rising walls, have dropped their work and stretched themselves in their last sleep; others have climbed to their places; the work goes on.  Upon the shoulders of the images of the Apostles, which stand about the chancel, generations of pigeons—­the doves of the temple whose nests are in the niches—­upon the shoulders of the Apostles generations of pigeons born in the niches have descended out of the azure as with the benediction of shimmering wings.  Generations of the wind-borne seeds of wild flowers have lodged in low crevices and have sprouted and blossomed, and as seeds again have been blown further on—­harbingers of vines and mosses already on their venerable way.

A mighty shape begins to answer back to the cathedrals of other lands and ages, bespeaking for itself admittance into the league of the world’s august sanctuaries.  It begins to send its annunciation onward into ages yet to be, so remote, so strange, that we know not in what sense the men of it will even be our human brothers save as they are children of the same Father.

Between this past and this future, the one of which cannot answer because it is too late and the other of which can not answer because it is too soon—­between this past and this future the cathedral stands in a present that answers back to it more and more.  For a world of living-men and women see kindled there the same ancient flame that has been the light of all earlier stations on that solitary road of faith which runs for a little space between the two eternities—­a road strewn with the dust of countless wayfarers bearing each a different cross of burden but with eyes turned toward the same Cross of hope.

As on some mountain-top a tall pine-tree casts its lengthened shadow upon the valleys far below, round and round with the circuit of the sun, so the cathedral flings hither and thither across the whole land its spiritual shaft of light.  A vast, unnumbered throng begin to hear of it, begin to look toward it, begin to grow familiar with its emerging form.  In imagination they see its chapels bathed in the glories of the morning sun; they remember its unfinished dome gilded at the hush of sunsets.  Between the roar of the eastern and of the western ocean its organ speaks of a Divine peace above mortal storm.  Pilgrims from afar, known only to themselves as pilgrims, being pilgrim-hearted but not pilgrim-clad, reach at its gates the borders of their Gethsemane.  Bowed as penitents, they hail its lily of forgiveness and the resurrection.

Slowly the cathedral rises, in what unknown years to stand finished!  Crowning a city of new people, let it be hoped, of better laws.  Finished and standing on its rock for the order of the streets, for order in the land and order throughout the world, for order in the secret places of the soul.  Majestical rebuker of the waste of lives, rebuker of a country which invites all lives into it and wastes lives most ruthlessly—­lives which it stands there to shelter and to foster and to save.