Righteous kings and queens, doing God-like acts to elevate and beautify their subjects, may be compared to heavenly gardeners, whose business in life is to beautify human nature and society with an increasing number of moral tints and splendour, reflected by the heavenly throne, and to transmit the colouring rays to the human flowers growing up under their charge; thus making this beautiful earth more like Paradise every year.
The righteous deeds of a good king or queen, when they emanate from a heart filled with heavenly desires to render earthly subjects contented and happy, are seeds that the spirit of evil cannot kill. They will live and thrive to the end of time, and then they will be transplanted to heaven to bloom through eternity.
When a Christian is said to have taken to doubting God’s goodness, lovingkindness, and fatherly care, he may be said to have drawn down the blinds of his soul and dimmed his vision of the beauty, power, and love of Jehovah, the creator and upholder of all things in heaven, earth, and sea.
Those who through fraud, craft, and deceit obtain the crown of laurels won by others will find that, instead of the soft, beautiful leaves, it will turn into a hard crown of thorns, that will prick sharp and deep enough to touch the quick of the soul, ruffle the thoughts, disturb the mind, and trouble the conscience.
As bees in gathering honey from flowers often transmit many new and lovely colours to plants and flowers, so in like manner good children in passing into the world among all kinds of families, especially among the young, change and beautify by kind words, soft answers, and example the characters of those they are brought in contact with.
The words used in faith by good Christian fathers and mothers in blessing their children are jewels, pearls, and other precious stones, which will be strung together by angelic hands with golden threads, and worked into patterns that are to adorn the children as they walk over the plains of Paradise. They are the immortal flowers of earth, with a life within them that will transform them into the everlasting flowers of heaven, that will be strewn by little loved ones upon the path of saints as they walk the streets of the New Jerusalem.