Hidden Flowers of Christ's Garden

"There is probably no grace of the Spirit in the believer more underrated or overlooked than that of patience. And yet there is not one which presents a stronger evidence or a more lovely illustration of the Christian character than it. Like some of those flowers God has pencilled with beauty, and perfumed with sweetness, which unfold their tints and breathe their fragrance veiled from human eye, this lovely and lowly grace of patience is almost entirely lost sight of by those who are borne onward upon the sweeping tide of this ever-heaving, active age of the Christian Church.

  And just as those flowers are only to be found in turning aside from the beaten path and the excited multitudes who throng it, into some quiet, shaded nook, so those patient sufferers of Christ's Church- those precious plants of His garden, so dear to His heart and so beauteous in His eye- are only to be met in scenes of suffering and sorrow, sequestered and shaded from all but God. Thus, in this age of Christian service, of rapid thought and of earnest action, there is danger of overlooking the hidden flowers of Christ's garden; in other words, of forgetting that there are passive as well as active graces of the Christian character which are as much the fruit of the Spirit, and requiring equally as skillful and diligent culture, and are as pleasant and glorifying to God, as an apostle's zeal or a martyr's heroism."

THE TREE OF LIFE by Octavius Winslow