Alas, Church writers, altercating tribes--
The vessel and your Church may sink in storms.
Christ cried: Woe, woe, to Pharisees and Scribes!
Like them, you bicker less for truth than forms.
I sorrow when I read the things you write,
What unheroic pertness! what un-Christian spite!

Alas, our youth, so clever yet so small,
Thin dilletanti deep in nature's plan,
Who make the emphatic One, by whom is all,
An essence less concentred than a man!
Better wild Mahmoud's war-cry once again!
O fools, we want a manlike God and Godlike men!

Go, frightful omens. Yet once more I turn
To you that mould men's thoughts; I call on you
To make opinion warlike, lest we learn
A sharper lesson than we ever knew.
I hear a thunder though the skies are fair,
But shrill you, loud and long, the warning-note:
Prepare!




L

[Lord Tennyson wrote, by Royal request, two stanzas which were sung as
part of _God Save the Queen_ at a State concert in connection with the