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Once I went up the winding staircase of Bunker Hill monument. Its great walls shut in the view on all sides. I could see only the bit of dusty floor at my feet and the cheerless walls that surrounded me. But as I climbed up the staircase there were windows here and there, and through these I looked out and caught glimpses of a very beautiful world outside, – green fields, rich gardens, picturesque landscapes, streams flashing like silver in the sunshine, the sea yonder, and far away, on the other hand, the shadowy forms of great mountain. How little, how dark and gloomy, seemed the close, narrow limits of the staircase as I looked out upon the illimitable view that stretched from the windows!
This earthly life, hemmed in as it is by its limitations and its narrow horizons, is like that tower – a little patch of dusty floor, with cheerless walls around it. But while we climb heavily and wearily up its steep, dark stairway, there lies outside the thick walls a glorious world, the rarest things of God’s love. And through the windows of revelation we get glimpses of the infinite sweep and stretch of life beyond this hampered, broken, fragmentary existence of earth. Beyond earth comes heaven.