SERMONS.

I.

ROOT AND FLOWER.

JOHN xii. 20-25: "And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast. The same came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: and again, Andrew and Philip tell Jesus. And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but, if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal."

I WENT once, in the last days of June, to see an old friend in the country, who has consecrated his life to trees and flowers. When I came away, he gave me something wrapped in a piece of paper, bidding me select the best spot in my garden, when I got home, and plant it. "For," he added, "that is a very choice flower, sir, - one of the most beautiful things you ever saw in your

life." I left my friend, and started home; and, when I had got well out of his sight, of course I undid the paper, that I might look at my treasure. It was as queer, unpromising a thing to look at, as I ever saw. At the first glance, you would take it for a poor, haggard old onion. There was not a speck of beauty about it, that I should desire it. Then I put my flower back into the paper, brought it home, and planted it just as I was directed; and when I had done this, I began to ponder and wonder over this great mystery of planting and growing and flowering. I said to myself, "What are my conceptions of what is to come out of my dark, forbidding bulb? I never saw the flower, I suppose, in my life. I have no certain idea what it is like. It may resemble a sunflower or a peony or a daisy or a bluebell. If I carry a single tooth pried out of the limestone to Professor Owen, he will sketch me an outline of the animal that used it, though this be the first fragment ever seen of a thing that died out ten thousand years before the first man. But I may carry a fragment of this root to the Owen of plants, if there be one, and ask him to search in it for the flower; and I

suppose

he must fail to tell me what it will be, because there seems to be no possible link between the bare grain and the body as it pleases God. And then this choicest spot in the garden, - what did my friend mean by that? If I understand him, he meant a place of the strongest possible contrasts, -a place bare to the sun and the night and the wind and the rain; where I had gathered the heaviest proportion of shard, refuse, and decay; a place where life has to do battle with darkness and death, and to draw from them its richest elements of beauty and perfume. And then what have I done? My friend gave me this flower, as he called it, folded carefully as if it were a jewel of price; and, carefully as he gave it, I brought it home. But, when I got home, I put it down into this grim earth, this fragment of . the measureless waste of land, and left it there. Had I not better keep it in some safe casket, or fold it to my heart, until I see the beauty that my friend has promised? Is it possible, is it indispensable in that will of God which I have been taught to call the order of nature, that the only way to come at the beauty and glory is that it shall be put away and buried out of my sight?

Can it be true, that the way to find what I want 1 is to lose it; that the transcendent form and color and perfume of August must depend upon the decay of June?"

Well, friends, these are some of the hinted questionings that whispered themselves out of my poor dry root, and I could give them but one answer; namely, "These seeming contradictions are only so because I do not know enough. And I can only know as I walk by faith; for faith, above all things, makes the discords of the present the harmonies of the future."

It is one of the many curious things that look out at us from almost every page of the Gospels, to assure us that the Gospels themselves are substantially fragments out of the real life and times. of Jesus Christ, that these men, who had come to the feast at Jerusalem and requested to see Jesus, should be Greeks, at that time probably the most inquisitive and newsy race on the earth. They had come, I presume, from Corinth or Ephesus; and, when they went back home, the first question would be, "What's the news?" Now, the news was Jesus; his name and fame had gone out into all Jewry. He was just then the com

mon subject of discussion in the city gates and synagogues; and it would be a great thing for them, when they got back home, to say, "We have seen Jesus, and talked with him." And the answer of Christ to their request, though it seems at the first glance to be no answer at all, touches the very heart of all such question and answer, and is, beside that, a beautiful instance of the rich, transcendental nature of this Son of God: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but, if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." As if he would say, "These men want to see me. What can they gain by that? There is nothing to see in me. If they want to see me, they must wait until I go away, and the world sees me no more. What they will see is not me. The root is not the flower. This common, foot-sore man, with this poor, brown face, so thin and worn that men think I may be nearly fifty, while I am still but thirty, what can I be to men whose ideal is Apollo? I cannot sing with Homer; I cannot speculate with Plato ; I cannot unloose the seals with Euclid, or bear men on the mighty tides of eloquence with Demosthenes. Phidias made the marble speak;