April 11

So is the kingdom of heaven, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. - Mark 4:26-27.

NATURAL influences operate mysteriously, and thus also is it in the spiritual economy. Those individuals who say that they will not believe any more than they can comprehend, must have either very large understandings or very little creeds, for what do we know or what can we comprehend? we do not even understand ourselves. “Oh, what a miracle,” says Young, “is man to man!” Who can explain the human frame, the causes of vital heat or the colour of blood, and a thousand other things? We should do, therefore, in reference to Spiritual things, what we do in all such cases as those to which reference is here made. In all these instances we are satisfied with the results, if we are ignorant of the processes; we are satisfied of the effect though reason may fail, and perfectly fail, as to the causation and the mode by which the effects have been produced.

As we know not how the bones of the unborn infant do grow, nor “what is the way of the Spirit;” “even so,” says the Royal Preacher, “thou knowest not the works of God, who maketh all.” “The wind,” says our Saviour, “bloweth where it listeth” -and what philosopher can explain the first rise and final issue, and numberless other things pertaining to it-“yet thou hearest the sound thereof;” and you feel its currents: you see the clouds course along; you see the waving of the corn in the field; and you see trees torn up by the roots. “Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” Or apply it more immediately to the imagery here employed by our Lord of the corn which the husbandman sows, and “which springs up he knoweth not how.” In vain, therefore, as Paul says, do any ask, “How are the dead raised, and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.”

Here we see life and death; we see decay and growth at once, equally inexplicable and undeniable; so is the spiritual life.