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
each and every one of us is a seed-field, and the seeds of new life and
purpose should be growing in it.

As we recall the other parable of the seed growing secretly, recorded in
St. Mark's Gospel, we feel even more strongly how the essence of all our
life is in seeds of influence. "So is the Kingdom of Heaven as if a man
should cast seed upon the earth, and the seed should spring up and grow,
he knoweth not how." It grows in us mysteriously we know not how.

And I am not sure that we all, indeed I think it likely that we do not
all, take it home to our thoughts with sufficient seriousness that this
mysterious growth in the thing sown implies a mysterious vital power or
force which is inherent in it.

I call it a mysterious vital power, because all life is a mystery to us.
The very thought of life lands us in mystery, in mystery which defies
analysis. We know that all the life in us and around us follows certain
laws, as we call them, the life of plants, the life of animals, the life
of man, each following its own laws after its kind, and that is all we
know about it. We can observe its action, its uniformities, its
sequences, and variations, but beyond this we cannot penetrate its
secret. It grows mysteriously, we know not how.

But this much we know, that no life is spontaneously generated. The
science of our day has demonstrated it, as we believe, beyond dispute,
that you cannot create life out of dead matter. All life comes from some
antecedent life. Wherever you see life of any kind, you know that there
must have been before it some form of life which was its parent.

Yet again, the scientific investigator points out another suggestive
fact, that the lower creature does not of its own lower nature expand
into the higher, but that life is lifted up and grows by the infusion of
something higher than itself. So, too, we believe that the Spirit of God
touches with its mysterious power the dead souls of men; it transforms
them, it uplifts them, they are born agai