Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little Flower--but if I could understand
What you art, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.


Beautiful confession! Absolutely true. I hold that flower in my hand,
and I look at it, flower and leaves and stem and root. I can botanize
it, and then I tear it to pieces--that is what the botanist mostly
does--and you put some part of it there, and some part of it there,
and some part of it there. There is the root, there the stem, and
there are the leaves, and there is everything; but where is the
flower? Gone. How did it go? When did it go? Why, when you ruthlessly
tore it to bits. But how did you destroy it? You interfered with the
principle that made it what it was--you interfered with the principle
of life. What is life? No man can tell you. "If I could but know what
you are, little flower, root and all, and all in all," I would know
what life is, what God is, what man is. I can not.

Now, if you lift that little parable of the flower into the highest
realm of animal life, and speak of yourself--we don't know ourselves;
down in my nature there are reaches that I have not fathomed yet. They
are coming up every day. What a blest thing it is to have the Master
at hand, to hand them over to Him as they come up, and say, "Lord,
here is another piece of Thy territory; govern it; I don't know
anything about it." But there is the business. I don't know myself,
but God knows me, understands all the complex relationships of my
life, knows how matter affects mind, and physical and mental and
spiritual are blended in one in the high ideal of humanity. Oh,
remember, man is the crowning and most glorious work of God of which