1898.] ESSAYS. 105 



tasted the fierce delight of war, when the need of war was 

 ended, came back to home and shop and farm again, took up 

 their instruments of busy toil, and became once more the men 

 of peace they had been. Tluit, to my mind, is the noblest part 

 of the story of our soldiers. That is precisely what the thorns 

 have done. 



Take the beginnings of our apple tree, of our Baldwin, our 

 Pippin, our Gravenstein, without a thorn from stem to farthest 

 twig. They had their beginnings in that hard, stumpy, thorny, 

 savage crab-bush. Man took the thing, hunger compelled him 

 to eat its fruit, and he found that with proper care it began to 

 take on sweetness and harmlessness. He protected it, and gave 

 it nourishment and sunshine, and so the long process went on 

 until we have our wonderful varieties of apple, peach and plum 

 today. In England, I remember we boys used to go after what 

 we called " sloes" in the later summer-time. What fun it was ! 

 But what anguish both at the time and generally afterwards ! 

 They were a species of wild plum, but it was growing into 

 tameness. You could eat the thing, and such disastrous results 

 as I have hinted at would be pretty sure to follow. But the 

 wonder of it to us was that on that wild plant we would find 

 innumerable thorns which were giving up their soldier life, and 

 out of each side of these thorns would be tiny little leaves, and 

 the fierce sharpness of them was disappearing. They were 

 turning back to twigs again. And that is the process that has 

 gone on with the apple and peach and cherry, all those 

 delicious fruits. You know how we cultivate the hawthorn, 

 which makes such a thorny hedge in England. We can culti- 

 vate it out of thorniness. We have varieties of roses already 

 in which the thorns have been cultivated out. We have iriven 

 all our attention alone to producing fragrance and beauty in the 

 rose and have neglected that particular, letting the thorns come 

 on them, but if we wish, in less than a hundred years, we can 

 have our roses without thorns. 



All this is of vital interest to me as minister, in a different 

 way than it is to you, as horticulturists. The glorious convic- 

 tion comes to me that the thorns of human character, the hard, 



