WILD LILIES. THE Commentators are a great deal troubled about the special flower Jesus had in his mind; but, when you follow them through the reports of travellers and missionaries, this seems to be the general conclusion, that in any case it was a wild flower. It is evident also, that there were then, as now, over there, a great many varieties of wild lilies, two of which are selected for special comment,- one hedged about with thorns so that you cannot reach it except at the risk of tearing your fingers; while the other grows among the wheat and barley, is looked on by the farmers with great disfavor, and is plucked up by the roots, bound into bundles, and burnt. One of these, it is imagined, was meant; and this may be the truth, while it is possible he did not mean this or that particular flower, but the whole wealth of wild lilies with which they were familiar. Here they were grow ing all about him in the woods and pastures, and among the corn; things of no account, if a gleam of beauty is of no account, and a touch of fragrance; wild, in the way very often, and mere weeds to be mown down with the briars, or plucked from among the growing wheat and burnt. But within the worthlessness he found a worth. These wild things also are of God, he says, and from God. Of no worth to you, they are of so much worth to him that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. You want them out of the way: He put them in the way, and loves what at the best you merely tolerate, or why should he have cast such a wealth of beauty and fragrance into their cups? And we find the key to the lesson of the lilies, as we try to identify ourselves with the men and women to whom he was speaking that day. He was speaking to them about their life; and it was a life in which they would at the best be inclined to feel that they were of no great account. They were people who had to take hold of humble tasks to earn their bread, and to work at them with very scant encouragement. And there were hard times for them in those days, as there are in these,— worse, indeed, than any that we can well imagine; so that now and then they must have been quite fortunate if they did not feel they were rather in the way, and the world would be better without 66 them. They were more fortunate, also, than some are now, if they did not feel sometimes, that their poor obscure lot was, on the whole, about as good as they had any right to expect, because of a certain wild and weedy quality in their nature, out of which they could never hope to rise into any great worth, either to themselves or to the world about them. For there is only here and there a man who will not be content to take his hard fortune quietly, and will keep up a steady revolt against it, and look out for better days. To most men, and especially to those who are born to toil on a low plane where the chances for rising are hardly worth counting, it is about as it has been with your Saxon serf in England for a thousand years, a long mechanic pacing to and fro, a gray set life and apathetic end." And what can be more natural in such a case, than the dull and heavy feeling that you are of no more account to Heaven than you are to earth? a thing to God as you are to man, in the way in the higher as in the lower life, and bound to take what comes, for this has all been settled where there is no appeal. It is not hard to realize that this was the kind of company over whose hard and poor lot the tender heart of Christ was yearning. He meets them on their own ground, and opens to them the lesson of the lilies. They are of no account, he says, wild things, and in the way. They are mown down, and pulled up and consumed, and you think there is good riddance. But now just look at the cup of that wild lily. Did any whiteness in the palace of Solomon, or any purple he ever wore, touch the pure splendor of those petals? Was any silk ever equal to their sheen, or fretted gold equal to that you will find in their heart, or any line of beauty man ever drew equal to the curve from the base to the edge of that cup, or any incense equal to their perfume? No man cares for them, but do you see how God cares? He gave them their beauty and sweetness, and maintains them in the world against all opposition, for he must and will have wild lilies. And so you will see from this brief word of lilies first, and then of those to whom Jesus speaks, what a large and gracious meaning stays within his thought. For the beauty and worth of it, as of so much beside in his gospel, lies just here, that he does not seem to care either for the lilies or the lives on which the grace of God seems to be stamped so clearly that you have no doubt about it when your see them; but leaves these to speak for themselves, and takes up those that need such an advocate and interpreter before they can come home to us in their true worth. Because this is the simple truth, that there was a great wealth of lilies in the world that day, which held in their cup the culture of all the centuries since God put man in a garden to dress it, — flowers about which men were busy, no doubt, |