108 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETF. [1898. 



thorn. We have the very sight before our eyes of such God's 

 work going on. The old man, harsh, fierce, selfisii, savage, is 

 not to be destroyed, not destroyed at all, no element of his 

 power is to be wiped away. But out of the old man, strong, 

 stern and fierce, the new man is to grow. The strong, stern, un- 

 lovely elements becoming the strength of holiness, the stainless- 

 ness of purity, the perfectness of love. That is the lesson, 

 which in utter ignorance of the things themselves, the roses 

 have taught this minister. 



DISCUSSION. 

 Mr. Harrison. 



Mr. Chairman and Friends: — 



I have been highly delighted with these remarks this after- 

 noon. I am intensely interested in the subject. I believe in 

 the mission of beauty, in its power to help humanity ; and as 

 has been outlined, beauty was unfelt in its loveliness on earth at 

 the time of the advent of humanity. The vegetation of the 

 carboniferous age was not beautiful, it was left for the goal of 

 man to make beauty rise on every hand. We are told by 

 mineralogists that even the diamond and the sapphire are com- 

 paratively recent productions. 



In the West where I have been so long, I have rejoiced in 

 the evangel of nature, that beautiful evangel which reveals 

 God's infinite love. "The wilderness shall blossom as the 

 rose." Out there in the Mnlderness the rose has its mission. 

 There is a man on this great prairie who not only chews 

 tobacco, but eats it, and it is hard to tell where the plug leaves 

 ofi' and the man begins ; he becomes the plug himself. I have 

 seen him go to the store to sell his wife's butter and eggs, and 

 get fifty cents for them from the grocer. He would then buy 

 forty cents worth of tobacco, and ten cents worth of sugar for 

 his wife and take it home and eat three-fourths of that himself. 

 Now when you come to bring him into contact with a higher 

 civilization, and under the influence of beauty you make a 

 diflerent man of him. You cannot save the old man, but you 

 can the boys, and wonderfully assist the girls. 



