“Let me not die before I’ve done for thee
My earthly work, whatever it may be.
Call me not hence, with mission unfulfilled;
Let me not leave my space of ground untilled;
Impress this truth upon me, that not one
Can do my portion that I leave undone.”
We are all builders. We may not erect any house or temple on a city street, for human eyes to see, but every one of us builds a fabric which God and angels see. Life is a building. It rises slowly, day by day, through the years. Every new lesson we learn lays a block on the edifice which is rising silently within us. 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 todays 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 splendour as do the ruins of some old castle or coliseum, a monument only of folly and failure.
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