On the heights the cathedral rises--slowly, as the great houses of man's
Christian faith have always risen.

Years have drifted by as silently as the winds since the first rock was
riven where its foundations were to be laid, and still all day on the
clean air sounds the lonely clink of drill and chisel as the blasting
and the shaping of the stone goes on. The snows of winters have drifted
deep above its rough beginnings; the suns of many a spring have melted
the snows away. Well nigh a generation of human lives has already
measured its brief span about the cornerstones. Far-brought,
many-tongued toilers, toiling on the 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.