There was once a fairy palace that was connected in a marvellous way with the people that lived in it. This palace was built by a great wonder-workers, and was in every part most beautiful. Its walls were of the most precious stones, and the furnishings within were elegant and luxurious.
A good deal of work had to be done, you may imagine, about such a large and magnificent abode, and the people whom the great wonder-worker permitted to live in it were kept very busy indeed. There is nothing strange about that, but the strange part of the matter is that while the inhabitants of the palace were busily engaged in improving it, keeping the windows bright, arranging the contents in a more beautiful fashion, and planning ways in which the palace could be made still more attractive, and could be put to finer and higher uses,—while the inhabitants were doing all this, the palace grew. Of its own accord it added new rooms, and raised itself by many more stories toward the sky.
But another even more wonderful law of the palace was this, that when the people who lived in it forgot to do their work, and took no thought about improving the beautiful home in which they lived, but let its windows get dirty and its furnishings become disordered,—moreover, when they took no thought about using wisely its beautiful rooms for the delight and the good of others,—then the noble mansion, instead of growing, began to shrink. It would lose first one room and then another. It would sink down a story in a single day, until the astonished passer-by saw it to be only half the size it was the week before. Sometimes it seemed almost that the inhabitants were in danger of being crushed to death before they came to their senses and went to work so vigorously that the palace began to grow again.
Do you want to know, children, what this palace is? It is nothing more nor less than the life in which God has placed you. A beautiful and lordly house it is, filled with all the finest and most useful things. While you work in it heartily, and try to make it as beautiful and helpful as you can, then your life will be all the time growing and widening and lifting itself higher toward heaven, and spreading itself out broader on the earth. And if you are lazy and careless, then your life will begin to shrink; it will never stand still; and you, too, like the poor people in the story, will be in danger of being smothered by the closing in of your own life walls.