Prayer-Meeting Bouquets.
By Sel.
My mother says she always enjoys that prayer-meeting the best which is like a bouquet of fresh and fragrant flowers—no two alike, but all tied up together handsomely, and well arranged. She means the prayers, remarks, and singing, I suppose. Those who make them bring each a flower. One brings something sweet to tell about the love of Christ, perhaps. That is like a sprig of mignonette or heliotrope. Mother says she prefers those flowers because of their fragrance. Then, confession of sin and words of repentance and humility may be the blue spring violets. Others bring sprays of green—fresh Bible truths which they have collected—like wreaths of smilax, or delicate-leaved vines. Others contribute roses, carnations, lilies, or wall-flowers may be; or some young Christian, perhaps, timidly offers a bud or two “from his own experience,” as father says. And such a bouquet, well arranged, is the very best of meetings, my mother thinks. If she is right about it, it seems to me I have attended meetings, occasionally, ornamented with considerably many burdocks and mullein-stalks—where even the hymns sounded as if their stems had all dried up. And I’m thinking some of the “brethren,” as father calls them, by the way they speak in meeting, seldom try to pick any flowers to carry in before they start away from home. So they have to take whatever they chance to find along the road on the way to the meeting. Instead of something rare and sweet from their garden, they pluck and bring in anything that happens to catch their eye. But father says they’re “better than nothing to offer,” after all; though fresh flowers are much better, I think, than any commonplace, withered ones, found lying in the rut, perhaps, where the one who first gathered them threw them down as he went along. If a “flower is a flower,” there’s some choice in flowers, isn’t there? I wish they could just hear my mother once, speaking of Jesus, and “talking religion” in her own way, as she does about home here—it’s all white clover-blossoms and mignonette to me! And when she sometimes steals into my chamber to pray, when she thinks I’m asleep, it’s the sweetest white lily I ever saw floating in the very smoothest cove of the river! Now, if such flowers could only be carried to the weekly prayer-meeting a little oftener, I believe I should like to go better than I do.—Sel.