of
Jesus grown, that its body overshadows the earth, and its spirit reaches
heaven.

As the leaves and branches of a tree tend to assume the form and
proportions of the tree itself, so subordinate parts in the development
of God's kingdom follow more or less closely the law of the whole
kingdom--a progress secret, slow, and sure, from a diminutive beginning
to an unexpected and amazing greatness. Take, for example, the history
of Moses, which is a vigorous branch shooting out from the mustard-tree
under the ancient dispensation. The branch, a part of the tree, is, like
the tree itself, small at first and great at last. A poor Hebrew
slave-mother, counting her own "a goodly child," as every true mother
will to the end of time, strove, by a strange mixture of ingenuity and
desperation, to preserve him from the cruel executioners of Pharaoh.
When she could no longer hide him in the house, she laid him in a wicker
basket, and set it afloat in an eddy of the Nile. How small the seed
seemed that day! A slave's man-child, one of many thousands destined by
their jealous owners to destruction, cast by his own mother into the
river, that he might not fall into the more dreaded hands of man--how
small that germ was, and yet how great it grew! From heaven the word had
gone forth, "Destroy it not, for a blessing is in it." On the mighty
stream, and the cruel men who frequented it, the Maker of them both had
laid the command, Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophet no harm.
From that small seed, accordingly, sprang the greatest tree that grew in
those old days upon the earth. Moses, the terror of Pharaoh, the scourge
of Egypt, the leader of the Exodus, the lawgiver of Israel--Moses in his
manhood was to the foundling infant what the towering tree is to the
imperceptible seed from which it springs.

The operation of the same law may be observed in later ages. In the
Popish convent at Erfurt a studious young monk sits alone in his cell,
earnestly examining an ancient record. The student is Luther, and the
book the Bible. He has read many books before, but his reading had never
made him wretched till now. In other books he saw other people; but in
this book for the first time he saw himself. His own sin, when
conscience was quickened and enlightened to discern it, became a burden
heavier than he could bear. For a time he was in a horror of great
darkness; but when at last he found "the righteousness which is of God
by faith," he gr