Suppose a master admired a bed of lilies and said, “Let me always find some here;” if a landslip destroyed that bed, a slave might feel absolved from further trouble about lilies, but the son would say, “No; we can give my father what he wants by growing them elsewhere—­it was not so much the bed, as the lilies, that he really cared for.”

God will look in us for the lilies of peace and spiritual-mindedness, which only grow where there is what the old Babylonians called “a Sabbath of the heart.”  Are we to feel absolved from responding to His demand because old Jewish ways have vanished?  When St. Paul speaks so slightingly of “times and seasons and Sabbaths,” does he mean that the worship and meditation belonging to such seasons were valueless?  No; he is rather saying, “How can you think that our Father values, not the lilies, but only the fact of their growing on this or that bit of earth?”

Every day, landslips are altering the features of God’s great garden—­this present world.  We can no longer rely on definite instructions to plant in this or that place; many circumstances, as yet unborn, may hinder it.  But we must get it well into our minds that the Master will certainly come down into His garden to ask for lilies, and that we must plant without delay; tools and methods may be improved upon, certain aspects which are now favourable may be deprived of sun by future buildings, but let us clearly realize that the end and object of having a garden is to grow flowers, though ways and means may vary with the times.

It is much easier to follow rules than to be inspired with the burning desire to produce flowers and the moral thoughtfulness which uses the best methods of the day.

But you can less well afford to do without moral thoughtfulness now than you could have done a generation ago.  Thirty years ago a woman’s path was hedged in by signposts and by-laws, and danger-signals, to which she attended as a matter of course; to-day, she has to find her way across a moorland with uncertain tracks, which she may desert at will.  She needs to know something of the stars to guide her now—­she needs nobler and deeper teaching than in the days of convenances and chaperons.

At present you have your home ways to guide, but you will find Sunday vary in almost every house you stay in, and when you marry you will have to set the tone of a household; if you are to keep Sunday rightly in the future, you must learn now to value it rightly, and that means moral thoughtfulness,—­a realization of our need of an inner life and of what that inner life requires for its sustenance, and an appreciation of the teaching of the Church Catechism, which tells us that our duty to God begins with Worship.

What can we say as to the positive duty of keeping Sunday?  We can hardly say we are literally bound by the Jewish Sabbath, since, for Jewish Christians, the Sabbath and Sunday existed for some time side by side, as separate institutions; Sunday being a day of united worship, while the Sabbath supplied retirement from the world.