Now, if any other teacher had spoken these words to Matthew, and had tried to make him quit his business and engage in something else, he would have said:  “No; I can’t leave my office.  This is all the means I have of getting a living.  The business pays well, and I am not willing to give it up.”  But when Jesus spoke to him, he did, at once, what he was told to do.  We read that “He left all, rose up, and followed him.”  Matt. ix:  9; Luke v:  28.  He became one of the twelve apostles and wrote the gospel which bears his name.  But it was the great power which Jesus has over the hearts of men that made Matthew willing to do, at once, what he was told to do.

And the power which Jesus exercised over Matthew, in this case, he still has, and still uses.  And when he is pleased to use this power the very worst people feel it, and are made good by it.  And Jesus, “the Great Teacher,” uses this power sometimes in connection with very simple things.  Here is an illustration.  We may call it: 

“Saved by a Rose.”  Some time ago, a Christian gentleman was in the habit of visiting one of our prisons.  It occurred to him, one day, that it would be a good thing to have a flowering plant in the little yard connected with each cell.  He got permission from the officers of the prison to do so.  He had a bracket fastened to the wall, in each yard, and a flower pot, with a plant in it, placed on each bracket.  One of these prisoners was worse than all the rest.  He was the most hardened man that had ever been in that prison.  His temper was so violent and obstinate that no one could manage him.  The keeper of the prison was afraid of him, and never liked to go near him.  He was such a disagreeable-looking man that the name given to him in the prison was “Ugly Greg.”  A little rose bush was put on the bracket in Ugly Greg’s yard, and the effect produced by it is told in these simple lines, which some one has written about it: 

    “Ugly Greg was the prisoner’s name,
    Ugly in face, and in nature the same;
    Stubborn, sullen, and beetle-browed,
    The hardest case in a hardened crowd. 
    The sin-set lines in his face were bent
    Neither by kindness nor punishment;
    He hadn’t a friend in the prison there,
    And he grew more ugly and didn’t care.

    “But some one—­blessings on his name! 
    Had caused to be placed in that house of shame,
    To relieve the blank of the white-washed wall,
    Flower-pot brackets, with plants on them all. 
    Though it seemed but a useless thing to do,
    Ugly Greg’s cell had a flower-pot, too,
    And as he came back at the work-day’s close,
    He paused, astonished, before a rose.

    “‘He will smash it in pieces,’ the keeper said,
    But the lines on his face grew soft instead. 
    Next morning he watered his plant with care,
    And went to his work with a cheerful air;
    And, day by day, as the rose-bush grew,
    Ugly Greg began changing, too.