lost. It was because God had taken it out of its dead coverings, and cast it into the heart of elements that throb with life, as the earth throbs with the summer sun. It was buried that it might rise. The flowering of the former summer was over and done; the blossoms of our national holiness had withered away; the root alone was left. We held on to that through the winter, thank God; but then we wanted to hold on to it through the summer also: we feared to trust it to the new spring. The root, withered as it was, was what we wanted. But our Father is the husbandman; and he buried the root out of our sight. It was because there was as sure a hope for the nation as there is for June roses. We had to watch painfully for it, to wrestle

with awful oppositions through a dark night. But so does the farmer watch and wrestle for his harvest. Canker-worm and caterpillar take their toll; wind and storm do their work. Anxiety and care can never be quite absent. They are hardly more absent to-day than ever they were; only the day is sure to come in the nation as in our life, in our life as in the nation, when the flower unfolds to the sun in its perfect glory.

When the battle of Shiloh was fought, I went from Chicago to the battle-field, with a corps of nurses, to take care of the wounded men. Our city, when I left it, was sheeted in grim black weather: not a leaf was open on the trees, not

But, when we got into

a flower in the gardens. the South, the orchards were rejoicing in great rosy clouds of apple-blossom, and the woods were full of song. When I came back to Chicago, however, the trees were still bare. Here and there, a leaf had ventured out, and was shivering in the bitter wind: but there was no spring yet; and men were reaping up all their old grudges against the Lakes and their weather, and were sure the spring would never come.

Now, I have one tree just by my study window, with which I have managed to become very intimate. We nod to each other every morning. In those long black days, I could see my friend was looking disheartened enough. It had great treasure of buds; but it seemed to fold them as a child folds a treasure in its clasped fingers, and all the while to be saying, "Well, I do think this spring will never come." But I said, "Hold on,

good tree spring is coming. I saw her down

there on the Alabama line.

Here where you are

is the winter, fierce, persistent, determined to stay. Yonder, where I have been, is the spring, -soft, sunny, filling the woods with her white splendor; and I can see the blossoms pouring up this way, faster than I could run on my feet to tell you." And it was so. The warm days came at last; the summer was victor; and my tree stood, tremulous in her beautiful green robes, like a bride adorned for her wedding.

Now, why will men not take these things into their hearts, and be as full of faith in the meaning and purpose of their lives as of their flowers? Is the man alone the neglected step-child? are his fortunes alone misfortunes? are we much worse than the lilies? Or is it not of all things true, that as man rises nearest of all on this earth to the image of the Infinite, so he is nearest of all on this earth to the Providence that enfolds and blesses all?

II.

WHAT A LEAF SAID.

ISA. Ixiv. 6: "We all do fade as a leaf."

My text is a sermon in itself. It was whispered from the trees, as you came to church: it will rustle under your feet, as you go home. It is the sermon of these autumn days, proclaiming the dissolution, as the spring proclaimed the resurrection and the life. I heard this sermon, when I was seventeen, in the plane-trees that covered the foss of an old Roman camp: I shall hear it, if I live, when I am seventy, in the elms and maples by this lake shore; and it has always been the one thing, that the fading and falling leaf is the mute monitor of the fading and failing life.

And I can well believe how my experience must answer to yours, - how, in pensive moments all your life long, when the crimson banners unfold on the trees, and the leaves begin to

fall about your path, you have thought more painfully of the fading life than at any other time in the year. This seems to be not only the common feeling, but the habit also of the prophet and seer. Few psalms were ever sung about the fading leaf, that had for their burden a great cry of accomplishment and victory. All rejoice over the purple grape and ripened grain. The fruit, ruddy and golden, seems to laugh at us on the tree; but the leaf, rustling under our feet or shivering in the sharp frost, seems to tell only of dissolution and death. We thank God in our great Thanksgiving for the kindly fruits of the earth we never thank him for the kindly leaves. Every thing on the farm and in the garden is considered, except the leaf. "How

strange and awful the gusty wind and whirling leaves of the autumnal day!" Coleridge cries; and he does but express what all men feel. We tack it into a distich for our children's copybooks; we set it to music, and sing it in our parlors, and churches; and we engrave it on the memorial stones of our dead,

do fade as a leaf.

that we all

And yet I do not intend to re-echo this cry