the wind-borne seeds of wild flowers have lodged in low
crevices and have sprouted and blossomed, and as seeds again have been
blown further on--harbingers of vines and mosses already on their
venerable way.

A mighty shape begins to answer back to the cathedrals of other lands
and ages, bespeaking for itself admittance into the league of the
world's august sanctuaries. It begins to send its annunciation onward
into ages yet to be, so remote, so strange, that we know not in what
sense the men of it will even be our human brothers save as they are
children of the same Father.

Between this past and this future, the one of which cannot answer
because it is too late and the other of which can not answer because it
is too soon--between this past and this future the cathedral stands in a
present that answers back to it more and more. For a world of living-men
and women see kindled there the same ancient flame that has been the
light of all earlier stations on that solitary road of faith which runs
for a little space between the two eternities--a road strewn with the
dust of countless wayfarers bearing each a different cross of burden but
with eyes turned toward the same Cross of hope.

As on some mountain-top a tall pine-tree casts its lengthened shadow
upon the valleys far below, round and round with the circuit of the sun,
so the cathedral flings hither and thither across the whole land its
spiritual shaft of light. A vast, unnumbered throng begin to hear of it,
begin to look toward it, begin to grow familiar with its emerging form.
In imagination they see its chapels bathed in the glories of the morning
sun; they remember its unfinished dome gilded at the hush of sunsets.
Between the roar of the eastern and of the western ocean its organ
speaks of a Divine peace above mortal storm. Pilgrims from afar, known
only to themselves as pilgrims, being pilgrim-hearted but not
pilgrim-clad, reach at its gates the borders of their Gethsemane. Bowed
as penitents, they hail its lily of forgiveness and the resurrection.

Slowly the cathedral rises, in what unknown years to stand finished!
Crowning a city of new people, let it be hoped, of better laws. Finished
and standing on its rock for the order of the streets, for order in the
land and order throughout the world, for order in the secret places of
the soul. Majestical rebuker of the waste of lives, rebuker of a country
which invites all lives into it and wastes lives most ruthl