Christ builds on through all the ages, and the prophecy of our text is yet unfulfilled.  Its fulfilment is the meaning and end of all history.  For the present, there has to be much destructive as well as constructive work done.  Many a wretched hovel, the abode of sorrow and want, many a den of infamy, many a palace of pride, many a temple of idols, will have to be pulled down yet, and men’s eyes will be blinded by the dust, and their hearts will ache as they look at the ruins.  Be it so.  The finished structure will obliterate the remembrance of poor buildings that cumbered its site.  This Emperor of ours may indeed say, that He found the city of brick and made it marble.  Have patience if His work is slow; mourn not if it is destructive; doubt not, though the unfinished walls, and corridors that seem to lead nowhere, and all the confusion of unfinished toils puzzle you, when you try to make out the plan.  See to it, my brother, that you lend a hand and help to rear the true temple, which is rising slowly through the ages, at which successive generations toil, and from whose unfinished glories they dying depart, but which shall be completed, because the true Builder ‘ever liveth,’ and is ’a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.’  Above all, brethren! take heed that you are yourselves builded in that temple.  Travellers sometimes find in lonely quarries long abandoned or once worked by a vanished race, great blocks squared and dressed, that seem to have been meant for palace or shrine.  But there they lie, neglected and forgotten, and the building for which they were hewn has been reared without them.  Beware lest God’s grand temple should be built up without you, and you be left to desolation and decay.  Trust your souls to Christ, and He will set you in the spiritual house which the King greater than Solomon is building still.

In one of the mosques of Damascus, which has been a Christian church, and before that was a heathen temple, the portal bears, deep cut in Greek characters, the inscription, ’Thy kingdom, O Christ, is an everlasting kingdom, and Thy dominion endureth throughout all generations.’  The confident words seem contradicted by the twelve centuries of Mohammedanism on which they have looked down.  But though their silent prophecy is unheeded and unheard by the worshippers below, it shall be proved true one day, and the crescent shall wane before the steady light of the Sun of Righteousness.  The words are carven deep over the portals of the temple which Christ rears; and though men may not be able to read them, and may not believe them if they do, though for centuries traffickers have defiled its courts, and base-born usurpers have set up their petty thrones, yet the writing stands sure, a dumb witness against the transient lies, a patient prophet of the eternal truth.  And when all false faiths, and their priests who have oppressed men and traduced God, have vanished; and when kings that have prostituted