d, but in a little time they
were gone, leaving their work uncompleted. They set out with gladness,
but tired at length of the toil, or grew disheartened at the slow
coming of success, and abandoned their ideal when it was perhaps just
ready to be realized. Many homes present the spectacle of abandoned
dreams of love. For a time the beautiful vision shone in radiance, and
two hearts sought to make it come true, but then gave it up in despair.

So life everywhere is full of beginnings never carried out to
completion. There is not a soul-wreck on the streets, not a prisoner
serving out a sentence behind iron bars, not a debased, fallen one
anywhere, in whose soul there were not once visions of beauty, bright
hopes, holy thoughts and purposes, and high resolves--an ideal of
something lovely and noble. But alas! the visions, the hopes, the
purposes, the resolves, never grew into more than beginnings. God's
angels bend down and see a great wilderness of unfinished fabrics,
splendid possibilities unfulfilled, noble might-have-beens abandoned,
ghastly ruins now, sad memorials only of failure.

The lesson from all this is, that we should finish our work, that we
should allow nothing to draw us away from our duty, that we should
never weary in following Christ, that we should hold fast the beginning
of our confidence steadfast unto the end. We should not falter under
any burden, in the face of any danger, before any demand of cost and
sacrifice. No discouragement, no sorrow, no worldly attraction, no
hardship, should weaken for one moment our determination to be faithful
unto death. No one who has begun to build for Christ should leave an
unfinished, abandoned life-work to grieve the heart of the Master and
to be sneered at as a reproach to the name he bears.

Yet we must remember, lest we be discouraged, that only in a relative,
human sense can any life-building be made altogether complete. Our
best work is marred and imperfect. It is only when we are in Christ,
and are co-workers with him, that anything we do can ever be made
perfect and beautiful. But the weakest, and the humblest, who are
simply faithful, will stand at last complete in him. Even the merest
fragment of life, as it appears in men's eyes, if it be truly in
Christ, and filled with his love and with his Spirit, will appear
finished, when presented before the divine Presence. To do God's will,
whatever that may be, to fill out his plan, is to be co