nd
which laid the foundation-stone was never the same as that which set
the last stone upon the coping. Generations often succeeded one another,
labouring at gargoyle, rose-window, and shaft, and died, leaving the
work to others; the master-builder who drew up the first rough outline
passed away, and was succeeded by others, and the details of the work as
completed bore sometimes but faint resemblance to the work as he devised
it; no man fully understood all that others had done or were doing,
but each laboured in his place; and the work as completed had unity;
it expressed not the desire and necessity of one mind, but of the human
spirit of that age; and not less essential to the existence of the
building was the labour of the workman who passed a life of devotion
in carving gargoyles or shaping rose-windows, than that of the greatest
master who drew general outlines: perhaps it was yet more heroic; for,
for the master-builder, who, even if it were but vaguely, had an image
of what the work would be when the last stone was laid and the last
spire raised, it was easy to labour with devotion and zeal, though well
he might know that the placing of that last stone and the raising of
that last spire would not be his, and that the building in its full
beauty and strength he should never see; but for the journeyman labourer
who carried on his duties and month by month toiled at carving his own
little gargoyle or shaping the traceries in his own little oriel window,
without any complete vision, it was not so easy; nevertheless, it was
through the conscientious labours of such alone, through their heaps of
chipped and spoiled stones, which may have lain thick about them, that
at the last the pile was reared in its strength and beauty.

For a Moses who could climb Pisgah, and, though it were through a
mist of bitter tears, could see stretching before him the land of the
inheritance, a land which his feet should never tread and whose fruit
his hand should never touch, it was yet, perhaps, not so hard to turn
round and die; for, as in a dream, he had seen the land: but for the
thousands who could climb no Pisgah, who were to leave their bones
whitening in the desert, having even from afar never seen the true
outline of the land; those who, on that long march, had not even borne
the Ark nor struck the timbrel, but carried only their small household
vessels and possessions, for these it was perhaps not so easy to lie
down and perish