The Crisis by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jun 25, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 25.

The Crisis

By Editor

[The following stanzas from Whittier’s “The Crisis” were written when this nation was passing through a crisis which cost millions of dollars and thousands of lives. We are nearing a crisis now. In fact the crisis is here in principle; and the principles of church-and-state union, now rapidly making their way, will, when crystallized into law, spell ruin to the Government. The only hope is to see the deed in the principle, the fruitage in the apparently harmless seed-sowing. Will Americans see it, or will they turn their faces to the darkness of the past?]

Forever ours! for good or ill, on us the burden lies; God’s balance, watched by angels, is hung across the skies. Shall Justice, Truth, and Freedom turn the poised and trembling scale, Or shall the Evil triumph, and robber Wrong prevail? Shall the broad land o’er which our flag in starry splendor waves Forego through us its freedom, and bear the tread of slaves?

Great Heaven! Is this our mission? End in this the prayers and tears, The toil, the strife, the watchings of our younger, better years? Still as the Old World rolls in light, shall ours in shadow turn, A beamless chaos, cursed of God, through outer darkness borne? Where the far nations looked for light, a blackness in the air? Where for words of hope they listened, the long wail of despair?

The Crisis presses on us; face to face with us it stands, With solemn lips of question, like the Sphinx in Egypt’s sands! This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin; This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin; Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal’s cloudy crown, We call the dews of blessing or the bolts of cursing down!

By all for which the martyrs bore their agony and shame; By all the warning words of truth with which the prophets came; By the Future which awaits us; by all the hopes which cast Their faint and trembling beams across the blackness of the Past; And by the blessed thought of Him who for earth’s freedom died, O my people! O my brothers! let us choose the righteous side.