108 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 



ment house in a dingy city, you see a flower or plant in the 

 window or at the doorway, what do you argue? That deep 

 and dark penury has not put out all the lights of the soul 

 in that home. That the hard grind of daily toil has not 

 crushed all of the tender and hopeful there. That the 

 earthy and the sensual are not everything in count there; 

 but within are thoughts of the pure and good, outreaching 

 towi^ds the far off, unattained and dim. That the tended 

 plant and growing flower are proofs of some wise plan- 

 nings for life, and some softening touches of goodness in 

 the dwellers in that humble home. 



Well, God has provided, botanical science says, 200,000 

 species of plants in the vegetable kingdom. And thousands 

 upon thousands of them are flowers that are of little use or 

 none at all towards food to eat or raiment to wear. These 

 flowers are set as in the windows and doorway of this 

 lower life of earth of ours, — and it is a poor, humble, and 

 in some sense grinding life of want, too. When ye see 

 them, then, shall ye not argue as before? God's wisdom 

 sets them forth. God's goodness furnishes them in the 

 full measures and running over superfluities of its inherent 

 love. They are suggestive of noble unsatisfiedness. They 

 prophesy of immortality. They shame what is base and 

 narrow and impure. Sweet in fragrance, beautiful to the 

 vision, delicate of texture, they seem nothing short of 

 heavenly messengers to proclaim God's wisdom and good- 

 ness, and to uplift, not only the artist and poet and lover 

 of beauty but all who will be grateful for the Divine 

 bounty, to the true, the beautiful, the good and the eternal. 

 Consider the flowers of the field I The thousands of them 

 that seein useless and unnecessary. Are we tempted to 

 ask, " To what purpose is this waste?" Men asked such a 

 question of old, and among them Judas. And they were 

 rebuked. " Wastes," as we view them, may be really 

 God's precious means of exaltation: His provisions and 

 preparations for heavenly felicities that the eye hath not 

 seen, nor the ear heard, nor the mind conceived: His ef- 



