as
been His for centuries of centuries before it came to be ours, and we
can neither make it nor mar it. We were not consulted when its
foundations were laid in the deep. The waves and the storms, the
sunshine and the song of birds need not our aid. They will take care
of themselves. Life is the only material that is plastic in our hand.
Only man can be helped by man.

When they hung John Brown in Virginia, many said, you remember, that in
resisting the Government he had thrown away his life, and would gain
nothing for it. He could not, as Thoreau said at the time, get a vote
of thanks or a pair of boots for his life. He could not get
four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year around. But he
was not asking for a vote of thanks. It was not for the
four-and-sixpence a day that he stood between brute force and its
victims. It was to show men the nature of slavery. It was to help his
fellow-citizens to read the story of their institutions in the light of
history. "You can get more," Thoreau went on to say, "in your market
[at Concord] for a quart of milk than you can for a quart of blood; but
yours is not the market heroes carry their blood to." The blood of
heroes is not sold by the quart. The great, strong, noble, and pure of
this world, those who have made our race worthy to be called men, have
not been paid by the day or by the quart; not by riches, nor fame, nor
power, nor anything that man can give. Out of the fullness of their
lives have they served the Lord. Out of the wealth of their resources
have they helped their fellow-men.

The great man cannot be a self-seeker. The greatness of a Napoleon or
an Alexander is the greatness of gluttony. It is slavery on a grand
scale. What men have done for their own glory or aggrandizement has
left no permanent impress. "I have carried out nothing," says the
warrior, Sigurd Slembe. "I have not sown the least grain nor laid one
stone upon another to witness that I have lived." Napoleon could have
said as much, if, like Sigurd, he had stood "upon his own grave and
heard the great bell ring." The tragedy of the Isle of St. Helena lay
not in the failure of effort, but in the futility of the aim to which
effort was directed. There was no tragedy of the Isle of Patmos.

What such men have torn down remains torn down. All this would soon
have fallen of itself; for that which has life in it cannot be
destroyed by force. But what such men have buil