What I have said with reference to the Sunday-school is also true with reference to the Church. There is an old saying, that "like priest, like people." When a pastor continues for a long period of years in the same pulpit, ministering to the same people, if he has their sympathy, co-operation and assistance the people will become very much like each other in their spiritual character, and all will become more and more like the pastor and his teachings. If he is godly, and consecrated, and upright, his people will become increasingly so. And you will find not only that each scholar becomes a miniature of the Sunday-school which he attends, but each Christian becomes a miniature of the congregation of which he is a member. But the leaves teach us another lesson. The great trees which you see in the forest are the result of the united efforts and labors of the leaves. Each leaf is gifted with individual power, and together they all drink in the influence of the sunlight and the showers, and unitedly they build up the great oaks and elms and poplars, and all the trees of the fields and forest. The coal, which is now dug from the mines, was once a great tropical growth of forest trees which were afterwards buried by some great convulsion in nature, and now when we dig up the coal and burn it in our stoves we are simply releasing the buried sunshine which was accumulated and stored up by the individual leaves of the great forests of centuries ago. As we look upon the leaves of the trees I think we must be impressed with the fact, that each one labors in his own appointed place. There is no conflict, there is no crowding of one, thinking to exalt himself above the others. There are no little parties of leaves joining together and trying to crowd themselves to the top of the tree, but each and all work faithfully and zealously in the place which God has appointed them. [Illustration: The Budding of the New Leaf.] They are not only faithful workers, but they are unselfish workers. No leaf can have the joy which belongs to another, or the glory of all the leaves. Each leaf has the reward of doing a little, and when its work is done it must drop to the ground and perish in the dust. The work which it has done and the tree which it has helped to build will be its monument and reward. If each leaf gives its life faithfully for the building up of the tree, no leaf can fall to the ground or be shaken from its place by the autumn wind and perish in despair.