And care not what hands shall reap it, Or if you shall have passed away
Before the waving corn-fields
Shall gladden the sunny day.
Sow; and look onward, upward,
Where the starry light appears —
Where in spite of the coward's doubting, Or your own heart's trembling fears,
You shall reap in joy the harvest You have sown to-day in tears.*
II.
Keaping in Joy.
Now comes the promise — " He shall come again with joy, bring- ing his sheaves with him." We have here in the Hebrew a striking
* Thomas Fuller, Oood Thmighta in Worse Timet.
* A. A. Procter, Legends and Lyrics, i. 134.
PSALM cxxvi. 6 89
form of expression. It is the combination of the finite tense with the infinitive ; it is difficult in our idiom to bring out the exact thought. In some versions it is rendered, "Coming, he shall come." This, however, conveys neither the peculiar form nor the precise sense of the Hebrew phrase. Luther's repetition of the finite tense, most scholars are agreed, gives us the best approxima- tion to the force of the original, " He shall come, he shall come." The certainty of His coming again is the thought ; this is what our common version, with its " shall doubtless come again," clearly teaches.
1. The sower shall shout in the joy of his harvest. He goes forth in the dull winter when leaden clouds hang overhead, and the wild winds moan dismally, and the rain-showers sweep suddenly upon him, and the dead leaves are swept by every gust, and the trees stretch up their bare black arms to heaven. But though it begins thus, it has another ending. There comes the happy time when the row of reapers bend over the falling corn ; when they that bind the sheaves are busy, and others pile the shocks ; when the laden waggons go homewards with the precious burden, and about the farmsteads are they who build the stacks. Then shall the sower come again. He who went out with hand- f uls shall come back with armfuls. He who scattered seed shall gather sheaves. He who went out with a basket shall come with a waggon-load.
^ At Clanwilliam he heard some wonderful and well-authen- ticated instances of the marvellous fertility of the soil near the Oliphants Eiver, where in good seasons the land yields even two- hundredfold. Mr. Fryer, one of the churchwardens, had himself seen " a stool of wheat which, after successive cuttings, had thrown out 320 stalks " ; and knew of a particular crop which was even more wonderful : A farmer sowed ^ of a muid, or sack, of corn ; the river overflowed and he reaped 57 sacks ! He found rather a difficulty in disposing of it all, and next year he did not sow. But grain shed by the harvest of the previous year, and escaping the appetites of the birds, actually produced, after another over- flow of the river, a self-sown harvest of 72 sacks; i.e. the farmer, with one sowing and one ploughing, reaped in two years, from J sack of seed 129 sacks of corn ! 516 fold ! This is vouched for by several persons.^
^ A Father in God: W. W. Jones, Archbishop of Capetovm, 93.
90 SOWING IN TEARS, REAPING IN JOY
2. The spiritual harvest is assured to us on the same authority as assures the earthly harvest. He who has never broken His first promise, " seedtime and harvest shall not cease," will never break His second, "they that sow in tears shall reap in joy." There is no joy like that which comes from successful work for Christ. All the joys of earth are nothing when compared with this. This endures; this allies us to angels and God. This awakens the purest and noblest instincts of the soul. In this joy we feel the throb of Christ's heart. The promise to Him is that "he shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied." This joy is mingled even with the gloom of Gethsemane and Calvary. It was for the joy set before Him that He endured the cross and despised the shame.
^ Most of the thoughts that cluster round the season of autumn are worn and common enough. No new ones can be spoken ; we can only vary the key of the old. So when we think of harvest time, and of life's harvest being similar to it, we think a well-worn thought ; but its very worn condition makes it dear, for it has been the constant thought of all our brother men. It is bound up with a thousand lovely poems in which the thoughts of solitary men took form, with a thousand lovely landscapes in which, by vintage and by cornland, human energy and human joy, the long day's labour and the moonlight dance were wrought together into happiness. Few sights are fairer than that seen autumn after autumn round many an English homestead, when, as evening falls, the wains stand laden among the golden stubble, and the gleaners are scattered over the misty field ; when men and women cluster round the gathered sheaves and rejoice in the loving-kindness of the earth ; when in the dewy air the shouts of happy people ring, and all over the broad moon shines down to bless with its yellow light the same old recurring scene it has looked on and loved for so many thousand years.^