Many of you have brought here offerings of flowers, sweet and fit for this day and place and purpose.  Some may have brought them simply with the thought of helping out the occasion, or to please your teacher, or because it is beautiful in itself to heap up beauty in this large way; but if, as you worked here yesterday, or brought your flowers to-day, your thoughts silently rose to God, saying, “These are for Thy altars—­this glory of tint and perfume is not for us, but for Thee”—­then, I think, every poet, every person of fine feeling, every true thinker, would say that the latter is more beautiful than the former.  I hate to see a life that does not take hold of God; I hate to see fine acts and brave lives and noble dispositions and generous emotions that do not reach up into a sense of God; I hate to see persons—­and I see a great many such nowadays—­striving after beautiful lives and true sentiments and large thoughts without ever a word of prayer, or thought of God, or anything to show they love and venerate Christ.  I hate to see it, both because they might rise so much higher and because at last it fails; for God must enter into every thought and sentiment and purpose in order to make it genuine, and truly beautiful, and altogether right.  That God may be in your thoughts; that you may learn to confess Him in all your ways, to serve and fear and know and love him—­this is the wish with which I greet you to-day, and the prayer that I offer in your behalf.

I found, the other day, some lines by Faber—­a Catholic poet—­so beautifully giving this last thought of our sermon that I will read them to you: 

“Oh God! who wert my childhood’s love,
  My boyhood’s pure delight,
A presence felt the livelong day,
  A welcome fear at night,

“I know not what I thought of Thee;
  What picture I had made
Of that Eternal Majesty
  To whom my childhood prayed.

“With age Thou grewest more divine,
  More glorious than before;
I feared Thee with a deeper fear,
  Because I loved Thee more.

“Thou broadenest out with every year
  Each breath of life to meet. 
I scarce can think Thou art the same,
  Thou art so much more sweet.

“Father! what hast Thou grown to now? 
  A joy all joys above,
Something more sacred than a fear,
  More tender than a love.

“With gentle swiftness lead me on,
  Dear God! to see Thy face;
And meanwhile in my narrow heart,
  Oh, make Thyself more space.”

THE HISTORY OF SOLOMON