Now quit your care and anxious fear
Author: Percy Dreamer (1867-1936)
Now quit your care  
And anxious fear and worry; 
For schemes are vain  
And fretting brings no gain. 
To prayer, to prayer!  
Bells call and clash and hurry, 
In Lent the bells do cry, 
“Come buy, come buy,  
Come buy with love the love most high.” 
 
Lent comes in the spring,  
And spring is pied with brightness; 
The sweetest flowers,  
Keen winds, and sun, and showers 
Their health do bring 
To make Lent’s chastened whiteness, 
For life to men brings light 
And might, and might  
And might to those whose hearts are right 
 
To bow the head  
In sackcloth and in ashes, 
Or rend the soul,  
Such grief is not Lent’s goal; 
But to be led  
To where God’s glory flashes 
His beauty to come nigh. 
To fly, to fly, 
To fly where truth and light do lie. 
 
 
For is not this 
The fast that I have chosen? — 
The prophet spoke — 
To shatter every yoke 
Of wickedness 
The grievous bands to loosen 
Oppression put to flight, 
To fight, to fight, 
To fight ‘til every wrong’s set right. 
 
For righteousness 
And peace will show their faces 
To those who feed 
The hungry in their need, 
And wrongs redress, 
Who build the old waste places, 
And in the darkness shine. 
Divine, divine, 
Divine it is when all combine! 
 
Then shall your light 
Break forth as doth the morning; 
Your health shall spring, 
The friends you make shall bring 
God’s glory bright, 
Your way through life adorning; 
And love shall be the prize. 
Arise, arise, 
Arise! and make a paradise!
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