have written the twelfth and fifteenth
chapters of the first letter to the Corinthians. And time fails to
speak of David and all the writers of the Psalms, and of those
heroic souls misnamed the "Minor" Prophets.

Study the teachings of our Lord. How he must have considered the
lilies of the field, and that such a tiny seed as that of the
mustard could have produced so great an herb, and noticed and
thought on the thorns and the tares and the wheat, and watched the
sparrows, and pondered and wondered how the birds were fed. All his
teaching was drawn from Nature. And all the study in the world could
never have taught him what he knew, if it had not been a loving and
appreciative study.

There is one strange and interesting passage in John's Gospel, xv.
1: "I am the true vine." My father used to tell us that the Greek
word [Greek: alethine], rendered true, is usually employed of the
genuine in distinction from the counterfeit, the reality in
distinction from the shadow and image. Is not this perhaps the clew
to our Lord's use of natural imagery? Nature was always the
presentation to his senses of the divine thought and purpose. He
studied the words of the ancient Scripture, he found the same words
and teachings clearly and concretely embodied in the processes of
Nature. The interpretation of the Parable of the Sower was no mere
play of fancy to him; it was the genuine and fundamental truth,
deeper and more real than the existence of the sower, the soil, and
the seed. The spiritual truth was the substance; the tangible soil
and seed really only the shadow. And thus all Nature was to him
divine.

We all of us need to offer the prayer of the blind man, "Lord, that
our eyes may be opened." Let us learn, too, from the old heathen
giant, Antaeus, who, after every defeat and fall, rose strengthened
and vivified from contact with his mother Earth. You will experience
in life many a desperate struggle, many a hard fall. There is at
such times nothing in the world so strengthening, healing, and
life-giving as the thoughts and encouragements which Nature pours
into the hearts and minds of her loving disciples. She will set you
on your feet again, infused with new life, filled with an
unconquerable spirit, with unfaltering courage, and an iron will to
fight once more and win. In every battle her inspiring words will
ring in your ears, and she will never fail you. We may not see her
deepest realities, her rarest treasures of th