XII. THE SOWER AND THE SEED.


"A sower went out to sow his seed."--ST. LUKE viii. 5.

It is significant that the first of the Saviour's parables is the parable
of the sower, that the first thing to which He likens His own work is
that of the sower of seed, the first lesson He has to impress upon us by
any kind of comparison is that the word of God is a seed sown in our
hearts, a something which contains in it the germ of a new life.

It is no less significant that He returns so often to this same kind of
comparison for the purpose of impressing us always with the primary fact,
that our relationship to God, the Father of Spirits, in other words our
spiritual condition at the present moment, our hope for the time to come,
does not depend upon some body of doctrine, but on our having received
into the secret places of the heart the seeds of a new life.

This is suggestive of a great many considerations which touch our life
very closely; but I will not turn aside to them at this moment, as my
desire is to fix your thoughts for the present on this one fundamental
thing, that the principle of moral and spiritual life in you is a seed,
and as such it is endowed with a power of independent separate growth; it
was intended to grow in you.

The sower casts his seed upon the earth and goes his way, and, once sown,
it springs up and grows, as Jesus said in another parable, "he knoweth
not how." This, then, is the truth which He is impressing on our
attention, when He speaks of His revelation as a seed, a seed to be sown
by hands which have no control over it except to sow it. The soul of