SUMMER MEETING. 49 



Your thinking in forms of beauty, starting with the simple rose of Eden, 

 has developed the unsurpassed and varied splendor of the roses seen here 

 before us this afternoon. So with nearly all our vegetables that we prize 

 for their agreeable flavor and nutritive properties; together with our 

 flowers they have been brought from a wild, unpalatable state by careful 

 selection and cultivation to their present high state of development. 



All these marvelous developments in forms of beauty and of fruitful- 

 ness, that have beautified, enriched and blessed the world, all imply cult- 

 ure, patience, skill on the part of the horticulturist like that of God's. 



It is thought in the horticulturist's brain that has added to the prim- 

 itive glories of creation. It is thought in his brain and arm which gives 

 us a summer the year round. It is thought in the horticulturist that 

 has enlarged the work God began. 



"The man whose life work survives in the rose or strawberry is a cre- 

 ator, a benefactor, a teacher,"— a teacher and benefactor, first, in mul- 

 tiplying and improving the blessings God gave at first,— and second, by 

 the efforts to produce these he has been saving man and restoring to a 

 higher better type of manhood. While it has given new plants, flowers, 

 and fruits, your calling, like the Scotchman's oats, has also been helping 

 to make men. 



The agencies of heaven all conserve the grander, higher nature of men, 

 and you are co-laborers with the Infinite, for as He sets a high ideal so you 

 bring into your daily task the ideal of the highest attainable perfection 

 of growth and production. 



You are satisfied with nothing that you, or that others have done. It is 

 your duty, your design, your delight to enrich the earth with a wealth 

 and beauty never before attained, and that noble discontent, that divine 

 restlessness seen in man and peculiarly distinctive in the life of the horti- 

 culturist, has lifted humanity upcm higher and holier planes of living, so 

 that while you have been laboring to produce that which is more and 

 more perfect, productive and beautiful in the world of nature, you have 

 by your very effort been working in union with God in the production of 

 a nobler type of man. 



It was more than a coincidence then, it was prophecy indicative of the 

 purifying and ennobling influence of your manhood-making calling, that 

 Mary at the tomb of her risen Lord, whom she did not recognize, could think 

 of no one more likely to possess the attractive features and intense look of 

 love of the perfect man than that horticulturist who kept the garden 

 where he had been buried. I will step aside to let Whittier place this 

 wreath upon your brow, 



"Oh, painter of the fruits and flowers. 

 We thank thee for the wise design. 

 Whereby these human hands of ours 

 In Nature's garden work with thine. 



And thank that from our daily needs 

 The joy of simple faith is born; 

 That he who smites the summer weed, 

 Must trust Thee for the autumn corn. 



4h 



