Bear then, and forbear. Pity, cherish, love; yearn, as a mother yearns over her prodigal first-born, over the world which is loving and seeking destruction your sorrow is not unto death, but unto life. Christ assures it. "He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied." It shall be yours too to drink deeply of that cup of rapture. "Where sin abounded grace shall overabound. Where sin hath reigned unto death, there shall grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord." Christ is the surety of the everlasting triumph, and therefore "as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so also our consolation aboundeth by Christ."

XIII.

THE GARDEN BY THE CROSS.

“Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden.”— John xix. 41.

AND it was spring, the splendid oriental spring. The flowers breathed their sweetest fragrance around the cross where their Lord was bowing beneath the load of His great agony, and was passing, God-forsaken, as man thought, and as for one dread moment it seemed even to Himself, into the valley of the shadow of death. There is something startling in the association-the Cross, the Garden; the one, the very symbol of shame and suffering, the most awful witness of the destructive power of the sin which has laid waste the world; the other, the brightest of the relics of Eden which the compassion of the Father has saved out of the wreck. The form, the hue, and the breath of flowers, is the purest fragment of the pristine beauty which survives to us. They bloom as fair, as fresh, each spring, as when the dew of the Maker's benediction lay like a mantling glory upon Eden; though perhaps it is just this dewy splendour, the first bloom of the beauty of Creation, which sin has brushed off from the world. We know

what fruit is when the bloom is off it. Colour, form, fragrance, are all there; but something is lost which can ill be expressed—its glory, the last touch of perfection, the glow and the signature of life. It is like the glow of health in a human countenance; it adds to it a special inexpressible charm. I think that it must have been radiant in David when he sang to his soul," Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise Him, who is the health of my countenance and my God."

And so the pristine glow has faded from the Creation; or is it that a film has passed before our sight? At any rate, Eden is lost to us; and it is only in moments of imaginative rapture that we can restore the broken image of what has been in the past; while through the Apocalypse we gain some realising vision of all that God has in store for us, in what will be something higher than a Paradise regained. But flowers help us to comprehend it, better perhaps than anything which is left to us in this path of our pilgrimage. Nothing more brings home to us the boundless beauty, power, and love which are in Him, who made one fair world for us which we have deflowered, and who is making by His redeeming love another whose perfection shall be transcendent and eternal. The blush of spring, the glow of summer, the ruddy gold of autumn, are shed forth by the Creator in pure joy of creation. And where no eye but His, and perhaps the angels', sees them, where no human heart is gladdened by them, there He has scattered them in the wildest luxuriance.

Pure joy in beauty is manifestly a passion which is cherished on high.

Have you ever laid your face close to the herbage of a breezy down in summer, and peered into the world of wonderful beauty which the grasses, the mosses, and the lichens unveil. Nothing so fills one with the sense of the boundless benignity of the Being from whom we receive, and in whom we enjoy all the good of the present, while we trust to Him the future, as the lavish beauty with which He has clothed the Creation. And nothing in the mere creature region seems to me so full of promise of what that future will be, when, in the new heaven and the new earth, the lost harmony between man and Nature is restored. God keeps the flowers bright and fragrant around us as a memory and as a prophecy; a hint of what we have lost as mere creatures by the reign. of sin, and an earnest of what the reign of Christ will one day restore. The beauty of the life which man lost by transgression, still survives in the flowers which he crushes beneath his footsteps. It was the Master, for whom the world had nothing but a cross, who said, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden. The place of a skull was embosomed in beauty; a smile as of heaven played over its ghastly aspect. Flowers bloomed sweetly around the saddest path which was ever trodden by human foot

steps; and they gleamed pale and fair in the moonlight which shone on the sepulchre, where men had' laid their Lord.

We have here presented to us in the very closest association, and yet in the sharpest contrast, the darkest act of the tragedy of life, and the fairest, gayest, gladdest vision which the eye of man can look upon in his world. We will consider the contrast in detail and some of the suggestions of interest which it affords.

I. The darkest act of the tragedy of life. "In the place where He was crucified." I speak of the tragedy of life. That crucifixion does not stand alone. It is but the culmination of all that good has suffered at the hands of evil, patience at the hands of force, truth at the hands of the father of lies, from the first days of the Creation until now. There is a profound sense in which the Lord was the Man of Sorrows. He stands on a lonely height of pre-eminence, as the chief sufferer of the human race. None could drink His cup to the dregs; none could fathom to the depth at which He knew it, the mystery of pain. But He was also the head of a great brotherhood of sorrow. Alone as the Man of Sorrows in one sense, in another, He was "the firstborn among many brethren." A great cloud of unseen witnesses was around Him when He suffered, who had all drunk the same cup of life's bitterness, and trod the same dark path to heaven.

Read the catalogue of their names and heroic deeds in the epistle to the Hebrews. These are all from the