.

Sorrow seems to destroy the life of a child of God. Its rude share
ploughs again and again through it, making many a deep furrow, gashing
its beauty. But afterward a harvest of blessing and good grows up out
of the crushed and broken life. That is what God intends always in
trial and sorrow.

Let us have the ploughman's faith, and we shall not faint when the
share is driven through our heart. Then by faith we shall see beyond
the pain and trial the blessing of richer life, of whiter holiness, of
larger fruitfulness. And to win that blessing will be worth all the
pain and trial.

CHAPTER XXIII.

UNFINISHED LIFE-BUILDING.

"Let me not die before I've done for thee
My earthly work, whatever it may be.
Call me not hence, with mission unfulfilled;
Let me not leave my space of ground unfilled;
Impress this truth upon me, that not one
Can do my portion, that I leave undone."

We are all builders. We may not erect any house or temple on a city
street, for human eyes to see, but every one of us builds a fabric
which God and angels see. Life is a building. It rises slowly, day by
day, through the years. Every new lesson we learn lays a block on the
edifice which is rising silently within us. Every experience, every
touch of another life on ours, every influence that impresses us, every
book we read, every conversation we have, every act of our commonest
days, adds something to the invisible building. Sorrow, too, has its
place in preparing the stones to lie on the life-wall. All life
furnishes the material.

"Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build."

There are many noble fabrics of character reared in this world. But
there are also many who build only low, mean huts, without beauty,
which will be swept away in the testing-fires of judgment. There are
many, too, whose life-work presents the spectacle of an unfinished
building. There was a beautiful plan to begin with, and the work
promised well for a little time; but after a while it was abandoned and
left standing, with walls half-way up, a useless fragment, open and
exposed, an incomplete, inglorious ruin, telling no story of past
splendor as do the ruins of some old castle or coliseum, a monument
only of folly and failure.

"There is nothing sadder," writes one, "than an incomplete ruin; one
that has never been of use; that never was what it was meant to be;
about which no pure, holy, lofty asso