atisfying, more majestic
thought of life than this--the scaffolding by which souls are built
up into the temple of God? And to care whether a thing is painful or
pleasant is as absurd as to care whether the bricklayer's trowel is
knocking the sharp corner off a brick, or plastering mortar on the
one below it before he lays it carefully on its course. Is the
_building_ getting on? That is the one question that is worth
thinking about.

You and I write our lives as if on one of those manifold writers
which you use. A thin filmy sheet _here_, a bit of black paper
below it; but the writing goes through upon the next page, and when
the blackness that divides two worlds is swept away _there_, the
history of each life written by ourselves remains legible in
eternity. And the question is--What sort of autobiography are we
writing for the revelation of that day, and how far do our
circumstances help us to transcribe fair in our lives the will of our
God and the image of our Redeemer?

If, then, we have once got hold of that principle that all which
is--summer and winter, storm and sunshine, possession and loss,
memory and hope, work and rest, and all the other antitheses of
life--is equally the product of His will, equally the manifestation
of His mind, equally His means for our discipline, then we have the
amulet and talisman which will preserve us from the fever of desire
and the shivering fits of anxiety as to things which perish. And, as
they tell of a Christian father who, riding by one of the great lakes
of Switzerland all day long, on his journey to the Church Council
that was absorbing his thoughts, said towards evening to the deacon
who was pacing beside him, 'Where is the lake?' so you and I,
journeying along by the margin of this great flood of things when
wild storms sweep across it, or when the sunbeams glint upon its blue
waters, 'and birds of peace sit brooding on the charmed wave,' will
be careless of the changeful sea, if the eye looks beyond the visible
and beholds the unseen, the unchanging real presences that make glory
in the darkest lives, and 'sunshine in the shady place.' 'Let every
man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God.'

III. Still further, another thought may be suggested from these
words, or rather from the connection in which they occur, and that
is--Such contented continuance in our place is the dictate of the
truest wisdom.

There are two or three collateral topics, partly suggest