ations to
inhabit, never, I suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly
recognized motives of exertion. Yet these are not the less our duties;
nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the range of our
intended and deliberate usefulness include, not only the companions but
the successors, of our pilgrimage. God has lent us the earth for our
life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come
after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation,
as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to
involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits
which it was in our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is
one of the appointed conditions of the labour of men that, in
proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the
fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we
place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of
what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure
of our success. Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can
benefit those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which
human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so
far as from the grave.

Nor is there, indeed, any present loss, in such respect for futurity.
Every human action gains in honour, in grace, in all true magnificence,
by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the
quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes,
separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no
action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test.
Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it
not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such
work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay
stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held
sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as
they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, "See! this our
fathers did for us." For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is
not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in
that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious
sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls
that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in