S. THE PLANTER AND THE RAIN

THE PLANTER AND THE RAIN He planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it. — Isaiah 44:14. The Prophet is telling us how men make idols. He pictures the whole process. He describes the planting of a tree upon the hill-side, its growth into full size and strength, its being cut down and made into fuel, the comfort which it gives its owner as it burns upon the hearth, and then how "the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image." What is on the Prophet’s mind is the indiscriminateness, the lack of separateness and sanctity in that which is put to sacred uses. It is but the refuse and residue of ordinary life that is given to religion. We will not try to follow the Prophet in this line of his thought to-day; rather let us dwell on one idea which is incidentally suggested by what he says. In the course of his story he depicts the growing of a tree. "He planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it." It is the same thing going on long ago in old Judea which has gone on since man began to live upon the earth, which is going on everywhere to-day. The civilized and cultivated tree is the joint product of human care and the earth’s fertility. Man puts the seed into the ground, and then the ground, made fruitful by rain and sunshine, does the rest. Man has the initiative, but he does not follow out what he begins to its fulfillment. It is taken out of his hands. The great machinery of Nature appropriates it, and by and by the full-grown product does not belong alone to him or to Nature, but is the work of both together, — of his designing and of Nature’s execution. "He planted the ash, and the rain did nourish it." The words have in them that, I think, which immediately harmonizes with the large and general feeling which we all have about the way in which things grow in the world. Partly by deliberate choice, and partly by what seems to be automatic action; partly by man giving orders to Nature, and partly by Nature carrying out the suggestions of man; partly by human will, and partly by natural force, — so it appears to us as if the operations of the world went on. Sometimes one element and sometimes the other seems most prominent, according to the observer’s general nature or special mood. But, behold here is a recognition of them both, and a blending of the two. Here is man the deviser, the conceiver, and here is the great system of the universe taking his devise or conception at his hands and carrying it forward to its full development. Let us study the picture which is thus set before us, and see how true it is to what the world contains.

We may ask ourselves how it is that any institution or established form of human living comes to be prevalent and dominant. We cannot often — perhaps we can almost never — trace the process, but we know what it must be. A strong idea, of freedom, of justice, of mercy, enters into some strong man’s soul. It makes itself completely his. Then it will not be satisfied with him; it grows restless within him and demands the world. Then he takes it out some day and plants it. With some vigorous, incisive word or deed he thrusts his live and fiery idea down deep into the fruitful soil of human life. Then human life takes up his idea and nourishes it. "Wonderfully all the forces gather around it and give it their vitality. History bears witness that it has all been living by the power of that idea unknown, unguessed; philosophy says that in it lies the key of her hard problems; economy discovers that by it life may be made more thrifty and complete; poetry shows its nobleness; affection wreaths it with love; all the essential hopes and fears and needs of human nature come flocking to it; until at last you can no more conceive of human life without that idea than you can think with complacency of the landscape without the great tree which is as thoroughly a part of it as is the very ground itself. A free church, a just court, a popular government, — this is the way in which every institution comes to be. It is the thought of a man set into the great system of human life, claimed by that system, fed by it, becoming so thoroughly the possession of that system that it quite forgets the mind in which, it first sprang, but yet being through all its long perpetual life the result of both, — of the hand that planted it, and of the elements which fed it into its full result — the ash-tree which the man planted, and the rain nourished.

Here is the relation of the world’s few great creative men to the great mass and body of its life. Helpless would the great general humanity be without their pregnant thoughts; helpless would they be for all their pregnant thoughts without the great general humanity in which to plant them. Helpless Europe without Martin Luther. Helpless also Martin Luther without Europe. The idea may be the richest and the truest; without the human heart to plant it in, it comes to nothing. The human heart may be tumultuous with fructifying power; if it have no idea to work upon, it tears itself to pieces with its purposeless fermentation. Here is the mutual need of great souls and the great world. Here is where they must learn to respect and to be thankful for each other. Here must be their escape from all grudges and jealousies and weak contempt. This may serve for our first illustration of the truth we have to study. We have another, even more striking, close at our hand in the way in which character grows up in our personal nature. Where do our characters come from? It is easy sometimes to represent them as the result of strong influence which other men have had over us. It is easy at other times to think of them as if they made themselves, shaping themselves by mere internal fermentation into the result we see. But neither account tells the story by itself. We know that it does not. When we question ourselves, not about character in general, but about special points and qualities of character, then we are sure that it was by some outer influence made our own, some seed of motive or example set into our lives and then taken possession of by those lives and filled with their vitality, developed into their own type and kind of vice or virtue — it was thus that this which is now so intimate that we call it not merely ours but ourselves came into being. This is the reason of the perpetual identity along with the perpetual variety of goodness and badness. We are all good and bad alike; and yet every man is good and bad in a way all his own, — in a way in which no other man has ever been bad or good since the world began, — just as all ash-trees are alike because they have all been planted from the same nurseries; and yet every ash-tree is different from every other because it has grown in its own soil and fed on its own rain: the society and the individuality of moral life. Of course what I am saying is true both of the evil and of the good which is in us. It is true of the evil. Here is the bad man. Here is the thief. How did he grow bad? How is he bad to-day? He cheats himself if he tries to believe that he is bad because of a constant outside influence which holds him every moment, and thinks that if that influence were taken off he instantly would flee to goodness. The evil in him is vastly more his own, more himself, than that; and yet it did come into him from without. He did not invent robbery. The temptation dropped in through the open channel of the eye or ear; but, once in, it became his. It became he. His nature seized it; his passions colored it; it turned its growth in the direction of his ambitions. How harmless the temptation without him! How innocent he but for the temptation! Or is it goodness and not evil? Still the same thing is true. You have absolutely forgotten what suggestion it was which first brought to your thought the idea of self-conquest, or of knowledge, or of charity, which is now your very life of life. Was there ever a time when you were destitute of it? Is it possible that other people have it too, this which is so especially and absolutely your own? How far away seems the time, as your strained memory recovers it, when some dear hand dropped into your soft, young life the seed which has grown richly into this! The lips which spoke the word which was the New Word of your life have withered beneath the tombstone long ago. The father or the mother who said to you, "Be brave, be true," have gone on themselves deep into the courage and truth of eternity. But what then? Does the harvest-field remember the bright morning when the sower walked in the brown furrows and scattered the seed? It is not what stays in our memories, but what has passed into our characters that is the possession of our lives. The long-forgotten deed or word was caught up into your life. Everything in you was different because of it. And here it is in you to-day; not a seed any longer but a tree, not an influence but a character, yet carrying in itself forever the virtue of its double history, — that it came into the nature and that it became the nature; for we are parts of the great whole, and we are wholes ourselves. So it is that men become good or bad. Such is the germ-theory of character. So credit and blame are intricately interwoven and shared between our circumstances and ourselves; and yet it must not be forgotten to be said, this does not make our natures indiscriminate. It is not true that they lie waiting equally indifferent and ready to give growth to the evil and the good. The truth above all others which Christ came to declare was that the human nature had its preference; that it preferred the good, and gave its best fostering to that. Forced to bestow its growth-power on the evil if the evil was forced upon it, it felt that to be a violence. It lived in slavery while it did that. It hated the work it had to do, for its real nature was to serve the good. It struggled to cast out and to refuse the evil. It was to claim that for it and to tempt it to do that that Jesus came. That refusal of the power of growth to strengthen and vivify the bad was complete in Him. Only the good that came to Him commanded His strength. And ever our nature struggles more and more to be what His was and is, who was and is the perfect man! The truth which I am preaching has its clearest illustration, it may be, in the way in which God has sent into the world the Gospel of His Son. Most sharp and clear and definite stands out in history the life and death of Jesus Christ. The skies are broken at one special point. The print of the divine footstep is on one special spot of earth. The Son of Man comes at one special date, which thenceforth shines supremely luminous among the years. It was the entrance of a new, divine force into the world. But what has been the story of that force once introduced? You have only to read the history of Christendom and you will see. It has been subjected it i influences which have created the ordinary currents of human life. The characters and thoughts of men have told upon it. The Gospel has shared in the fortunes of the Christian world. It has followed in the track of conquering armies; it has been beaten back and hindered by the tempests of revolution and misrule; it has been tossed upon the waves of philosophical speculation; it has been made the plaything or the tool of politics; it has taken possession of countries and centuries only by taking possession of men through the natural affections of their human hearts; it has worked through institutions which it only helped to create. While it has helped to make the world, it has also at every moment been made by the world into something different from its own pure self. It has been carried forward on the tide of human progress to which it was always itself giving its greatest force and volume. A divine gift to the world, then when once given made in large degree subject to the nurturing conditions of the world to which it had been given — what but this has been the Gospel of God’s grace? Is not its story told in the words of this old parable? "He planteth an ash, and then the rain doth nourish it."

If you try to take either half of the truth by itself, you get into the midst of puzzle and mistake. Think of the Gospel simply as an intrusion of divine force kept apart from any mixture with the influences of the world, and it is impossible to understand the forms in which it has been allowed to present itself. Its weaknesses and its strength are alike unintelligible. Think of it as a mere development of human life, and you cannot conceive how it came to exist at all. But consider it in its completeness. Remember that it is a divine force working through human conditions; see it flowing through the deep channels of the universal human needs; hear it summoning to its standard the eternal human hopes and fears; let it be all one long incarnation, God manifest in the flesh, — a true God, with the real strength of Godhood manifest in a true flesh, cumbered by its hindrances and at the same time made utterable through its sympathies, — and then you see at once why it is so weak, and why it is so strong; why it has not occupied the world with one lightning flash of power, and why it must at last, however slowly, accomplish its complete salvation.

Oh, wondrous tree, whose seed came surely from the hand of God, whose growth has never passed out of His watchful care, which He has set here in this rich, wayward, tumultuous soil of human life, how hast thou wrestled for existence with this bounteous yet reluctant ground, how hast thou sent thy roots into the pierced heart of man’s affections! Through what dark stormy nights hast thou struggled with the winds, and grown strong in wrestling! How hast thou drawn up into thyself what is eternal and spiritual in man and made it claim its kinship to divinity! Oh, wondrous tree! oh, Christian faith! oh. Christian Church! so small, so strong! what would the world be without thee? "What wouldst thou be without the world? Grow on till in thy life the perfect union of the earth and heaven, of God and man, shall be complete!

Every Christian is a little Christendom; and the method of the entrance of the Gospel into the great world is repeated in the way in which the Gospel enters into every soul, which then it occupies and changes. Again there is the special act of the implanting of the new life, and then there is the intrusting of the new implanted life to the nature and its circumstances. Do you remember, oh, my Christian friend! Perhaps the place has perished from the earth; perhaps the fire has swept the stately church away in which the Lord first came and spoke the word which woke you from your lethargy; perhaps there is a well-remembered chamber in some house here in the city where strangers have long lived, whose threshold you have not crossed nor had the right to cross for years, but into which your memory at any instant may go back and see, almost visible, the figure of the Saviour who stood there on one unforgotten night and said to you, " You are mine; " perhaps it is a silent wilderness; perhaps it is the corner of a crowded street which you can never pass without the old mysterious wonder growing into reality again. There Christ came to you! There the descent from heaven silently took place, and the seed was in the soul; then was a new miracle of grace. The man was born again!

Since then long years have come and gone. What have they seen? The rain has nourished it, — that long sown seed! Nothing has happened since which has not touched that seed and helped or hindered its maturity. Your child’s death twenty years ago, your failure, your success in business, the fame you won by some brilliant action, the book you wrote, the cause you argued, the long journey which you made, the friend you won or lost; and things more silent, more subtle, less evident and notable: your growing older, your changing thought of life, the philosophical idea which took you captive; and, deeper still, the slow and steady operation of your essential nature, of the man that you intrinsically were, the being of your being, — all of these have held the new life in their grasp. They all have poured in upon it their vitality. They have made it a different thing from any other Christian life in all the Church. They have nourished it; they have colored and shaped it; and to-day you are the Christian which these two together — the historical conversion and the continuous experience — have created. What shall we say that God has done for you? Shall not our parable still tell the story? "He has planted an ash, and the rain has nourished it."

Still, remember, it is His rain. The influences into whose influence the seed was given still were God’s. He took the child, and gave the friend, and sent you on the journey, and shaped the nature which bestowed on the Christian life its distinctive character. It is not a discrimination between what God does and what you do. God forbid! It is not that! God is behind and in it all; but it is the perception of two parts of His working, — one in which He comes directly from the heavens; the other in which, through your essential sonship to Himself, He ripens the seed which He implanted to its full result. It is all He. He is all and in all.

How beautiful it is! Oh, Christian, lose not either portion of the perfect whole, — not the divine historic access of the deeper life, not the subjection of the total nature, the total experience, to the perfection of that divine access by assured possession. Stand forth, oh, human souls, and let the light which lighteth every man enter into you all. It seems to enter into all alike. But then, with the new light within you all, go forth, each with his several nature to his several life; and, oh, the myriad glories of the various church, the rainbow splendor of the heaven which slowly builds itself, as in each one life appropriates grace and grace transfigures life, and God becomes yours, and you become God’s in the experience of which eternity shall see no end!

These have been more or less clear illustrations and applications of our principle. May we not say that the principle itself includes the whole truth of the supernatural and its relation to the natural? Let me give what time is left to that. What is the picture which the verse of Isaiah sets before our eyes? A group of ash-trees are growing on the hill. We see them stand strong and substantial in the ground. Their roots are drinking in the juices of the earth; their branches catch the winds; the rain descends for their refreshment. We come back to them year after year, and lo! each year they are a little larger than they were the year before. They live and grow, and all their life and growth appears to be the simple outcome of their terrestrial conditions. If we let our questioning run back no farther than the years which we and our fathers can remember, these ash -trees are the creatures of the earth, set fast into its bosom, and with its life abundantly accounting for their lives. But by and by there comes a man whose questions will not be content within that limitation. He hears of a time when there were no ash-trees here. He asks behind the method of their growth the method of their origin; and then he learns how one day, long ago, there came a man bringing these ash-trees with him, and planted them, and said to the earth and to the elements, "Here, I give these to you. Take them and nourish them for me. "And then, when he has discovered that, the story of the ash-trees is complete. Behind the law of their growth has been set the fact of their planting. Behind the process there is a beginning. Behind the natural forces of their nourishment there is the supernatural will of him who chose that they should be. And now, let it be not a group of ash-trees but a group of men, — a world-full of men. They too stand rooted in the earth. Soil, winds, and rain, the things of earth, its nourishments and inspirations, are their food and drink. They are what you are, men and women who are listening to me now. The earth is theirs, and they are its. Agnosticism says that that is all which it is possible to know about them. Whence they came, what hand planted them here, it is folly to try to tell. The natural is everything. "The rain doth nourish them." Religion says, "They must have come from somewhere, and calls the somewhere which they came from God. The lives which the rain nourishes He planted. There is a supernatural. I feel the freer beating of a will."

If we are not agnostics but religious men taught by the voice of God which speaks to us in our souls, then this is the view which we hold about these lives of ours my brethren. I will not try, here at a sermon’s end, to prove that that view is true. I will only ask you to see how great it is, and beg you to be true to it if you hold it; for the place in which it sets your life, the thing it makes out of your life, is very noble and inspiring. A thought of God intrusted to the world — which, remember, is itself full of God — for its embodiment and execution, — that is what your life is if the religious conception of life is true. Tell me, does the definition as you get hold of it meet and correspond with no double consciousness about yourself within yourself which has puzzled you a thousand times? A thought of God intrusted to the earth for its embodiment and execution! What are these dreams and visions, these upward reachings, these certainties of infinite belongings, these remonstrances with earth as if it were a tyrant holding us in slavery? What are they, oh, thought of God, but the unbroken tension of the chain which binds the thinker to his thought forever? And what are all these earthlinesses, these tender clingings to the things our senses understand, these practical devices, these comfortable limitations, these perceived adaptivenesses, these dreads of the vast universe, these calls of present duties, this fear of dying, this love of the present, warm, domestic earth, — what are they all but the pressure of the school -room on the scholar, of the warm ground upon the seed intrusted to it? The man who does not somehow hold the complete truth about his life — both of these truths combined in one — does not live worthily. The man who has and holds them both, look, what a life he lives! Look how substantially his roots are fastened in the earth. Look how aspiringly he lifts his branches to the sky.

It is not strange that in the greatest of all human lives, — the life of lives, the life of Jesus, — all this complete truth about the life of man should be most manifest. A thought of God intrusted to the earth for its embodiment and execution! Hear what He says about Himself: "I came forth from the Father and am come into the world." Again, "I leave the world and go unto the Father." "I came forth from the Father!" All the mystery of Nazareth is in those words. All that made that birth to differ from the births of other men as being more immediately the utterance of a thought of God is in these words, "I came forth from the Father." And "I am come into the world." All the distinct work of the thirty-three years, all the development of consciousness by propitious or unpropitious circumstances, all the perfecting by suffering, and finally the cross and its consequences are in those words, "I came into the world." A thought of God’s intrusted for its embodiment and execution to the earth; "The word was made flesh and dwelt among us," — that is the Incarnation. And it is in the light of the Incarnation that every man must understand his own life and his brethren’s. His own life and his brethren’s, I say; for I am anxious to have you feel that only when we see the supernatural and natural meeting in our brother’s life can we be fair to him, or kind to him, or honor him as a fellow-creature ought to be honored, or help him as a fellow-creature ought to be helped. Here are you, set between your brethren who arc more fortunate and your brethren who are less fortunate than you are. On one side of you is the rich and popular man, who can do you a favor. On the other side of you is the poor, obscure man, who wants your favor shown to him. To the one you are tempted to be obsequious, to the other you are tempted to be brutal. Here are you tempted to yield to public opinion on one side, and tempted to despise brave and noble earnestness on the other. Tell me, will it not set you right with both, will it not enable you to keep your respect for yourself before the one man and your respect for him before the other man if you say of each of them as you look him in the face, " This is a thought of God intrusted to the earth for its embodiment and execution "? Two thoughts about each brother-man must swallow up everything beside when you say that to yourself about any fellow-creature, — the thought of the sacredness of his life, and the desire to make the earth to which God has intrusted him as full of helpfulness, as free from hindrance for him as you can. Oh, fathers and mothers, say it of the children in your arms! Oh, students, say it of the men who are your fellow-students! Oh, friends, say it of the friends you love! Oh, enemies, say it of the enemies you dare to hate! Oh, helpers, say it of the poor you help! Oh, suppliants, say it of the rich who help you! Oh, men and women, say it of each other, everywhere! "This is a thought of God intrusted to the earth for its embodiment and execution." And so peace and responsibility and elevation shall take possession of all human intercourse, and the children live together like their Father’s children in their Father’s house.

Behold, then, here is the issue of it all! We live together between the solemn heaven and the solemn earth. The hand which planted us and the soil in which we are planted — both of them are real, neither of them can be forgotten. God help us to be true to both. God help us to stand in the world with natures opened upward to receive the divinest gifts, with natures opened outward to catch every humblest opportunity which life affords. What were we if we had not come from God? What were we if we had not come into the world? Oh, by the God we came from and by the world into which we have come, let us be men! And to be men is to be images of Christ, the Tree of Life. It is to have the Psalmist’s blessing, to be trees planted by the waterside which shall bring forth their fruit in due season. May that blessing come to all of us!