en, "you had better go along with us and carry the
stove."

"I will go, too," said Josiah Franklin. "There is to be a lecture
to-night on the book of Job. I always thought that that book is the
greatest poem in all the world. Job arrived at a conclusion, and one
that will stand. He tells us, since we can not know the first cause and
the end, that we must be always ignorant of the deepest things of life,
but that we must do just right in everything; and if we do that,
everything which happens to us will be for our best good, and the very
best thing that could happen whether we gain or lose, have or want. I
may be a poor man, with my tallow dips, but I have always been
determined to do just right. It may be that I will be blessed in my
children--who knows? and then men may say of me, 'There was a man!'"

"'And he dwelt in the land of Uz'" said Uncle Ben.

"Wait for me a few minutes while I get ready," said Josiah Franklin. "I
will have to shave."

The prospect of a lecture in the old South Church on the philosophical
patriarch who dwelt in the land of Uz, and led his flocks, and saw the
planets come and go in their eternal march, on the open plains or
through the branches of pastoral palms, was a very agreeable one to
little Ben.

He thought.

"Uncle Benjamin," he said, "a man who writes a book like Job leaves his
thoughts behind him. He does not die like other men; his life goes on."

"Yes, that is what some people call an objective life. I call it a
_projective_ life. A man who builds men, or things, for the use of men,
lives in the things he builds. He has immortality in this world. A man
who builds a house leaves his thought in the form of the house he
builds. If he make a road, he lives in the road; if he invent a useful
thing, he lives in the invention. A man may live in a ship that he has
caused to be constructed, or his mind may see the form of a church, a
hall, or a temple, and he may so build after what he sees that he makes
his thoughts creative, and he lives on in the things that he creates
after he dies. It was so with the builders of cities, of the Pyramids.
So Romulus--if there were such a man--lives in Rome, and Columbus in the
lands that he discovered. The Pilgrim Fathers will always live in New
England. Those who do things and make things leave behind them a life
outside of themselves. I call such works a man's projected life."

Little Ben sat swinging the foot stove.

"He lives the longest in