dear
brother, see to it, that your roots go down through the gravel on the
surface. Do you see to it that you dig deeper than that; and thrusting
your hand, as it were, through the thin, silk-paper screen that stands
between you and the Eternal, grasp the hand that you will find on the
other side, waiting and ready to clasp you, and to hold you up.

When they build a new house in Rome they have to dig down through
sometimes sixty or a hundred feet of rubbish that runs like water, the
ruins of old temples and palaces, once occupied by men in the same flush
of life in which we are now. We too have to dig down through ruins,
until we get to the Rock and build there, and build secure. Withdraw
your affections and your thoughts and your desires from the fleeting,
and fix them on the permanent. If a captain takes anything but the
pole-star for his fixed point he will lose his reckoning, and his ship
will be on the reefs. If we take anything but God for our supreme
delight and desire we shall perish.

Then let me say, too, let this thought stimulate us to crowd every
moment, as full as it can be packed, with noble work and heavenly
thoughts. These fleeting things are elastic, and you may put all but
infinite treasure into them. Think of what the possibilities, for each
of us, of this dying year were on the 1st of January; and of what the
realisation has been by the 28th of December. So much that we could have
done! so little that we have done! So many ripples of the river have
passed, bearing no golden sand to pile upon the shore! 'We have been' is
a sad word; but oh, the one sad word is, 'We might have been!' And, so,
do you see to it that you fill time with that which is kindred to
eternity, and make 'one day as a thousand years' in the elastic
possibilities and realities of consecration and of service.

Further, let the thought help us to the conviction of the relative
insignificance of all that can change. That will not spoil nor shade any
real joy; rather it will add to it poignancy that prevents it from
cloying or from becoming the enemy of our souls. But the thought will
wondrously lighten the burden that we have to carry, and the tasks which
we have to perform. 'But for a moment,' makes all light. There was an
old rabbi, long ago, whose real name was all but lost, because everybody
nick-named him 'Rabbi Thisalso.' The reason was because he had
perpetually on his lips the saying about everything as it came, 'This
als