"Down..."

Down every century, God has pursued wayward man and won him with eternal love...
          Down the vastly-looming forests, the tangled glades, the turbulent mountain torrents where Adam and Eve and their children roamed and hid and hunted...
          Down the pillared dimness, richly-veiled of temples, down strange, incense haunted corridors, down richly-lighted shrines of devil-gods...
          Down the Numidian-marbled banquet halls, the wine-splashed floors, the purple orgies, the myrtled bacchanalian feasts of Nero... 
         Down Broadway - blare of horns - blinding electrics, ermine wraps, silk hats, door checks ― "Extra! Gangsters..― languid waltzes, dizzy jazz ― youth and beauty...
          Down cloistered walks of sunset, vaguely rustling with the garments of passing nuns, softly charged with the lily breath of prayer...
          Down everywhere, down immemorial years, down all the alleys of the world and all the pebbled garden paths of stars... And always, it is God who wins. Always, when the soul at last sinks wearied out, stripped of all its vanities, its shattered pride, its dinted indifference, always the victor lays aside His blinding armor and draws aside the veil of eternal love; always, in accents of infinite tenderness, come those words that only God can utter:

         "Rise, clasp my hand, and come."

― Horacio Luis de la Costa y Villamayor, A.B. 1935

The Hound of Heaven

March 1932

(Read the whole essay HERE!)

Study (Man Between Two Trees) by R.H. Ives Gammell
Oil on paper. Undated. Childs Gallery, Boston.