"In the upper corner of our garden nearby, one can see an old cactus. Some one sowed the seed from which it sprang before any one of us was born. I used to try to twist and break it when I first came here, for it seemed to cast no blossoms and bear no fruit. Other plants and shrubs blossomed, yielded their fruit, but the old cactus seemed just to live and that was all. One day, as some of you know, Ruth was here and we discovered a bud on it, called the gardener, who decided it was a century plant which might blossom soon, but it did not. Evening after evening all the neighbors came to behold the wonderful blossom which was expected to come forth from the seed sown nearly one hundred years ago. It was so slow that we became discouraged, but at last one evening, when we all stood around, the gardener applied warm water to the roots and in a few moments the largest and most beautiful blossom known to the Orient came forth, and think of it, dear friends, more than fifty years after the one who sowed the seed had gone to his long home. "Today the seed of life is being sown in the hilly land of Old Canaan, the buds are promise, blossoms peace and fruit everlasting life. As through summer and winter, sunshine and rain, the old cactus came forth, so through joy and sadness, bitterness and despair, the tree of life may put forth. When we think of the thorny path over which good souls before us have traveled, we ought to trust in providence, for God is with us and knows it all. "God's mysterious guide oft leads us where we would not go, but never where we cannot stay. He plans our course, he knows it all and some bright morn he will reveal. Abraham did not know, when he was called from home to spend his years among these hills, that when the frost of time had turned him pale, the angels would appear. Hagar, wandering in the wilds of Beersheba, did not think that God knew all of her troubles, and would not let her perish with her child. Moses did not know when he fled across the desert wilds oft looking back in fear, that his fair Zipporah would meet him at the well. When Ruth looked, for the last time, on the scenes of her childhood, and turned from the hills of Moab, to follow Naomi in the plain path of duty, she did not know that God had called her to become the mother of the most illustrious family in the world. All these, my friends, were blessings in disguise. "Neither does the seed sown mature so quickly. The seed here sown in Galilee these days may bear little fruit in our generation, even for hundreds or thousands of years, but some sweet day, when the storms of life are over, and the followers of our Lord join hands to spread the gospel of the "Bread-of-life" as we have heard today, like the sleepy cactus, it will blossom forth in all lands."