AIDS TO THE DEVELOPMENT

OF THE

DIVINE LIFE.

BY THE

REV. J. BALDWIN BROWN, B.A.

No. II.

TEARFUL SOWERS, JOYFUL REAPERS.

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." Ps. cxxvi, 5, 6.

“TEARFUL Sowing, joyful reaping," is the law of all labour. Every workman, as far as the fruit of his labour stretches, is saved by hope. Seed time is ever the season of anxious toil; harvest home the jubilee of joy.

It is, perhaps, the grandest argument for the being of a God, or rather the widest rent through this crust of sense by which we can look out on the fact, that all things are made and live in hope. The present is ever giving birth to the future by the sacrifice of itself. And if God were not the pledge of the glory and grandeur of that future-and when I say God I mean God in Christ, for then I know what I am talking about a heavy, deadly pall would rest on all things here, the life of the world would in that case be but a desperate struggle with death. But tell us that death is life, new

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life, more glorious life-and a great light shines out and dissipates the gloom. Joyfully we suffer and struggle, and see all things suffer and struggle, for "they that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." (Ps. cxxvi, 5, 6.) Rob us of our faith in God, and what is that future, where is it? It is, because He is; if He is not, it is not--all is death. A deep, suppressed undertone of aspiration runs through the whole of nature. Every act and manifestation of her life has a deeper relation to the future than to the present. Indeed, nature means a "becoming" -that which is about to be. Not for itself wholly does the bee suck the honey of the flowers. Not for itself, surely, does the plant bury its seeds beneath the soil, and die. Not for itself does the mother bird tend its callow nurselings, and watch and toil with a single-hearted devotion that touches the hardest, that they may have shelter and food. Not for themselves do the generous brutes which God has made the satellites of man clothe themselves with strength and swiftness, and die to guard their master's treasure or his child. Our sympathies with the animal creation rise in warmth and intensity just as it grows more unselfish and devoted, sinks the present in the future, and lives, though it knows it not, in hope. They have been no shallow thinkers who have founded on such facts the doctrine of the immortality of brutes, though we cannot fully assent to their conclusion, inasmuch as in brutes no true personality appears. Still the aspect of creation would be a sad and bitter one, blotted as it is by tears and stained with sweat of both brain and heart, if we were not able to discern that one great thought runs through the whole of it, utters itself in higher and yet higher speech as the orders of being become more capable of expressing it, until at length in man that thought unfolds itself, and finds its full, eternal expression in the tearful

sowing, the joyful reaping, of the incarnate Son of God. But we have a right to ask whether this universal "groaning of creation," which thus found speech and uttered itself to God, is the moaning of the agony of the hopeless, or the sobbing of a child on a father's bosom, prelude of fruitful reconciliation and fulness of joy. God's answer is, " They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him."

But

I. I must first endeavour to bring out the significance of the emblem here employed. The Scriptures compel us to believe that the relation between spiritual labour and husbandry is peculiarly close and real. "Behold a sower went forth to sow." "And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground: and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come." (Mark iv, 26-9.) Husbandry is the oldest, simplest, and most heaven-ordained labour of man. Arts and sciences fall under the head of inventions-they exercise the proud intellect, and need a heavy discipline of suffering before they take their place, humbly, as the servants of the regenerate will. But husbandry works quite otherwise; it keeps man in his place as a servant, and exercises patience, obedience, and faith. These are the points in which it seems to me that husbandry is suggestive of the spiritual workman. I shall dwell upon them for a moment before I proceed.

1. It is a work of homely, wholesome, patient labour. A man can only get from the soil in the proportion in which he puts into it. And he must not only put in seed, but work, which

costs much more. "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." There is no work that I know which is so earnest and constant, the conditions of which are so fixed that the workman has but to submit to them at once. Work by fits and starts in this field is worthless. They are not the white-handed and womanish men who wield the flail or drive the ploughshare, nor may they be dilettanti workmen who till the spiritual seed-field of God. In both fields the work must be honest and earnestpatient, sinewy toil, in search of the treasure which has been hidden in the bosom of the mother earth, both of nature and of man, by the Lord.

2. Submission.-God has made a law-"In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread." The toil of the husbandman is the first act of submission, the first confession of man that the devil lied to him when he said "Ye can become as gods" by sin. The earth will not yield him one grain in obedience to his will; it yields only in answer to his work. And work implies conditions-laws, obedience to a master, subjection to the Lord. God makes man work in submission to His laws for his daily sustenance. Through husbandry He brought the rebel at once benignly in contact with the serene, inflexible law which he thought to overthrow. It is law, God's law, which holds out man's daily bread to him. He must bow, do homage, accept the investiture, before it will put even a fragment into his hands. Dimly, blindly, he may make his submission to the God whom he had defied, and take thus his first step in spiritual education; still it is a step, and God seeks to lead man, the labourer, on through the ascending stages of culture, until he seeks, consciously and lovingly, not submission to all the will only, but fellowship with the Spirit, of the Lord.

3. Faith. All husbandry is of faith. The seed is trusted to the bosom of Nature. It must be left there, buried out of sight, till by agencies which he cannot control, whose secret his

cunning science cannot master, it springs, and returns to the light of day. He must cast the care of it on Him who bears the burden of Nature, gives security for all her deposits, and is the trustee of her every hope. It is bread, too, which the husbandman buries-his children's bread-but he buries it out of sight, beyond recovery, in deep trust in what we call the laws of Nature, but which we know to be the hand of God. He and his, in scant years, may endure agonies of hunger, but his seed-corn he dares not consume; on that hangs his whole future, in that lies all his hope, and that, in a strange external image of deeper things, he lays up with God. Here is faith of the heartiest and manliest kind. "He casts his bread upon the waters," for he believes "he shall find it after many days." Storms may beat on it, frosts may chill it, floods may drench it, winds may blight it, but it hardly ruffles the surface of his confidence" he knows that he shall come again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." These hints may help you to understand why the sacred writers dwell so fondly upon husbandry, as the fullest emblem of spiritual work. But TEARFUL SOWING." This belongs surely to a new region; the key to this must be in the conditions of the spiritual world. Yes; but even this has wondrous adumbrations in nature. The anxious care and sorrow of the husbandman are in his sowing. The winter, the storm, the blight, are before him. Reaping seals his increase. The perils are behind him; care is over; he breaks out into singing, the most joyous song of the universe, the song of the harvest home. I now proceed to dwell on the law of spiritual labour, in the double aspect which is thus presented to us-the tearful sowing, the joyful reaping after many days.

II. The tearful sowing.

Is there a needs must be for this, and out of what conditions does it spring?