the broad branches; the birds
grieve because they can no more nest and sing amid the summer foliage.

But let us follow the tree's history. It is cut into boards, and built
into a beautiful cottage, where human hearts find their happy nest. Or
it is used in making a great organ which leads the worship of a
congregation. The losing of its life was the saving of it. It died
that it might become deeply, truly useful.

The plates, cups, dishes, and vases which we use in our homes and on
our tables, once lay as common clay in the earth, quiet and restful,
but in no way doing good, serving man. Then came men with picks, and
the clay was rudely torn out and plunged into a mortar and beaten and
ground in a mill, then pressed, and then put into a furnace, and burned
and burned, at last coming forth in beauty, and beginning its history
of usefulness. It was apparently destroyed that it might begin to be
of service.

A great church-building is going up, and the stones that are being laid
on the walls are brought out of the dark quarry for this purpose. We
can imagine them complaining, groaning, and repining, as the quarry
men's drills and hammers struck them. They supposed they were being
destroyed as they were torn out from the bed of rock where they had
lain undisturbed for ages, and were cut into blocks, and lifted out,
and then as they were chiselled and dressed into form. But they were
being destroyed only that they might become useful. They become part
of a new sanctuary, in which God is to be worshipped, where the Gospel
will be preached, where penitent sinners will find the Christ-Saviour,
where sorrowing ones will be comforted. Surely it was better that
these stones should be torn out, even amid agony, and built into the
wall of the church, than that they should have lain ages more,
undisturbed in the dark quarry. They were saved from uselessness by
being destroyed.

These are simple illustrations of the law which applies also in human
life. We must die to be useful--to be truly a blessing. Our Lord put
this truth in a little parable, when he said that the seed must fall
into the earth and die that it may bear fruit. Christ's own cross is
the highest illustration of this. His friends said he wasted his
precious life; but was that life wasted when Jesus was crucified?
George MacDonald in one of his little poems, with deep spiritual
insight, presents this truth of the blessed gain of Christ's life
thro