Pike County Ballads and Other Poems

RELIGION AND DOCTRINE.

    He stood before the Sanhedrim;
  The scowling rabbis gazed at him.
  He recked not of their praise or blame;
  There was no fear, there was no shame,
  For one upon whose dazzled eyes
  The whole world poured its vast surprise.
  The open heaven was far too near,
  His first day's light too sweet and clear,
  To let him waste his new-gained ken
  On the hate-clouded face of men.

    But still they questioned, "Who art thou?
  What hast thou been? What art thou now?
  Thou art not he who yesterday
  Sat here and begged beside the way;
  For he was blind."

                       —"And I am he;
  For I was blind, but now I see."

    He told the story o'er and o'er;
  It was his full heart's only lore:
  A prophet on the Sabbath-day
  Had touched his sightless eyes with clay,
  And made him see who had been blind.
  Their words passed by him like the wind,
  Which raves and howls, but cannot shock
  The hundred-fathom-rooted rock.

    Their threats and fury all went wide;
  They could not touch his Hebrew pride.
  Their sneers at Jesus and His band,
  Nameless and homeless in the land,
  Their boasts of Moses and his Lord,
  All could not change him by one word.

    "I know not what this man may be,
  Sinner or saint; but as for me,
  One thing I know,—that I am he
  Who once was blind, and now I see."

    They were all doctors of renown,
  The great men of a famous town,
  With deep brows, wrinkled, broad, and wise,
  Beneath their wide phylacteries;
  The wisdom of the East was theirs,
  And honour crowned their silver hairs.
  The man they jeered and laughed to scorn
  Was unlearned, poor, and humbly born;
  But he knew better far than they
  What came to him that Sabbath-day;
  And what the Christ had done for him
  He knew, and not the Sanhedrim.