ABOVE THE COMMONPLACE OF SIN Individuality is one of God’s ways of expressing his greatness. His voice penetrates the centuries like the sound of silver bells, but there is never an echo. No duplicates are ever found among the works of God’s creative power. He gives his gifts unto the world with boundless generosity, but through the centuries no single gift has ever found its counterpart. Everything coming from the hand of God is original, unique, entirely dissimilar to anything else in the realm of nature. No two oak leaves are alike. They may be cut from the same pattern, so that, no matter where you find them drifting in the winds, you instantly recognize them, saying, “These are oak leaves”; yet, of all the millions of leaves that have unfolded upon branches of the oaks of countless ages, no two have been identical in size or form or in the delicate tracery of the tiny veins which are as delicate as hoarfrost, yet strong as leaden pipes. God never duplicates. The wild rose is a simple flower, possessing but five petals, held securely in the golden chalice of pollen-laden stamens. Nothing could possibly be more liable of duplication than this quaint flower of simple garb, yet of all the wild-rose blooms gathered by lovers’ hands and pressed to maidens’ lips, of all the wild-rose blooms that grace the old-fashioned gardens and trellis the fences of the country roads with their picturesque, sublime simplicity, no two are alike. God so respects the pretty things about which human sentiment revolves that no two are cast from the same mold. Consider the blossom that you once kissed, and pressing, stored away. It is hidden in a secret place, intended for no eyes save your own, and viewed only through the clear tears that memory revives. Guard it with the tenderest care, for God will never make another blossom just like it. He respects the tender affections of your heart that chose this blossom from a lover’s hand to be the sweetest, fairest blossom of your life. When a mother stoops and plucks a blossom from her baby’s grave, covers it with mingled tears and kisses, and puts it away between the leaves of the family Bible, thus binding in one cover the sweetest sentiments of this world and the best hopes and aspirations of a better world, she does a beautiful thing, and our heavenly Father so honors her love and reverence for her precious dead that, though a thousand centuries come and go, he will never make another blossom just like that.