Anti-slavery poems : songs of labor and reform / by John Greenleaf Whittier [electronic text]

THE QUAKER OF THE OLDEN TIME.

THE Quaker of the olden time! How calm and firm and true, Unspotted by its wrong and crime, He walked the dark earth through. The lust of power, the love of gain, The thousand lures of sin Around him, had no power to stain The purity within.

With that deep insight which detects All great things in the small, And knows how each man's life affects The spiritual life of all, He walked by faith and not by sight, By love and not by law; The presence of the wrong or right He rather felt than saw.

He felt that wrong with wrong partakes, That nothing stands alone, That whoso gives the motive, makes His brother's sin his own.

And, pausing not for doubtful choice Of evils great or small, He listened to that inward voice Which called away from all.

O Spirit of that early day, So pure and strong and true, Be with us in the narrow way Our faithful fathers knew. Give strength the evil to forsake, The cross of Truth to bear, And love and reverent fear to make Our daily lives a prayer!

1838.