Passing away, saith the World, passing away:
Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day:
Thy life never continueth in one stay.
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey
That hath won neither laurel nor bay ?
I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:
Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay
On my bosom for aye.
Then I answered : Yea.
Passing away, saith rny Soul, passing away :
With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,
Hearken what the past doth witness and say :
Bust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,
A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.
2 COR. & GAL. — 13
194 THE NEW AND THE OLD
At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay ; Watch thou and pray. Then I answered : Yea.
Passing away, saith my God, passing away :
Winter passeth after the long delay:
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May.
Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray :
Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day,
My love. My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered: Yea.^
5. " The old things are passed away ; behold, they are become new." This is God's law of change. They leave us only to return in other shapes ; they vanish only to come back in nobler forms. God never takes away but that He may give us more abundantly. He takes away the innocence of childhood that He may give us the old man's crown of glory. He takes away the fathers we leaned on and the children in whom we garnered up our love that He may be Himself the Father of the fatherless and the hope of them that are desolate. He takes away the guides we trusted, the friends who were our very life, that He may be Himself our guide and ever-living Friend. He unsettles the simple belief of ignorance that He may give us the nobler faith of them that know. He smites with emptiness the burning words which stirred our fathers that He may give us other words of deeper meaning and of yet more thrilling call. Nothing that is good can perish. Though He sift it as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth. The dross of our thoughts shall perish ; but the word of our God which came to us will embody itself again in worthier forms. Through all the changing scenes of history His call remains the same — Come upward hither, and I will show thee of My glory.
But it is needful to look at God's manner of making new Sometimes the change comes with a mighty destruction and the crack of doom. But has the old really perished ? Is anything that was precious in the earth or the heaven of the old time taken elean away out of our reach ? The answer lies in the Bibles
' Ghriatina 6. Rossetti, Poems, 191.
2 COR. V. 17 195
which we hold in our hands. They have an Old Testament as well as a New. Adam's earth is ours. David's heaven is ours, Israel after the flesh has grown into Israel after the spirit. We cannot neglect the Scriptures of the Old Covenant without misreading the Scriptures of the New Covenant. It was Christ's coming that made the law to cease, and rendered useless part at least of the office of the prophets. Yet Christ Himself said, " Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets : I came not to destroy but to fulfil." That in them which He did seem to destroy had, in fact, already died a natural death, for its work was done ; but in making all things new He brought life and immortality into the old. And even so must they in each generation strive to act who follow in His steps.
^ All around, in those well-ordered precincts, were quiet signs of wealth, and a noble taste — a taste, indeed, chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the material it had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the remains of older art, here arranged and harmonized, with effects, both as regards colour and form, so delicate, as to seem really derivative from a spirit fairer than any which lay within the resources of the ancient world. It was the old way of true Renaissance, the way of nature with her roses, the Divine way with the body of man, and it may be with his very soul — conceiving the new organism, by no sudden and abrupt creation, but rather by the action of a new principle upon elements all of which had indeed lived and died many times. The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns, the precious corner stones of immemorial building, had put on, by such juxtaposition, a new and singular expressiveness, an air of grave thought and intellectual purpose.^
(1) The principle is seen in History. — If Greece has perished, she remains a light to the world. If Rome's eternal throne is cast down, her witness to right and law is imperishable. If the old saints are mouldered into dust, their spirit Lives among us in many a patient toiler of whom the world is not worthy — more prosaic, it may be, but no way less heroic than that which dared the cross and the fire in the olden time. If Puritanism has passed away, it has left us many of the best features of English life — the sober earnestness, the civil freedom, the Sunday rest, the quiet sense of duty which labours to unloose the bauds of wickedness and to