HOUND OF HEAVEN"

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rancis Thompson, born in Preston in 1859, spent the greater part of his mature life in London where he died in 1907. He was educated at Ushaw College near Durham, and afterwards went to Owens College, Manchester, to qualify as a doctor.

But his gift as prescriber and healer lay elsewhere than in the consulting-room. He walked to London in search of a living, finding, indeed, a prolonged near approach to death in its streets; until at length his literary powers were discovered by himself and by others, and he began, in his later twenties, an outpouring of verse which endured for a half-decade of years—his "Poems," his "Sister Songs," and his "New Poems."

"The Hound of Heaven" "marked the return of the nineteenth century to Thomas à Kempis." The great poetry of it transcended, in itself and in its influence, all conventions; so that it won the love of a Catholic Mystic like Coventry Patmore; was included by Dean Beeching in his "Lyra Sacra" among its older high compeers; and gave new heart to quite another manner of man, Edward Burne-Jones.

W. M.

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