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300 BOOK OF THE A. AND A. RITE.
ami the Last—ou whose promises we rely with per-
fect confidence ; in whose mercy and goodness we
implicitly trust, and for the fulfilment of whose wise
purposes we are content to wait.
LECTURE.
0. My brother, the true Mason labors for the
benefit of those who come after him, as well as for
the advancement and improvement of his race.
.That is a poor ambition which contains itself within
the limits of a single life. All men who deserve to
live desire to survive their funerals, and to live after-
ward in the good that they have done mankind,
rather than in the marble of men's memories. Most
men desire to leave some work behind them that
may outlast their own day and generation : that is
an instinctive impulse given by God, and is often
found in the rudest human heart—the surest proof
of the soul's immortality and of the fundamental dif-
ference between men and the wisest brutes. To plant
the tree that, after we are dead, shall shelter our
children, is as natural as to love the shade of those
our fathers planted. The rudest unlettered husband-
man, painfully conscious of his own inferiority, will
toil and stint himself, to be enabled to educate
hifl child, that he may walk in a higher sphere of
usefulness in this world.