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Poem: “The Gift of Perseverance”

by on Nov 29, 2015 in Poetry
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The Gift of Perseverance

ONCE, as I brooded o’er my guilty state,
A fever seized me, duties to devise,
To buy me interest in my Saviour’s eyes;
Not that His love I would extenuate,
But scourge and penance, masterful self-hate,
Or gift of cost, served by an artifice
To quell my restless thoughts and envious sighs
And doubts, which fain heaven’s peace would antedate.
Thus as I tossed, He said:—’E’en holiest deeds
Shroud not the soul from God, nor soothe its needs;
Deny thee thine own fears, and wait the end!’
Stern lesson! Let me con it day by day,
And learn to kneel before the Omniscient Ray,
Nor shrink, when Truth’s avenging shafts descend!

Bl. John Henry Newman


Blessed John Henry Newman was born in London, the eldest of three sons and three daughters. He became an evangelical Oxford academic and priest in the Anglican Church of England. In 1845, Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He founded the Catholic University of Ireland which later became the University College, Dublin.  Newman died on August 11th, 1890 of pneumonia at the Birmingham Oratory. At the time of his death, he had been Protodeacon of the Holy Roman Church. The Protodeacon is the longest-serving Cardinal Deacon in the College of Cardinals. Newman was beatified on September 19th, 2010