At this delicious season of the year, when spring time is fast ripening into summer, and every hedge, and field, and garden is full of life and growth, full of beauty and fruitfulness; and we look back on the long winter, and the boughs which stood bare so drearily for six months, as if in a dream; the blessed spring with its green leaves, and gay flowers, and bright suns has put the winter's frosts out of our thoughts, and we seem to take instinctively to the warmth, as if it were our natural element--as if we were intended, like the bees and butterflies, to live and work only in the summer days, and not to pass, as we do in this climate, one-third of the year, one-third of our whole lives, in mist, cold, and gloom. Now, there is a meaning in all this--in our love of bright, warm weather, a very deep and blessed meaning in it. It is a sign to us where we come from--where God would have us go. A sign that we came from God's heaven of light and beauty, that God's heaven of light and beauty is meant for us hereafter. That love which we have for spring, is a sign, that we are children of the everlasting Spring, children of the light and of the day, in body and in soul; if we would but claim our birthright! For you must remember that mankind came from a warm country--a country all of sunshine and joy. Adam in the garden of Eden was in no cold or severe climate, he had no need of clothes, not even of the trouble of tilling the ground. The bountiful earth gave him all he wanted. The trees over his head stretched out the luscious fruits to him--the shady glades were his only house, the mossy banks his only bed. He was bred up the child of sunshine and joy. But he was not meant to stay there. God who brings good out of evil, gave man a real blessing when He drove him out of the garden of Eden. Men were meant to fill the earth and to conquer it, as they are doing at this day. They were meant to become hardy and industrious--to be forced to use their hands and their heads to the utmost stretch, to call out into practice all the powers which lay ready in them. They were meant, in short, according to the great law of God's world, to be made perfect through sufferings, and therefore it was God's kindness, and not cruelty, to our forefathers, when He sent them out into the world; and that He did not send them into any exceedingly hot country, where they would have become utterly lazy and profligate, like the negroes and the South Sea islanders, who have no need to work, because the perpetual summer gives them their bread ready-made to their hands. And it was a kindness, too, that God did not send our forefathers out into any exceedingly cold country, like the Greenlanders and the Esquimaux, where the perpetual winter would have made them greedy, and stunted, and stupid; but that He sent us into this temperate climate, where there is a continual change and variety of seasons. Here first,