Every experience, every
touch of another life on ours, every influence that impresses us, every
book we read, every conversation we have, every act of our commonest
days, adds something to the invisible building. Sorrow, too, has its
place in preparing the stones to lie on the life-wall. All life
furnishes the material.
"Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build."
There are many noble fabrics of character reared in this world. But
there are also many who build only low, mean huts, without beauty,
which will be swept away in the testing-fires of judgment. There are
many, too, whose life-work presents the spectacle of an unfinished
building. There was a beautiful plan to begin with, and the work
promised well for a little time; but after a while it was abandoned and
left standing, with walls half-way up, a useless fragment, open and
exposed, an incomplete, inglorious ruin, telling no story of past
splendor as do the ruins of some old castle or coliseum, a monument
only of folly and failure.
"There is nothing sadder," writes one, "than an incomplete ruin; one
that has never been of use; that never was what it was meant to be;
about which no pure, holy, lofty associations cling, no thoughts of
battles fought and victories won, or of defeats as glorious as
victories. God sees them where we do not. The highest tower may be
more unfinished than the lowest to him.
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