What a curious glory,
A baffling kind of love,
That pulls our eyes from beauty
And turns them up above;
In what strange morality
— And to what foggy ends —
Are we to love our enemies
While hating kin and friends;
What an odd philosophy,
What bizarre point of view,
To bless the blind and credulous
And call presumption “true;”
What a precarious notion,
What an unlikely guess,
That the kingdom is invisible
And this world value-less;
What a sad psychology
That looks on human kind,
Ignores all strength and virtue,
But smallest fault will find;
What unhappy Utopia
What grim ideal of loss,
To raise the holy martyr
And love the hanging cross;
And what a strange presumption
To say with certainty
That in moral perfection
This God we all can see;
A God who curses fig trees,
Tortures Job for show and tell,
Creates us sick with sin, and then
Commands us to be well;
A God who tells the father
To kill his only son,
Then carries out this evil law,
And called the Loving one;
This strange God strains my conscience,
His ways are not my own,
His nature is not natural,
He lives not in my bone;
For love of good and wisdom,
Of children and of wife,
Spare me your strange God’s teachings
Of the glories after life.