All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.

These lines are spoken in the voice of God near the close of Francis Thompson’s long religious poem “The Hound of Heaven,” first published in the 1890s. The poem dramatizes a soul’s flight from divine pursuit through pleasures, ambitions, and human loves, reflecting Thompson’s own turbulent life marked by poverty, illness, and addiction alongside a persistent return to Catholic faith. In the poem’s culminating turn, the pursued speaker finally hears the divine explanation for the losses and disappointments that have stripped away false refuges: they were not punitive harms but a providential “taking” meant to drive the soul toward God’s embrace.

The passage reframes deprivation as mercy. What the speaker experienced as theft—lost joys, broken attachments, frustrated plans—is presented as a purposeful removal of substitutes that kept the soul from its true end. The logic is paradoxical: God “takes” not to injure but to heal, creating a hunger that can only be satisfied in divine love (“My arms”). Thompson’s diction intensifies the tenderness of the claim: the losses are not random cruelty but a kind of severe compassion, redirecting desire from finite goods to the infinite. The lines crystallize the poem’s central theme: grace pursues, wounds, and finally consoles, turning flight into surrender.