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In an old city, long ago, some zealous men determined to build a Minster for their Master. The building was to be reared with great magnificence, and they brought costly wood and marble from distant lands, and employed the best artists to make the elegant figures for them. When all was ready, they met together to plan where they should build it.
“We will not have it here,” they said, “in these narrow streets, where the smoke and dust or traffic would defile the pure whiteness of the marble.”
“No,” said another, “we will put it on yonder green hill whose summit can be seen from all the surrounding country. There we will build our Minster; the world about us shall see it and know what we have done.”
So they chose the summit of the hill, and there with willing hands they labored all the summer long. The grain was just planted when they began, and it was waving like gold when they came together once more to talk about it. They had labored for months; yet the towers of that Minster never rose, and its walls never grew. The people said that when the men did in the daytime a band of angels undid at night.
“It is the hand of God,” an aged man said to them; “he will not have the Minster built there for the whole world to see. You should have wrought for his glory, not for your own.”
Meekly the builders bowed their heads. They saw the hand of God in the failure of their work, and looking deep into their own hearts they saw there what they could not see before – that they had been working for their own glory, not for God’s. So they took up their work again. This time they chose a site in the midst of the city’s traffic, where the poor, the lame, the old, the women and children, could go, fair days or foul, to worship. As they laboured, a strange Workman came and helped them. He was clad in pure white garments whose brightness dazzled their eyes. Like magic the walls arose, till they grew to be a wondrous pile. As the men wrought day by day, no one heard the sound of strife, for they knew that their strange Fellow workman was Jesus Christ, the Lord.
This old legend contains a lesson for us. It is not an easy one to learn, for we all want to erect our pile to God on the summit of the hill, where it will be seen by all the world. We easily forget that sometimes the greatest work we can perform for him is to do quietly and sweetly the little things he gives us to do. He stands by us as a fellow workman when we labor thus for him.