tive faculty, which gives you inheritance of the past, grasp of
the present, authority over the future. Map out the spaces of your
possible lives by its help; measure the range of their possible agency!
On the walls and towers of this your fair city, there is not an ornament
of which the first origin may not be traced back to the thoughts of men
who died two thousand years ago. Whom will _you_ be governing by your
thoughts, two thousand years hence? Think of it, and you will find that
so far from art being immoral, little else except art is moral; that
life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality:
and for the words "good" and "wicked," used of men, you may almost
substitute the words "Makers" and "Destroyers." Far the greater part of
the seeming prosperity of the world is, so far as our present knowledge
extends, vain: wholly useless for any kind of good, but having assigned
to it a certain inevitable sequence of destruction and of sorrow. Its
stress is only the stress of wandering storm; its beauty the hectic of
plague: and what is called the history of mankind is too often the
record of the whirlwind, and the map of the spreading of the leprosy.
But underneath all that, or in narrow spaces of dominion in the midst of
it, the work of every man, "qui non accepit in vanitatem animam suam,"
endures and prospers; a small remnant or green bud of it prevailing at
last over evil. And though faint with sickness, and encumbered in ruin,
the true workers redeem inch by inch the wilderness into garden ground;
by the help of their joined hands the order of all things is surely
sustained and vitally expanded, and although with strange vacillation,
in the eyes of the watcher, the morning cometh, and also the night,
there is no hour of human existence that does not draw on towards the
perfect day.

96. And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all men understood that
the beauty of Holiness must be in labour as well as in rest. Nay!
_more_, if it may be, in labour; in our strength, rather than in our
weakness; and in the choice of what we shall work for through the six
days, and may know to be good at their evening time, than in the choice
of what we pray for on the seventh, of reward or repose. With the
multitude that keep holiday, we may perhaps sometimes vainly have gone
up to the house of the Lord, and vainly there asked for what we fancied
would be mercy; but for the few who labour as their Lord would