THIRD ANNUAL FLOWER SERMON. 29 



The lessons of the lilies are for all ; it was to common- 

 folk long ago that Christ commended them. And the first, 

 the plainest, the most important teaching of flowers is their 

 teaching of beauty. It was this our Lord had in mind: 

 "Consider the lilies; Solomon in all his glory was not 

 arrayed like one of these." 



Speaking as Jesus did to believers in a Personal Deity, 

 He argued from the care shown for the grass of the field to 

 the care that must be exercised over men and women; 

 human life cannot be squalid and ugly by the will of One 

 who has written His choice of grace and sweetness on the 

 plants that live but a day. It is, therefore, to this great 

 fact of beauty, with its implication and revelation of a 

 Divine Mind, that I ask your attention. 



Let no one sneer at such study of nature as superficial, 

 unworthy of a scientific age. For science must recognize 

 all the facts, and to us the most obvious fact about a large 

 part of nature is that it is beautiful. The gratification we 

 get in dissecting a crocus is no more real than the gratifica- 

 tion we get in seeing it smile up from the sward. 



" Yesterday," says Darwin, in a letter to a friend, "I 

 strolled for an hour and enjoyed myself, — the fresh yet 

 dark green of the grand Scotch firs, the brown of the cat- 

 kins on the old birches with their white stems, and a fringe 

 of distant green from the larches made an excessively 

 pretty view. At last I fell asleep on the grass and awoke 

 with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels 

 running up the trees and some woodpeckers laughing, and 

 it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I 

 did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had 

 been formed." 



I take it the great man of science evinced quite as lofty 

 a mind thus lying on the grass and contemplating the scene 

 as in composing any paragraph of the " Origin of Species." 

 And if from the picture he enjoyed he was not led to think 

 of its Artist, it was not his science which forbad. " In 

 my most extreme fluctuations," he said, " I have never 



