To parents who have passed through all the thunder of life's battle and
stand at the close of life's day discouraged because children are
unripe, thoughtless and immature; to publicists and teachers, sowing
God's precious seed, but denied its harvests; to individuals seeking to
perfect their character within themselves comes this thought--that
character is a harvest so rich as to ask for long waiting and the
courage of far-off results. Nature can perfect physical processes in
twenty years, but long time is asked for teaching the arm skill, the
tongue its grace of speech, to clothe reason with sweetness and light,
to cast error out of the judgment, to teach the will hardness and the
heart hope and endurance.

Four hundred years passed by before the capstone was placed upon the
Cathedral of Cologne, but no trouble requires such patient toil as the
structure of manhood. For complexity and beauty nothing is comparable
to character. Great artists spend years upon a single picture. With a
touch here and a touch there they approach it, and when a long period
hath passed they bring it to completion. Yet all the beauty of
paintings, all the grace of statues, all the grandeur of cathedrals are
as nothing compared to the painting of that inner picture, the
chiseling of that inner manhood, the adornment of that inner temple,
that is scarcely begun when the physical life ends. How majestic the
full disclosure of an ideal manhood! With what patience must man wait
for its completion! Here lies the hope of immortality; it does not yet
appear what man shall be.