s
every reason to believe that when the harvest time comes he will reap
a crop of many hundredfold, because each kernel is expected to send up
a little green shoot, like this, and each stalk is capable of bearing
at least one ear of corn. [Quickly draw the ground line in brown and
the corn shoot in green, completing Fig. 25.] And this shoot will grow
larger and larger until the stalk is completed, and as time goes on
and the harvest time comes, the corn will hang in generous ears
thereon. [With broad sweeps of green, and, if you wish, a touch of
brown, complete Fig. 26. This includes covering part of the ear with
green to form the husk.] Note especially this fact, that the farmer,
when he plants the seed, believes that God will send the summertime,
when the corn will grow to its fullness, and also the autumn, when the
harvest is ready. Just think what would happen if we had no summer or
autumn--just the springtime. Do you not see that we would soon starve?
We would plant the seed and there would be no harvest.

[Illustration: Fig. 26]

"Let us see how very much like this are our very own lives. We do not
have a springtime and a summer and an autumn and a winter of life
every year. No, we have but one of each during our lives, if we reach
old age. Springtime is our childhood, summer is our young manhood and
young womanhood, autumn is our middle age and winter comes when the
hair is white and the footsteps faltering. The first part of a full
life is the seedtime, and the latter half is the harvest-time. Some
of us may think that we may, while we are young, form habits that are
bad and expect to get rid of them before the harvest-time. Still
others of us do not seem to find out very early in life that there is
a seedtime and a harvest-time, and we realize it only after we have
reached the harvest period, and then we cannot change the character of
the seed we have to reap.

"But that which is true of the one who has sown the seeds of wrong in
his younger years is just as true of him who has sown good seeds in
his childhood and youth. There is no more comforting thought than that
which comes with the assurance that God will send the rich harvest if
we sow early in life the seeds of purity of living and the seeds of
loving kindness.

"The wrong thoughts which try to crowd into our childhood and youth
are like the weeds which threaten to destroy the good grain, and
sometimes succeed. Let us watch them carefully and uproot