"You pray, but hath your thought e'er weighed
how empty vain the prayer must be,
"That begs a boon already giv'en,
or craves a change of law to see?

"Say, Man, deep learned in the Scheme
that orders mysteries sublime,
"How came it this was Jesus, that
was Judas from the birth of Time?

"How I the tiger, thou the lamb;
again the Secret, prithee, show
"Who slew the slain, bowman or bolt
or Fate that drave the man, the bow?

"Man worships self: his God is Man;
the struggling of the mortal mind
"To form its model as 'twould be,
the perfect of itself to find.

"The God became sage, priest and scribe
where Nilus' serpent made the vale;
"A gloomy Brahm in glowing Ind,
a neutral something cold and pale:

"Amid the high Chaldean hills
a moulder of the heavenly spheres;
"On Guebre steppes the Timeless-God
who governs by his dual peers: