The Lesson

The Lesson.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
9.1

When Thought, accustomed to appalling fact,
Grow normal and regains its sway once more,
Long buried Truth, within the hearts of men,
Shall rise and roll away the Stone of self,
And stand revealed in all its majesty,
Invincible, commanding and subline.

H UMBLED and awed to silence, man shall hear
And understand the deeper things of life;
Humbled and awed, he shall behold himself-
That blatant self of muscle and of brain.
With all his skill, his prowess and his gold,
An atom in the palm of Nature’s hand;
One second clinging and then lost to sight-
Whirled off, and outward; into nothingness.

AND he shall hear the “Still Small Voice” within,
Saying: There is a higher goal than fame;
A nobler purpose than a race for wealth;
A greater aim than conquest of the earth,
That little world-toy of the elements
That shrinks and shrivels, as it spins through space,

AND man shall listen to that voice and know
His life on earth is but a single phase
Of lives and forms innumerable, which he
Has known, and will know in eternal Time.

THE mortal body is a of, earth,
THAN thing And feels and suffers earth’s calamities.
The spirit is a portion of the Cause,
And lives and glories in Omnipotence,
Untouched by flame, by earthquake, or by flood;
As indestructible as Space itself.

RISE to that Consciousness, and live as one
Who climbs a stairway fashioned from the stars