o, will find the opportunity of free, unfettered activity in
God's ways, and transgressors will stumble therein. Therefore wisdom and
safety lie in penitence and confession, which will ever be met by
gracious pardon and showers of blessing that will cause our hearts,
which sin has made desert, to rejoice and blossom like the rose.

THE DEW AND THE PLANTS

'I will be as the dew unto Israel: he shall grow as the lily, and
cast forth his roots as Lebanon. 6. His branches shall spread, and
his beauty shall be as the olive-tree ...'--Hosea xiv. 5, 6.

Like his brethren, Hosea was a poet as well as a prophet. His little
prophecy is full of similes and illustrations drawn from natural
objects; scarcely any of them from cities or from the ways of men;
almost all of them from Nature, as seen in the open country, which he
evidently loved, and where he had looked upon things with a clear and
meditative eye. This whole chapter is full of emblems drawn from the
vegetable world. The lily, the cedar, the olive, are in my text. And
there follow, in the subsequent verses, the corn, and the vine, and the
green fir-tree.

The words which I have read, no doubt originally had simply a reference
to the numerical increase of the people and their restoration to their
land, but they may be taken by us quite fairly as having a very much
deeper and more blessed reference than that. For they describe the
uniform condition of all spiritual life and growth,' I will be as the
dew unto Israel'; and then they set forth some of the manifold aspects
of that growth, and the consequences of receiving that heavenly dew,
under the various metaphors to which I have referred. It is in that
higher signification that I wish to look at them now.

I. The first thought that comes out of the words is that for all life
and growth of the spirit there must be a bedewing from God.

'I will be as the dew unto Israel.' Now, scholars tell us that the kind
of moisture that is meant in these words is not what we call dew, of
which, as a matter of fact, there falls, in Palestine, little or none at
the season of the year referred to in my text, but that the word really
means the heavy night-clouds that come upon the wings of the south-west
wind, to diffuse moisture and freshness over the parched plains, in the
very height and fierceness of summer. The metaphor of my text becomes
more beautiful and striking, if we note that, in the previous chapter,
where