Monuments That Endure

Monuments That Endure By Harrison R. Merrill JUST three years ago on the sixteenth of October, 1927, the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees of Brigham Young University broke ground on University Hill for the erection of the new Heber J. Grant Library. One year later the building was dedicated by the man after whom it was named. Since that time more than two happy, prosperous years have passed, and in that time at least two thousand men and women, Heber J. Grant Library. Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah

404 IMPROVEMENT ERA among whom will be found some of the leaders of tomorrow, have gone into the new temple of learning and have come out with their faces illumined, and with a new vision of truth in their hearts. Each one, in a way, has carried with him a vision of the temple and a new interpretation of truth. In the temples built without hands are men's most enduring monuments. Stones will crumble, towers will be over-thrown, graves will be forgotten, but the monuments erected in the hearts of men will endure. Like the protoplasm or the undiscovered life- cell, they will be transmitted from generation to generation. Abra- ham was buried in a simple cave in Palestine; Moses went away into the mountains and the place of his burial no man knows; Joseph . Smith was secretly buried, but all three men live on. They had dropped truth into the hearts of men and the truths have endured. The Heber J. Grant Library is the receptacle of truth. It may not endure forever, but the truths gathered there by men will endure and multiply. The name of the man after whom the build- ing was christened will stand so long as men still live and search for truth upon the earth, for he is a searcher for truth, a disseminator of truth. It was fitting that the library should be given his name, for ' through it he will have a vast posterity of intellectual children. It was fitting that the new library should be erected so near to that other monument erected by a loving alumni to the memory of a great teacher. Karl G. Maeser had erected his own monuments in the hearts of his students; he needed no sarcophagus of stone. The alumni, then, were altogether wise in building to his memory a building from which truth might emanate and take hold of the lives of students who are to follow them, for thus are the monu- ments to Karl G. Maeser multiplied in a form that will endure. When one steps upon the campuses of large Eastern universities, especially private ones, one is surprised and delighted to learn that men, rich men especially, have come to the centers of learning to build their most beautiful and most lasting monuments. Judge Gary may be forgotten as a steel magnate, but he will live forever as lawyer and judge, for the reason that lawyers and judges, legions of them, on account of the splendid law school he endowed in Chicago, will have in their hearts truths which he made available for them. Mrs. Montgomery Ward may be forgotten as the rich wife of the founder of one of the world's greatest mail-order enter- prises, but she will be remembered forever by the medical and dental profession for the training she made possible through her construc- tion of a great medical institution. Monuments in cemeteries are rapidly becoming old-fashioned.

MONUMENTS THAT ENDURE 405 Men are now building them before they die on campuses of educa- tional institutions. They are building the "house by the side of the road," so to speak, where their service will never end. Judge Gary has now passed away, and his body has been laid in a little country churchyard where the stillness will rarely be broken except upon Decoration Day, or upon occasions when others are laid beside him; but, I fancy, he rests sweetly and serenely in his quiet sepulchre, knowing that he has set up an institution that will carry on his am- bitions and will force his spirit through the law practice for hun- dreds of years. I fancy I can hear him repeat verses from Sam Walter Foss' famous poem: "Let me live in a house by the side of the road, Where the race of men go by- — The men who are good and the men who are bad, As good or as bad as I. I would not sit in the scorner's seat Or hurl the cynic's ban — > Let me live in a house by the side of the road And be a friend to man. "I see from my house by the side of the road, By the side of the highway of life, The men who press with the ardor of hope. The men who are faint with the strife, But I turn not away from their smiles nor their tears. Both parts of an infinite plan — Let me live in a house by the side of the road And be a friend to man." "The life of a loved one does not end. It simply goes on. Its work is done here, only to be taken up in 'the other room.' We lived before and we live after here. We are not summer flies that live but for a day. Nature teaches us this. The rotation of the trees in the woods: the succession of the seasons: the leaf that (alls in the autumn turns into nurture for the new leaf of the spring. There is no end. It becomes easier to believe this when the other shore begins to be peopled by our loved ones. We can never feel for others until we have felt ourselves: we know not how to extend sympathy until it has been meted out to us. Life looks different after the light of a life dear to us has gone on. The physical presence may be denied us. but the spiritual takes its place, strengthening, heartening, reviving and uplifting. Those who leave us are never far off: they are real and near to us. And oftimes when the heart is saddest, the load heaviest and the trial greatest, it is they who stretch out their hands to us and give us fresh courage, that we wonder whence it came. It is only that with our eyes we can see not and with our ears we can hear not. One only needs to lose a good mother to know and learn this truth: to learn it so deeply and truly that no ism or cult or creed can shake that belief. It is then that clarity of vision comes: when the eye sees clearly and the mind and heart and soul unite in but one fixed truth: that we go on. The western gates close only to let the eastern gates open."