Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
Why are you troubled, children of the Gospel?
Of what use in the heavens is your useless thunder,
They say to the Lord, when your insulted Christ,
As on the day when His death made the hills tremble,
A reed in His hands and His brow crowned with thorns,
Is presented to the age?
Like a star extinguished on an empty horizon,
Faith, the light and guide of our forefathers,
Withdraws its rays from this cooled world;
Darkness and doubt have broken its compass,
And let diverge, in the wind of speech,
The incense of nations.
And you sleep? And the hands that bear your justice,
The leaders of nations, the kings of sacrifice,
Have not seized the sword and purged the holy place?
Let us rise, and launch the final anathema;
Let us take the rights of heaven, and charge ourselves
With the justices of God.
Stop, fools, and return into your souls;
This devouring zeal with which my name inflames you,
Comes it, says the Lord, from you or from me?
Answer; is it I whom vengeance honors?
Or is it not rather man that man abhors
Under this shadow of faith?
And who has charged you with the care of His vengeance?
Does He need you to take His defense?
The lightning, the hurricane, death, are they ours?
Cannot He in His hand take and judge the earth,
Or under His jealous foot break it like glass
With the impious and you?
What, has He promised us an eternal empire,
We disciples of a God who expires on the cross,
We to whom our Christ has bequeathed only His name,
His name and contempt, His name and insults,
Poverty and exile, death and tortures,
And above all forgiveness?
Would we then be like the deicide people,
Who, in the blindness of their stupid pride,
Stained Jerusalem with the blood of their Savior?
Took the empire of heaven for the empire of the world,
And said blaspheming: May your blood inundate us,
O king of Bethlehem!
Ah! we have only too much affected this empire!
Since, humble outlaws escaped from martyrdom,
We have confused all rights with powers,
Surrounded the leaders of prayer with fasces,
Laid hand on the sword and thrown dust
On the heads of kings.
Ah! we have only too much, from the masters of the earth,
Borrowed, to reign, their adulterous power;
And in the cause finally of the holy and jealous God,
Mixed the divine voice with the human voice,
Until Judah confused in its hatred
Tyranny and us.
There is the fatal origin of all our evils;
From there flowed shame and ruin,
Hatred, scandal, and dissensions;
From there hell vomited heresy,
And from the divine body so many lifeless members
Strew the nations.
“But of the thrice-holy God our injury is the injury;
Must we abandon Him to the contempt of the perjurer?
To the tongues of the skeptic or the blasphemer?
Must we, cowardly children of a father who is offended,
Suffer all without answer and see all without vengeance?”
And what does the Lord do?
His earth nourishes them, His sun enlightens them,
His grace awaits them, His goodness tolerates them,
They have part in His gifts that He deigns to pour on us,
For them the sky spreads its dew and its shade,
And of their mortal days He counts the number
Without subtracting anything.
He lends His word to the voice that denies Him;
He looks down with compassion on the error that prays to Him;
Lacking clarity, He counts for us a desire.
The voice that cries Allah! the voice that says my Father,
Bear to Him pure incense and adulterous incense:
His alone to choose.
Ah! for the truth let us not pretend to fear;
Can the breath of a child, up there, extinguish
The star whose steps the Eternal has measured?
It was before us, it survives the ages,
It does not belong to man, and its own clouds
Will not obscure it.
It is! it belongs to God who dispenses it to the world,
Who lavishes grace where misery abounds;
Let us give thanks to Him alone for the ray that shines on us!
Without being frightened by our funeral hours,
Without swelling with pride and without crying darkness
To the children of night.
Degenerate spirits, these days are a trial,
Not for the truth, always living and new,
But for us whom pain invites to repentance;
Let us testify for Christ, but above all by our lives;
Our least virtue will confound more impious
Than the blood of a martyr.
Christians, let us remember that the supreme Christian
Bequeathed only one word as the price of a long blasphemy
To that living ark where His teachings sleep;
And that man, outraging what our soul adores,
In our broken heart must still find
Only this single word: Let us love!
Alphonse de Lamartine
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-to-christians-in-times-of-trial-alphonse-de-lamartine/