"Done because we are too menny"

How many will heaven hold?

How many does God love?

Is this sounding too bold?

 

What's too hard for the Lord?

What is it he can't do?

Leave your dross for this gold.

 

He hates the death of souls,

He loves the sinner, true,

Longs to enlarge the fold.

 

How many will heaven hold?

How many does God love?

Their number can't be told.

 

I read Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy in my early twenties. A miserable book, it reaches a low point when the socially-disturbed son of the hero and his lover "Little Father Time," comes to believe that he and his half-siblings are the source of the family's woes and so murders her two children and commits suicide by hanging. He leaves behind a note that simply reads, "Done because we are too menny." No wonder Hardy wrote no more novels. This was my oblique response.