us in the hour of weariness, for the heavenly city, with all its bright
mansions and radiant palaces.

It is experience that matters, as I have said; not what we do, but how
we do it. The material things that we collect about us in our passage
through life, that we cling to so pathetically, and into which something
of our very selves seems to pass, these things are little else than
snares and hindrances to our progress--like the clay that sticks to the
feet of the traveller, like the burden of useless things that he carries
painfully with him, things which he cannot bring himself to throw away
because they might possibly turn out to be useful, and which meanwhile
clank and clatter fruitlessly about the laden beast, and weigh him down.
What we have rather to do is to disengage ourselves from these things:
from the money which we do not need, but which may help us some day;
from the luxuries we do not enjoy; from the furniture we trail about
with us from home to home. All those things get a hold of us and tie
us to earth, even when the associations with them are dear and tender
enough. The mistake we make is not in loving them--they are or can be
signs to us of the love and care of God--but we must refrain from loving
the possession of them.

Take, for instance, one of the least mundane of things, the knowledge we
painfully acquire, and the possession of which breeds in us such lively
satisfaction. If it is our duty to acquire knowledge and to impart it,
we must acquire it; but it is the faithfulness with which we toil, not
the accumulations we gain that are blessed to us--"knowledge comes but
wisdom lingers," says the poet--and it is the heavenly wisdom of which
we ought to be in search; for what remains to us of our equipment, when
we part from the world and migrate elsewhere, is not the actual stuff
that we have collected, whether it be knowledge or money, but the
patience, the diligence, the care which we have exercised in gaining
these things, the character, as affected by the work we have done;
but our mistake is to feel that we are idle and futile, unless we have
tangible results to show; when perhaps the hours in which we sat idle,
out of misery or mere feebleness, are the most fruitful hours of all for
the growth of the soul.

The great savant dies. What is lost? Not a single fact or a single
truth, but only his apprehension, his collection of certain truths; not
a single law of nature perishes or is altered t