There was a beautiful plan to begin with, and the work promised well for a little time; but after a while it was abandoned and left standing, with walls half-way up, a useless fragment, open and exposed, an incomplete, inglorious ruin, telling no story of past splendor as do the ruins of some old castle or coliseum, a monument only of folly and failure.
"There is nothing sadder," writes one, "than an incomplete ruin; one that has never been of use; that never was what it was meant to be; about which no pure, holy, lofty associations cling, no thoughts of battles fought and victories won, or of defeats as glorious as victories.

God sees them where we do not.

The highest tower may be more unfinished than the lowest to him." We must not forget the truth of this last sentence.

There are, lives which to our eyes seem only to have been begun and then abandoned, which to God's eyes are still rising into more and more graceful beauty.

Here is one who began his life-work with all the ardor of youth and all the enthusiasm of a consecrated spirit.