We scatter seeds with careless hand, And dream we ne'er shall see them more: But for a thousand years
Their fruit appears In weeds that mar the land, Or healthful store.
The deeds we do, the words we say, — Into still air they seem to fleet. We count them ever past;
But they shall last.
In the dread judgment they
And we shall meet.^
3. While the text is fitted to awaken the careless, we must not forget that it is equally fitted to cheer and encourage the faint- ^ Keble, Lyra Jnnoctntium, 116,
GAL. VI. 7 433
hearted. This, hideed, seems to liave been its original purpose. St. Paul was writing to the members of the household of the faith, and was calling them to Christian service. And to encourage these Galatian Christians to labour earnestly, he tells them that their labour cannot be in vain. Their spiritual work is a sowing, and by the eternal law of the universe it must be followed by a reaping. For in the spiritual world, laws are as inevitable and unalterable as in the natural world. Caprice has no more a place in the one than in the other. " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Just as surely as he who sows to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, so he who sows to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.
We have thus, first of all, to understand the law of the harvest — " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap " ; and then we have to receive a warning, which is at the same time a strong encouragement — " Be not deceived ; God is not mocked."
The Law of the Harvest.
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
1. Our present life is the seed-time of an eternal harvest. Each recurring year presents a mirror of human existence. The analogy is a commonplace of the world's poetry. "^ The spring is in every land a picture of youth — its morning freshness and inno- cence, its laughing sunshine, its opening blossoms, its bright and buoyant energy ; and, alas, oftentimes its cold winds and nipping frosts and early sudden blight ! Summer images a vigorous manhood, with all the powers in action and the pulses of life beating at full swing ; when the dreams of youth are worked out in sober, waking earnest; when manly strength is tested and matured under the heat of mid-day toil, and character is dis- ciplined, and success or failure in life's battle must be determined. Then follows mellow autumn, season of shortening days and slackening steps and gathering snows ; season too of ripe experience, of chastened thought and feeling, of widened influence and clustering honours. And the story ends in the silence and
2 COR. & GAL. — 28
434 SOWING AND REAPING
winter of the grave! Ends? Nay, that is a new beginning! This whole round of earthly vicissitude is but a single spring-time. It is the mere childhood of man's existence, the threshold of the vast house of life.
^ What men sow, they reap, is not a cheque to be cashed here below, when and how we please, but a word of faith, which cannot be severed from the hope which rests in God, the righteous Judge of heaven and earth. The text points to another, a perfect world ; it says : The harvest comes, but whether as a blessing or a curse, for salvation or perdition, that is the great question for us all.^
2. The text tells us that all our life long we are employed in sowing the seeds of that harvest which we must eventually reap. Our actions do not expire with their performance, nor our words with their utterance, nor our thoughts with the thinking of them. (^Each of these is a seed sown, and will bear fruit after its kind. Each of them survives in us, after it seems to be past and gone, and when it is perhaps forgotten, in the impress which it has left upon us, or in the habits and tendencies which it has strengthened and confirmed. It is a matter of experience that every after- period of life is affected more or less by the conduct of every earlier period, manhood by youth, and old age by manhood. " The child is father of the man." Such as we now are, we are as the offspring of the past, the practical result or the living embodiment of the days and years during which we have been occupied — it may be without much thought about it — in acquiring or developing the qualities that now distinguish us. And the like process still continues. We are sowing, from day to day, the seeds of that character which will cleave to us in after life, and which, if the same course of action be adhered to, will follow us beyond the grave, and go with us to the judgment.
^ We cannot teach art as an abstract skill or power. It is the result of a certain ethical state in the nation and at full period of the national growth that efflorescence of its ethical state will infallibly be produced : be it bad or good, we can no more teach nor shape it than we streak our orchard blossom with strange colours or infuse into its fruit a juice it has not drawn out of the sap. And, farther, such seed of art as we sow, such also must we reap ; that which is born of lasciviousness begets lasciviousnese,