| Making the Most of Life |
Chapter 13 |
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It is the same in the building up of personal character in each of us. There may be a great deal of noise all about us, but it is in silence that we grow. From a thousand sources come the little blocks that are laid upon the walls, – the lessons we get from others, the influences friends exert upon us, the truths our reading puts into our minds, the impressions life leaves upon us, the inspirations we receive from the divine Spirit – ever the builders are at work on these characters of ours, but they work silently, without noise of hammer or axe.
There is another suggestion. Down in the dark quarries, under the city, the men wrought cutting, hewing, polishing, and the stones. They hung their little lamps on the walls, and with their hammers and chisels they hewed away at the great blocks. Months and years passed; then one day there was a grand dedication, and there in the glorious sunshine all the secret, obscure work of those years was seen in its final beauty, amid the joy of a nation. If the men who had wrought in the quarries were present that day, what a joy it must have been to them to think of their work in preparing the great stones for their place in the magnificent building!
Here is a parable. The world is the quarry. We are toiling away in the darkness. We cannot see what good is ever to come out of our lonely, painful, obscure toil. Yet some day our quarry work will be manifested in the glory of heaven. We are preparing materials now and here for the temple of the great Kind, which in heaven is slowly rising through the ages. No noise of hammer or axe is heard in all that wondrous building, because the stones are all shaped and polished and made entirely ready in this world.
We are the stones, and the world is God’s quarry. The stones for the temple were cut out of the great rock in the dark underground cavern. They were rough and shapeless. Then they were dressed into form, and this required a great deal of cutting, hammering, and chiseling. Without this stern, sore work on the stones, not one of them could ever have filled a place in the temple. At last when they were ready they were lifted out of the dark quarry and carried up to the mountain top, where the temple was rising, and were laid in their place.
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