SION 
five hundred years to build; generation after generation helped 
to evolve the idea of that first builder, whose very name probably 
has passed into oblivion! The sculptor, and the carver in oak, 
and the designer of stained glass, each in turn threw himself self- 
lessly into the work, raising for others the carved columns, the 
curious gargoyles; decorating the facade of the great building 
with the sculptured figures of saint and martyr, carving the oaken 
screen, the stalls and the pulpit, filling the tall windows with jewelled 
glass—and all this unostentatiously, each one doing, without fuss 
or sense of special merit, his appointed task—each man literally 
‘* doing his bit,” and doing it well, because he loved it! They had 
faith in God, those old artists, and their labour was part of their 
religion, and therefore do “ their works live after them,” though 
they themselves have long been dust, and many are forgotten. 
It follows that if a man who planted a single tree—that giant 
cedar near the north side of Sion, for instance, which has ‘ had. 
a past’’—so a gardener told me—was blown down in a certain: 
memorable snow-storm twenty or thirty years ago, and then: 
replanted, and still survives, his great arms propped up with iron: 
supports—if such a man well merits our gratitude—for truly the 
tree is beautiful !—if the memory of such deserves posterity’s 
blessing, how great is posterity’s debt to him who planted many 
hundreds of trees, the Beeches of Burnham, the oaks of Windsor 
and Richmond, the trees of all sorts and climates at Kew, and 
the no less magnificent specimens at Sion itself. Kindly permitted 
for a time to wander over Sion, I offer my gratitude both to the 
owner and to the landscape-gardener, whosoever he was, that laid 
out these pleasure-grounds. Like the cathedral builder, he too 
dreamt this garden; laboriously he dug and delved, and pruned 
and watered, and every sapling he planted, with due regard to 
its proper place in the whole scheme, was one step onwards towards 
the realization of his dream. He illustrated in his own person 
two, at least, of the Christian virtues : charity and faith ; for what is 
charity but unselfishness, love ? and in a degree his was an unselfish 
act. And what is faith but—and this might well be the landscape- 
gardener’s motto—“ the substance of things hoped for, the evidence 
of things not seen.” 
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