But, my friends, you need to be aggressive Christians, and not like those persons who spend their lives in hugging their Christian graces and wondering why they do not make any progress.  How much robustness of health would a man have if he hid himself in a dark closet?  A great deal of the piety of the day is too exclusive.  It hides itself.  It needs more fresh air, more out-door exercise.  There are many Christians who are giving their entire life to self-examination.  They are feeling their pulses to see what is the condition of their spiritual health.  How long would a man have robust physical health if he kept all the days and weeks and months and years of his life feeling his pulse instead of going out into active, earnest, every-day work?

I was once amid the wonderful, bewitching cactus growths of North Carolina.  I never was more bewildered with the beauty of flowers, and yet when I would take up one of these cactuses and pull the leaves apart, the beauty was all gone.  You could hardly tell that it had ever been a flower.  And there are a great many Christian people in this day just pulling apart their Christian experiences to see what there is in them, and there is nothing left in them.  This style of self-examination is a damage instead of an advantage to their Christian character.  I remember when I was a boy I used to have a small piece in the garden that I called my own, and I planted corn there, and every few days I would pull it up to see how fast it was growing.  Now, there are a great many Christian people in this day whose self-examination merely amounts to the pulling up of that which they only yesterday or the day before planted.

O my friends! if you want to have a stalwart Christian character, plant it right out of doors in the great field of Christian usefulness, and though storms may come upon it, and though the hot sun of trial may try to consume it, it will thrive until it becomes a great tree, in which the fowls of heaven may have their habitation.  I have no patience with these flower-pot Christians.  They keep themselves under shelter, and all their Christian experience in a small, exclusive circle, when they ought to plant it in the great garden of the Lord, so that the whole atmosphere could be aromatic with their Christian usefulness.  What we want in the Church of God is more brawn of piety.

The century plant is wonderfully suggestive and wonderfully beautiful, but I never look at it without thinking of its parsimony.  It lets whole generations go by before it puts forth one blossom; so I have really more heartfelt admiration when I see the dewy tears in the blue eyes of the violets, for they come every spring.  My Christian friends, time is going by so rapidly that we can not afford to be idle.