God-Love by J. G. Holland

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Aug 30, 1877

God-Love.

By J. G. Holland

In all the crowded universe There is but one stupendous word; And huge and rough, or trimmed and terse, Its fragments build and undergird The songs and stories we rehearse.

All forms that human language tries, All phrases of the books and schools, And all the words of great and wise Are weak attempts or clumsy tools, To speak the word that speech defies.

That word ineffable to man, Though spoken through a thousand years, Or thundered in the fiery van Of all the myriad wheeling spheres, Unvoiced remains where they began.

There is no tree that rears its crest; No fern or flower that cleaves the sod, No bird that sings above its nest But tries to speak the name of God, And dies when it has done its best.

Like marble in the mountain mine, White at its heart as at its face, We chip its crystals, nor divine The forms of majesty and grace That wait within the central shrine!

And the great word, all words above, Including, yet defying all— Soft as the cooing of a dove, And strong as the Archangel's call— Means only this—means only love!

One word presents creation's whole,— All space, all worlds, all living things; And love endows them with a soul,— The bright Shechinah, throned in wings Behind the temple's sacred scroll!

The love of home and native land, The love that springs in son and sire, And that which welds the heart and hand Of man and maiden in its fire, Are signs, by which we understand

The love whose passion shook the cross; And all those loves that, deep and broad, Make princely gain of piteous loss, Reveal the love that lives in God As in a blood-illumined glass.

J. G. Holland.