Life Lessons: In the School of Christian Duty (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Life Lessons: In the School of Christian Duty

But human enterprise has for many years been busy, encroaching upon that sacred enclosure. A valuable quarry, cropping out on the neighboring bank, Offered that temptation which to the industry and thrift Of our countrymen is irresistible. The rock was quarried and carried away, leaving as the excavation approached the graveyard, a precipitous wall from thirty to fifty feet high. Still pressing on, the laborers cleared the rock away, till only at a single narrow point could the grave yard be approached, and at last, this too was assaulted, threatening to change the peninsular into a rock-walled island of the dead.

What a spectacle 1 Human enterprise sweeping around such a spot as that, sparing it indeed, but leaving it iso lated and inaccessible, chafing against it as a barrier, and shaking the sacred dust Of its graves with the shock Of its explosions, disturbing the hallowed silence appro priate to it, by the echoes Of rude voices and the din Of pick and chisel, and desecrating, to the extremest verge of possibility, the scene where friendship had found sad pleasure to linger, and affection had been wont to weep! From morning till night, human industry is intensely ao tive, almost beneath the shadow Of the monuments, but it has itself built up the wall, that keeps it, although so near, from all contact with them, or any chance to peruse the stone-graven lines that speak the solemn lessons of the grave. Unheeding toil takes no thought of the Voices that seem flung back to it, in every echo of its blows, from those rocky walls within which the dust of the dead finds repose.

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