SERMON XXIII. HARVEST PARABLES. MATTHEW VI. 28. Consider the lilies of the field. In some of our sister Churches there is a goodly custom of setting apart a Sunday in every year to be observed as a harvest-feast, as a day of special thanksgiving to God for His bountiful goodness in ordaining that the earth shall continue year after year to bring forth its fruits in due plenty for the food and nourishment of mankind. This is a goodly custom, I say; and perhaps it is to be regretted that there is no such custom in our Church. For it is a custom which agrees with the pattern set before us in the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles. That too, as we find in the 23rd chapter of the Book of Exodus, was appointed as the feast of ingathering, in the end of the year, when they had gathered in their labours out of the field. At this feast it was ordained in the Book of Deuteronomy, that all the people should rejoice, with their servants and the strangers within their gates, because God would bless them in all their increase, and in all the works of their hands. Moreover it seems desirable that all the members of the Church should be reminded once a year of God's providential care, by which their lives are sustained, and whatever is needed for the support and enjoyment of life is so abundantly supplied. It seems desirable that all persons should be especially reminded by such a solemn feast, that all their earthly blessings also come to them from the only Giver of every good gift, and should be called upon to thank the Giver. Indeed, as these are blessings the value of which all men understand, they may more easily be brought to feel a certain degree of thankfulness to Him from whom they receive them and while those who have already attained to a consciousness of what they owe to God for His infinitely more precious spiritual gifts, will gladly obey the summons to pour forth their praises to Him for His lesser, outward gifts, some of those, who as yet only feel the worth of the latter, may perhaps be awakened to perceive how the earthly harvest is in so many ways a type and pledge of the heavenly harvest, which awaits us all at the end of the world. With this view I purpose to speak to you today mainly about the goodness of God as manifested in the course of the outward world; and we may perhaps be enabled with God's help to discern some of the analogies between the order of the outward world and that of our spiritual life. In so doing let us take the words of the text, which come from the Gospel of the day, along with those which stand before and follow them, as a clue to aid us in finding out some of the lessons which it has pleased our Heavenly Father to teach us by the visible things of the Creation. These, my brethren, are especially addrest to us. Consider the lilies of the field. words which we may regard as In such a feast of thanksgiving as I have been speaking of, it would indeed behove a whole people to join, praising God with their hearts, and telling forth His praises with their lips. For all receive their share of the gifts, on account of which those praises are to be rendered. High and low, rich and poor, men, women, and children, dwellers in cities as well as dwellers in fields, husbandmen and handicraftsmen, they who work at the loom, no less than they who work at the plough, they whose home is on the houseless and barren sea, no less than they whose feet are planted on dry land,-all, one with another, live and are fed by the blessing of God in the harvest. But though this is a season when every mouth should be even more than usually praiseful, and every heart even more than usually thankful, there are some to whom it calls yet more loudly than to others, some by whom the blessing of God in the harvest ought to be felt still more deeply than by the rest of their brethren. And who are they? Who are these highly favoured persons, on whom God vouchsafes to pour the first fruits, as it were, of His bounty? Who but we, my friends.. we who dwell in the country, whose paths are amid the grass and the corn, who plough, and sow, and plant, and reap, and gather the fruits into our barns, who walk to and fro on the natural earth, and under the open sky. Hence too we may reasonably deem that our Lord's exhortation to consider the lilies of the field is especially addrest to us. This is the great advantage, the great blessing of living, as we do, in the country. It has been well said by one of our poets, that "God made the country, and man made the town." They who live in the country may be said to see more of God, so far as He manifests His eternal power and Godhead in the visible works of the Creation. They see more of His star-spangled garment, more of the life that He breathes into all things. They are surrounded by green leaves, instead of red bricks. The living grass is under their feet, instead of hard stones. They do not merely see a strip of sky hemmed in between two high walls; but it spreads abroad over them, from North to South, and from East to West. Moreover the things which meet their eyes are full of life and motion. The walls of a town are dead. The pavement of its streets is dead. From year's end to year's end they never change, just as blank and barren in spring and summer and autumn, as in winter. When Spring unbars the gates of Winter, and leaps forth through them rejoicing like a bridegroom, and the breath of God flows over the wide earth, and clothes every field with green, and every plant with leaves and blossoms, it passes by towns without touching them. They alone remain unchanged, rising, like so many bare rocks, out of the green sea of life, which rolls wave after wave from pole to pole. But while all that men see, and do, and deal with in towns, is man's work, all that we see and deal with in the country is God's work; and so is the chief part even of what we ourselves do. A craftsman may fancy that what he does is his own work. A shoemaker, for instance, may fancy that the shoes he makes are his own making, -a carpenter, that his table is his own joining, a bricklayer, that his house is his own building,—a weaver, that his cloth is his own weaving. For they give a compact body and shape and use and value to materials, which in themselves have very little; and, while the change is so great, it is entirely wrought by the workman, and the work is completed when it passes out of his hands. But the husbandman in a Christian land can hardly help being aware that all he can do is just nothing, except so far as he works together with God, and so far as God is pleased to bless his work. He cannot take it into his head that it is he who pulls the ear out of the ground, or draws forth the would mar his whole leaves from their shells, or opens the eyes of the flowers. He buries the seed in the ground; but he cannot give it a body to rise out of the ground. Indeed, if he were to try to do anything of the sort, he work. He can no more make the seed, which he buries in the ground, rise out of it, than he can make his brother man, whom he buries in the ground, rise out of it. It is God who giveth the seed its body, and to every seed its own body. To one seed He gives the body of a blade of grass, to another that of an ear of corn, to another that of an oak, to another that of a fir, to another that of an appletree bending down with its clusters of seedbearing fruit, like a happy mother with her rosycheeked children hanging from her neck and from her arms. Everything that a countryman sees, everything he is most familiar with, is full of life. It changes. It tells him the story, it shews him the parable, of his own lot. It springs up, and ripens, and fades away, and dies. Whereas everything that surrounds a townsman is already so dead, that Death has hardly any further power over it. It will wear out, and decay; but, having never lived, it never dies. Thus it speaks not of those great laws, whereby all things that have life in them are bound together. And what does the townsman know of God's world, and of the great powers that hold sway in it? What is the sun to him? It makes a dust in the street. What is the rain? It turns the dust into mud. But to the countryman the earth and all that is in it, the heaven and all its host, and all the powers that move about in it, fire and hail, snow and cloud, wind and rain, are, as it were, friends, known to him in all their shapes, in their manifold operations. He is better able to understand the saying of the Psalmist, |