i Early Letters of Marcus Dods, 198.
172 THE CROWNING OF THE YEAR
which we have earned by strenuous application. God has so made us that we must find our pleasure either in working, or as the reward of working.
^ There are certain countries of such tropical luxuriance and fertility that you have only to tickle the earth with a hoe, and she laughs with a harvest. But you do not find the highest type of men where Nature is so kind. There is an enervating kindness..- In these Northern lands men have a tussle with the earth to make her yield up her fruits, and they become the stronger for their battle with the elements. But they invariably find that God answers the prayer of their labour. There is a flourishing kitchen garden behind the hotel at Gairloch, reclaimed from the barest and barrenest bit of moorland I ever saw. All that countryside is just wild mountain, bare rock, shaggy heath, and desolate moor ; to get a kitchen garden out of such a spot is a triumph. It must have needed some considerable faith to make the attempt, and it was justified. God is always ready to supply if man only has conscience enough to demand. " He is faithful that promised." ^
^ " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." -And I work ! Say that too. If you destroy the sequence, life loses heart, and joy, and meaning, and value. Swing into line with the eternal energy, be a force among forces, a toiler, a producer, a factor, and life never loses its tone and flavour, its bead or glamour. There is no real taste to bread nor bliss in sleep for the idler. He is the doubter, the sceptic, the unhappy man. His idleness proclaims him diseased and decaying.^
Get leave to work In this world — 'tis the best you get at all; For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts Than men in benediction. God says, " Sweat For foreheads," men say "crowns," and so we are crowned, Aye, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work, get work; Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get.^
III.
And yet the harvest is the gift of God, and should link man to God. Man can only do a little ; he ploughs and sows, and
» W. A. MurseU.
' M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 15.
• E. B. Browning.
PSALM Lxv. II 173
makes what preparation he can, and then he has to sit down and wait. He can hasten nothing. If he goes out and waves his hands magically over the brown furrows, nothing happens ; if he stamps and rages, he does but reveal his impatience, and emphasize his own impotence. He must work, and then he must wait ; and there is something profoundly religious and infinitely suggestive in that waiting. What is he waiting for ? God. For aught we know, God could do the work instantly ; the harvest might follow immediately upon the seed-sowing, like the genii in the fairy tale. God could bring the gift at once on man's asking. But our world is not the world of the Arabian Nights. God chooses to wait on man's co-operation. He allows him to do so much that man is tempted to suppose that he is himself the author of the whole process of production. But man has not cleared up the mystery of growth by calling it Evolution. Whatever scientific explanation the human mind can ofifer of a harvest-field, the element of mystery remains precisely where it was before, and it is that element of mystery that makes us fall down and worship ; it is that element of mystery that fills us with a wonder akin to prayer ; it is that element of mystery that turns every flower into an altar, and makes a sanctuary of every cornfield. God thus keeps His hold of us by the persistence of the mysterious element in things. If we could explain the harvest, we could explain God, and our fairest vision would fade into the light of common day.
^ In harvest time the Greek saw the good goddess Ceres bearing her golden sheaves; the modern farmer too frequently sees only the result of his own knowledge, or of the latest patent manure. We pity the poor heathen Greek ; ought we not rather to pity ourselves ? ^
The seed was spread in the furrowed earth,
And nurtured long in the gloom it lay.
Till the beckoning hours led on its birth
And drew it up to the laughing day.
The young spring soothed and cherished the blade,
And summer 'stablished the stately stem.
And the Lord was glad of the thing He'd made,
The fair green ears and the fruit of them.
1 H. J. Wilmot-Buxton.
174 THE CROWNING OF THE YEAR
Summer had worked her will, and past
With her world of green, and autumn arose
And over the prospering tillage cast
A glory of change; the marshalled rows
Of bearded barley and four-square wheat
And pale oats, bearing a hundredfold,
Ripened under her shapely feet,
And out of the green ear grew the gold.
God, how wonderful this the thing,
The new-old miracle Thou hast done,
This proud triumphant fashioning,