The Welsh Poet, Henry Vaughan, (d.1695) called himself a Silurist, claiming descent from a pre-Roman tribe that ruled his part of Wales. Yet he maintains that 'A noble offspring surely then without distinction are all men.' We are all of us Easter Children, children of God, each one of us nobly born. No room for racism, as Archbishop Wilson was saying yesterday; we must be children of hope, of one beginning, one birth, one resurrection.
All sorts of men, that live on Earth,
Have one beginning and one birth.
For all things there is one Father,
Who lays out all, and all doth gather.
He the warm sun with rays adorns,
And fills with brightness the moon's horns.
The azur'd heav'ns with stars He burnish'd,
And the round world with creatures furnish'd.
But men—made to inherit all—
His own sons He was pleas'd to call,
And that they might be so indeed,
He gave them souls of divine seed.
A noble offspring surely then
Without distinction are all men.
O, why so vainly do some boast
Their birth and blood and a great host
Of ancestors, whose coats and crests
Are some rav'nous birds or beasts!
If extraction they look for,
And God, the great Progenitor,
No man, though of the meanest state,
Is base, or can degenerate,
Unless, to vice and lewdness bent,
He leaves and taints his true descent.
from Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist: Boethius, De Consolatione, Englished.
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