u, plead
for you, pray for you. Truly it is an architect, fulfilling Dante's
dictum, "piling up mountains of melody." Serving the soul well, the
body becomes sacred by service. Therefore man loves and guards the
physical house in which he lives.

Always objects and places associated with life's deep joys and sorrows
become themselves sacred through these associations. The flock
passing through the forest leaves some white threads behind. The bird
lines its nest with down from its own bosom. Thus the heart, going
forward, leaves behind some treasure, and perfumes its path. Memory
hangs upon the tree the whispered confession made beneath its
branches. No palace so memorable as the little house where you were
reared, no charter oak so historic as the trees under which you
played, no river Nile so notable as the little brook that once sung to
your sighing, no volume or manuscript so precious as the letter and
Testament your dying father pressed into your hand. Understanding this
principle, nations guard the manuscript of the sage, the sword of the
general, the flag stained with heroes' blood. Memorable forever the
little room where Milton wrote, the cottage where Shakespeare dwelt,
the spot where Dante dreamed, the ruin where Phidias wrought. But no
building ever showed such comely handiwork as the temple built by
divine skill. God hath made the soul's house fair to look upon. Death
may close its doors, darken its windows, and pull down its pillars;
still, its very ruins are precious, to be guarded with jealous care.
How sacred the spot where lie the parents that tended us, the bosom
that shielded our infancy, the hands that carried our weakness
everywhither. Men will always deem the desecration of the body or the
grave blasphemous. The physical house, standing, is the temple of God;
falling, it must forever be sacred in man's memory.

Science teaches us to look upon the body as a thinking machine. As a
mental mechanism it exhibits the divine being as an inventor, who has
produced a machine as much superior to Watt's engine, as that engine
is superior to a clod or stone. In this divine mechanism all intricate
and enduring machines are combined in one. Imagine an instrument so
delicate as to be at once a telescope and microscope, at one moment
witnessing the flight of a sun hundreds of millions of miles away,
then quickly adjusted for seeing the point of the finest needle!
Imagine a machine that at one and the same moment