as they are now, selecting and arranging in orders of nobility, over which they were wondering, and singing praises because of their exceeding beauty and sweetness, and preserving with care in gardens and conservatories, as was fitting, to their minds, for plants of such rare worth; Lilies like that out of whose cup the sacred books in India say Brahına sprung, the oldest of all the sons of God; like those Layard found in the royal palaces of Nineveh; like that Sir Gardiner Wilkinson copied from the brow of an Egyptian beauty, where it hangs like a jewel; and like those Sir William Jones was treasuring in his room when a man came to see him from Nepaul, and, seeing the flowers, bowed before them first, as a devout Catholic bows before the host. Some such rare flower our divine Teacher might have brought to his discourse, and said to his hearers, "See this now, and tell me whether God has not revealed himself in all this beauty and worth." But these wild things with the thorns about them, on the skirts of Mount Tabor, or these others in the standing corn, lilies lurking in the meadow-grass, or haunting the marshes, and tossing their heads in the wind all over the land, of no great worth in any case, and usually in the way; wild things which had never been touched by culture, or made sacred in any way by the reverence of the centuries, but had just taken care of themselves, and, as sure as summer

came, had foamed over out of their hiding places, so that those who wanted a land full of good green grass and corn would feel a good deal more like praying against them than bowing before them with the children of the far East, and be more ready to believe that the Evil One had hidden in their cups, than Brahma, the first incarnation,— how could he take these to his heart, and say such a sweet, good word about them, that human hearts had to treasure it, and write it in a Gospel, and send it down through all these ages as the word of God?

And, as he might have chosen his flowers, so he might have chosen his company, and been careful as we are often about narrowing his lessons of God's great regard down to those who might well be deemed most worthy. For, as there was a favored flower, so there was a favored class; and here, no doubt, he might have found instances of the worth of culture and fortune as proofs of the grace of God, as clear and conclusive as those he might have selected from the gardens and conservatories,

men and women of the rarest beauty and worth of life and character, about whose welcome there could be no doubt, whose place was assured, and whose loss to the world would leave a gap which, to men's minds, could never be filled; men and women of a distinct genius, whose sermons in the temple, or pleas at the bar, or cures in the hospital,

or creations in the finer arts, or histories, or poems, or stories, mark an era or create a school in the history and life of a nation; or who have such endowments of goodness or of valor, that they become saints and heroes by simply living out their lives. Very easy it would have been, no doubt, even in those barren and dismal days, to point out men and women who were the instances to the time of these noble orders; or, if there were none in life, there were plenty in history to which the noble heart of the nation would have responded at the mere mention of their names, from Abraham down to Zachariah who was slain between the temple and the altar. No doubt about the place those hold in the common estimation, any more than there is about the great names in the Poet's Corner at Westminster, or the crypt of St. Paul's in London; grand presences in the nation's history, whose names are written in the book of life. But here is what you might call a horde of common people, fishermen and herdsmen, peasants and publicans, persons of no account in the world, and of small account even to themselves, whose lot it was, perhaps, to draw their first breath in a home where they were not very welcome, to whom life from their youth had been a hard fight for the survival of the fittest, and who must be cut down and consumed, perhaps, by war or pestilence before they had a fair chance to open fully to the world, or be

hedged about by the thorns of evil circunstances; penned up in mean homes, so that they took to drink for what seemed like a glimpse of heaven to them in the very fires of hell, or were led into evil ways by the allurements of passions they had never been taught to curb and guide; wild things, making their way into life without leave or license, to leave it again, and make no sign; just to reveal a touch of beauty to those who had eyes to see it, and send some grain of sweetness from among the thorns, and then to pass away. And these were the men and women to whom Jesus said, "God cares for the wild things that are growing all about you; and are ye not much better than they?"

And when we leave them there about the mountain-side, and bring the truth home to our own life and the life of those about us, we can see what a divine wisdom there was in this turning away from the noblest and best, and touching those on whom the world looks with disdain and dislike for the lesson of God's grace. For the tendency of our time and of all time is to keep this grace in the gardens and conservatories of humanity, if I may say so, to the exclusion of the wilderness, and to believe in him as only revealed in the grandest and noblest natures, or, to use the term so common in our time, to those who have experienced a change of heart, while he cares nothing for those who can put forth no such claim, or looks on them with the

dislike the farmer feels toward the wild things that invade his crops in Syria. But the steady truth about all time and the vast preponderance of life is this that while our reverence for a true nobility is the proof of a certain nobleness in our own nature, and we can never over-estimate the worth of it, or the proof it brings home to us of the divine presence in this world, yet it is, after all, but as the lilies that had grown to their high worth through centuries of care, in comparison with the wild things that were shedding their gleam of beauty and sweetness in the corn and over the pastures. And if this great mass of humanity, which may well include your life and mine, is to have no part or lot in God's love and care, then woe worth the world, for it is, on the whole, a hideous and haggard failure!

For the truth you will find in a great city like this of ours is about as good, on the whole, as you will find anywhere; that an enormous majority are of no account except as they can reveal some gleam of beauty and breath of sweetness by being simply what they are, without any radical change at all, not cultured or of a special genius, but of quite the common order, with a wild tang and tendency, very much in the way sometimes, compelled to make a hard fight for existence, cumbering the ground, if God wants the whole land this instant for corn and timothy, and wants no wild things about. Take this city for your instance, and you strike a rather high