in us now; and then we must just wait patiently until He shall appear, for now we cannot even guess what the FLOWER will be.

To recur to the head of the different and infinitely various beauty in flowers. There are many lessons to be learnt from this. One,— How endless, infinite, inexhaustible, are God's thoughts of beauty! for these flowers, be it remembered, are but embodied thoughts of God's mind; and under the single head, "FLOWERS," in but one speck in His systems, how astounding the variety of exquisite ideas! Now go higher, and just peep, on the tiptoe of thought, at what may be included under the head-PLANETS. And go out into the warm May night, and look up at that gauze scarf of heaven, the Milky Way, and catch one far glimpse at the mighty marvels that may be classed under the awful head-SYSTEMS. And then go back into your small sphere of work again, and never fear but that there will be employment enough for the most active and untiring mind and body throughout the great Ages of Eternity.

Another lesson-How good God is to give us this variety of beauty! How kind! A little pale, monotonous blossom would have, no doubt, sufficed for mere use, in developing seeds and fruits. But our Father has provided not merely necessaries, but luxuries even, for His fallen children. What a proof of His kindness! what an earnest, again, of the beauty and delight of the unfallen world!

A third thought comes under the head of this variety in the flowers a thought that fits in well with the subject of their Easter sermon and May-day speeches. These infinitely diverse, yet always beautiful flowers will serve to explain to us how there can be degrees in heaven, and yet all be satisfied there. Ask you, How can one be said to be perfectly happy if there is above him a yet higher degree of happiness to which he cannot attain? These flowers, I say, make it all clear to us. For is not the humble daisy perfect? and yet who would not say that the rose has a higher, nobler perfection?

We shall rise, all who fall asleep in Jesus-we shall rise like the flowers, each beautiful, each perfect in his degree. From the little green weed-flower, which is yet a flower, to the speedwell, and the forgetme-not, and the daffodil, and the heart's-ease, and the chestnut bloom, and the garden flowers, and the hothouse flowers, there will be an infinite gradation and variety, but all will be in their degree perfect. There will be no jealousy, no discontent, and that for this very reason, that each has its own perfection. The gradation is not, I mean, from cankered rosebuds, up through more or less of imperfection, to the perfect rose; but the violet has attained to its own proper perfection, just as the lily has to hers; and the little celandine may gleam up brightly from the grass, all the more happy because above it opens the distinct and different beauty of the rose. Ay, even amongst the roses themselves how vast the variety! and among

many of these flowers, quite differing in colour, shape, growth, it yet might seem impossible to award the meed of highest perfection.

This world, let us ever remember, is the nursery-ground. Here the gardener has us under His care. He has made us, He gives us all that we are, or can be. But He has made us plants with will and reasonaccording to our use of His care, according to our watchfulness and prayer, and use of means provided, shall our culture progress, and the next year, after death's winter-the year, I mean, of eternity— find us flowers for the meadows, or for the palace-rooms of heaven. And while yet in that nursery (we are taught on the best authority) the degenerate vine may develop into the good vine, the tares into wheat, under that husbandry, and the fig tree, long barren, blossom and bear at last; also, what was a mere wild, single flower may be by that Gardener developed into the rich, rare double blossom.

Earth is God's garden, then, under God's care; a garden of immortal beings as well as of perishing flowers; and the undying growth may learn much from the innocent, fair flowers that fall by its side. To the worldling they tell but of evanescence and failing hopes; to the earnest Christian they seem God's crowding promises, as they edge his path with their sorrowful, sweet eyes. Sorrowful, I say, or rather grave, for nothing lovely in this fallen world but makes us sad with a foreboding and a recollection of something that is not, but that was, and is, in a higher degree, to be yet. Just as we remember, in days of childhood, the sorrowful yet yearning eyes of a sister when we were in disgrace; so, I fancy, the angels and the flowers look upon this fallen world, that will not, though it might, be reconciled to its God.

Earth is God's garden, mostly under the winter of death. And what shall we say as to the resurrection of the bulbs and roots that rotted in the ground? for we did not pursue any analogy for them. Yet an analogy there is, ready to our hand, if not from the flowers, at any rate from vegetation. Ugly fungi and damp lichen and charnel mould are the loathsome growth that start up after the first resurrection of the spring is over, and when the damp days of autumn have come: this is the only second life of the rotten, wasted bulbs. Sad, suggestive thought! But we will not dwell upon it, only hint it in a May-day paper.

And now, have we not had some profitable and eke loving speeches at this our May meeting of the preacher flowers? Have they not preached to us à sermon well fitted for the Easter season? Hear, then, its end. The loveliness of soul and body to which we look forward was purchased for us by our dear Lord. From Christ the germ must come here; from Christ must the perfection be derived hereafter. In Adam all die; in Christ must all be made alive. When

He shall appear, and the winter earth shall burst into blossom, what is it that will insure universal loveliness amid the infinite variety of the immortal growth that springs, at that Easter call, from the cold, damp prison of the grave? How know you that he or she whom you, in a great darkness of anguish that yet was not unlit by hope, suffered perforce to be lowered into the narrow house-how know you that that dear one who, living, loved the Lord, shall burst the bands of that prison-house in angelic beauty and immortal youth? "When He shall appear, we shall be like Him." If Christ is being formed within us here, then not only the soul shall be transformed— shall be a new and changed thing, strong and holy, and having attained, instead of weak, and sinful, and feebly striving,-not only the soul shall have perfected its renewal, but-what?

"He shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.”

Think of that May-day gathering of innumerable, all various and all lovely flowers, and cheer up, patient and loving brother or sister, may be in sorrow and in toil. For that discipline is preparing thee in this nursery-ground to blossom, perhaps, a rare flower in the Palace-Gardens of God. Fear not, whatever the Husbandman doeth to thee; least of all fear when He planteth thee in the ground. Keep fast, by God's grace, the germ of Christ's righteousness within thee, and when the soft air of the Resurrection Day calls it forth, thyself shall marvel at the FLOWER!

THE HOLY LAND.

"THE East" is the one quarter in which the hopes and aspirations of the world centre. The Jew still gazes thitherward in expectation of his Messiah; the Moslem sees there the spot where all that was mortal will undergo judgment; and the Christian beholds there the fulfilment of prophecy, the solace for present trial, the assurance of future life.

Mr. Hepworth Dixon is one of the latest travellers who brings us news from that land which is the true link which binds this world to the next. In his "Holy Land," a book full of the brightest word-pictures, broad speculation, and deep philosophy, we have his varied experiences of that quarter of the world where gods have clashed with gods, and where the mystery of the one God and one Lord was revealed to man.

Syria, the home of the chosen people, to whom was imparted the knowledge of the true God, has ever been "the prolific soil of creeds." Mr. Dixon points out how Phoenicia lent her gods to Egypt, Egypt to Greece, and Greece to Rome, "so that when Venus and Jupiter returned to Galilee in the wake of Cæsar, they were only coming home to their parent soil." The shores and valleys seem to teem with rival deities, as these are enumerated in an eloquent passage, in which the author observes that "the Jews, the Christians, and the Moslems trace back their faith to these Syrian shores, on which there has always been, as there is even now, an abounding nursery of religious creeds. In the days of Herod the Great as many deities sought for supremacy in Galilee as fight in the Lebanon now; Ashtoreth over the Sidonians, Molech over the Syrians, Isis over the Egyptians, Dagon over the Philistines, Manah over the Ishmaelites, Artemis over the Greeks, Jupiter over the Romans." Mr. Dixon is of opinion, that if any man ever existed who could have fused these diverse peoples into one nation, making fellow-citizens of the Jew and the Greek, Herod the Great was the man. How he might have succeeded, but why he also failed, is shown in a brilliant portrait-character of a man who is masterly etched in a few words, as being "by birth an Arab, by profession a Jew, by necessity a Roman, and by culture and by choice a Greek." The measure in which Herod was each of them, not by turns, but at once, is admirably well put. "An Arab as Napoleon was a Corsican; a Jew as Henri Quatre was a Catholic; a Roman as Mohammed Ali

was a Turk, Herod was an Hellene of his free choice." Nevertheless-with all his art, all his ability, all his power, all his craft, cunning, and expedients, all his triumphs in war and in peace, all his pagan courtesy, all his orthodox zeal-Herod disappointed and alienated all parties. His political genius was not equal to the task of converting Syria into a nation on the principles of a cultured and a liberal Greek; and his personal life, as Mr. Dixon remarks, "was such as to estrange from him the sympathies of all good and honest men." After describing this personal life, and the darkest shades in the character of this lustful and cruel king, and depicting the shade with as much power as he paints the light and glory with beauty, such as only a master hand can give to the work, Mr. Dixon sums up the case between Herod and his accusers and defenders alike in these eloquent words :-"Genius, valour, courtesy, eloquence, and taste had come to nothing, to worse than nothing, in Herod's hands. He had crushed the nobles, but he had not raised the multitude. In fighting against the intolerant spirit of the Oral Law he had toiled to a noble end; but the means to that end were beyond his reach, and perhaps beyond his conception. The way to unite a crowd of hostile sects into one people is not by pandering to every passion and delusion in its turn, but by kindling in the whole body of rivals a new spiritual passion hot enough to consume the old. Herod provided games, rites, comedies, architecture, for a society too much corrupted ever to become a nation except by being born afresh. To become one in heart, Jew and Greek required, not old shows, but a new spiritual life. But this new life of the Spirit is a gift which kings and governors have not to give." It seems to us impossible that a case so boundless in its bearings could be described, examined, and explained with more terseness, perspicuity, and truth than it is here by Mr. Dixon. It is strange that around the cradle of the blessed Prince of Peace there should be no peace; that in the once abiding-place of the chosen people there should be no distinct people; that when the old law and the new dispensation were proclaimed and enshrined, there should be no law, or what is the same, no observance of it. Tents and towers, convents and mosques, but no race, no people, no law. "In the province of Galilee," says our traveller, "there are perhaps as many gods as in the time of Herod the Great." Mr. Dixon looks out from the hill of Nazareth, and in that noble landscape counts the habitations of Christian, Jew, and Moslem, "each sect as intolerant of the other as, in the apostolic times, an Arab was of a Greek, a Samaritan of a Jew." Is there peace more to the North, where Druse assails Maronite, and Maronite repulses the Druse; and where, hated by both, dwells "that sect of the Ansayreh, whose obscene rites no Frank has yet been suffered to see, and live." Mr.