The Sylvan Year
Description:... Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: XIX. Sowing?Its sublime Trust ? Spiritual Sowing ? Parable of the Sower ? Intellectual Sowing ? Our Age more favorable to it than other Ages ? An O14 Peasant ?The First Sower?The First Cultivator of the Cereals ? Roman Bread?Our Ignorance of our earliest Benefactors. OF at least equal dignity is the great religious act of sowing, with its sublime well-grounded confidence in the natural repayment of what we wisely trust to Nature. We are so familiar with this act of confidence that the meaning of it is almost lost to our apprehension, yet man's trust in the order of the universe is never more grandly proved than when he goes forth from some poor house where the children have scanty bread, and carries the precious grain and scatters it on the ground. There is another kind of sowing on which it is not always possible to have such secure reliance, because it is so difficult to know accurately the condition of the soil. He who sows corn sows it in earth that can be analyzed, and agricultural chemistry can tell him with great certainty what may be his chances of success; but who knows the minds of nations and their chemistry ? who can tell whether the most precious seed-thoughts of philosophy will lie utterly unproductive or yield illimitable harvests ? The condition of that soil varies from year to year; one year you might as well sow corn onicebergs as trust any living thought to the deadly coldness of the world, and yet a few years later this same world will be no longer an iceberg but good earth waiting for the seed. We all of us know the parable of the sower, how 'the sower soweth the word' by the wayside, and on stony ground, and amongst thorns, and finally on good ground also. That is the way the preacher sows his doctrine, and in every age from the day when that par...
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