in the margin soon creeps into the text; and what we write
between the lines soon becomes a part of the manuscript.

Let who says
The soul's a clean white paper, rather say
A palimpsest, a prophet's holograph,
Defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's--
. . . . . . . we may discern perhaps
Some upstroke of an Alpha and Omega
Expressing the Old Scripture.

But if we are to undergo a real emendation, it must be by detecting
something more than an upstroke of the Divine Will; it must be by
reference to the original plan of God, and by a surrender to the same.

In the chapels at the back of the choir of Cologne Cathedral are
preserved the original parchments on which are drawn the plan of the
great minster. All the centuries through which this building has been
raising, the men that have been working at it have had in reverence the
original thoughts of the master-minds at the first: and those who have
been chosen to the superintendence of the work have been men who were
reckoned the most conversant with the laws of the Gothic architecture.
One can imagine that Archbishop Englebert sleeps the more softly in his
silver shrine because of the completed work of to-day. So we speak and
think of a great stone-temple, the working out of an idea whose details
were at first but scantily given, carried out in ages during which the
master-minds that planned it could no more be consulted.

And yet when a greater and more perfect tabernacle is in building, not
planned of mortal thought, and whose stones were too heavy to be moved
by mortal hands, how little reference there is to the plan of the
Founder, how few that are desirous of living according to the counsel
and will of God, and to see in that will, not a mere legal skeleton of
the structure, but a pattern, good and acceptable and perfect, with no
detail wanting for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Alas!
that our lives should be lived so much at random instead of being so
fashioned that it might be said over the completed structure at the
last, "Whose architect and craftsman is God." In Christianity the
ideal is to be the actual: there is to be no "shooting at the moon,
because by that means you reach higher than by aiming at a tree" (a
very doubtful statement even in mechanics); what God wants us to be
that we must be; and if He says, "Be ye perfect," then let us go on to
perfection and reach it. The Christian is called upon by his Mast