THIRD ANNUAL FLOWER SERMON. 33 



Grant, if you please, that the tools used to bring out these 

 delicate contours and sweet colors, Avere, as the current 

 theory claims, the innumerable hordes of insects, this does 

 not obliterate the result, a loveliness no insect ever saw, but 

 full of light and life for men. Moths and flies and bees 

 and ants may be the immediate causes of all the different 

 corollas. Each lily of the field may, as Professor Henslow 

 insists, be ** due to the responsive action of the proto- 

 plasm in consequence of the irritations set up by the weights, 

 pressures, thrusts, tensions, etc., of the insect visitors." 

 But the Sistine Madonna is not accounted for by an analy- 

 sis of pigments or an enumeration of the bristles in a 

 brush. That picture means a Raphael who conceived it, 

 in whose mind it was before one tint stood on the canvas, 

 and who in painting addressed himself to other and kindred 

 minds, telling them his holy thought. 



Such then is the lesson of the lilies ; the vision of God 

 given in all beauty gleams from each of their myriad 

 mirrors. And this vision is more than a mere assurance 

 that God exists. All beauty is sacramental, and the out- 

 ward visible form conveys to the faithful an inward spirit- 

 ual grace. 



We are creatures of the dust, with a bony framework and 

 a padding of flesh, with blood corpuscles and nerve-tissues, 

 moving around in a gross, palpable world and knocking 

 against lumps of matter at every turn. 1 



We are also spiritual creatures, with thoughts, ideas, 

 ambitions, aspirations, and it is as such creatures that we 

 best estimate ourselves. 



The world and our own bodies are often oppressive, 

 bewildering, repulsive ; all these laws of matter, chemic 

 and electric forces, the varied impulses of the restless 

 atoms, seem intolerable tyrannies over the soul, and we feel 

 ourselves degraded by our carnal passions and susceptibili- 

 ties. And so have arisen religions and philosophies having 

 as their central doctrine a hatred and contempt for the 

 material universe, — Dualisms, Buddhisms, Gnosticisms. 



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