* * * * *

And now we can turn at last to see in our picture-book the result of
all this fading and stripping and breaking: no outcome as yet that
will catch the eye of sense, yet full of eternal possibilities.

What a marvel it is, this seed "endynamited" for its ministry! Just
an atom of whiteness, folded up in its smooth brown shell. Opposite
p. 35 you see the two tiny specks in the splitting pod; does it not
seem incredible that anything can come out of them? Could we imagine
anything more insignificant? And yet they are brimful of a vitality
that will last (given the necessary conditions) "while the earth
remaineth," through harvest after harvest in ever-widening circles.

Equally unimportant from the point of view of "the natural man" is
the heavenly seed that God gives His people to scatter. "The things
of the Spirit of God ... are foolishness unto him." "The kingdom of
God cometh not with observation." His beginnings are always very
feeble things.

It is out of the hour of its greatest apparent extremity, moreover,
that the seed launches out to its ministry. There was a time, a few
weeks earlier, when you could, if you examined it, trace the future
plant in embryo; the two seed-leaves and the rootlet were all visible
in shades of exquisite green; but all this dries up when maturity
comes, till there is not a sign of life left in it. Everything that
is brilliant and beautiful is withdrawn and shrouded in the "bare
grain" when we strip off the sheath and hold it in our hand:
everything has gone down in defiant faith to the last ebb. Nothing is
left to it, as far as we can discern, but the invisible,
miracle-working power of God. Shall we not learn of the dried-up
seed, to rejoice when in our seed-sowing we are shut up to God
alone--when every shade of hope and promise to the eyes of sense,
have faded like the baby seed-leaves in the germ? "So is the kingdom
of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should
sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow
up, he knoweth not how."

To sow heavenly seed means to give way to Him in the promptings that
are sure to come as soon as He finds us broken enough for Him to be
able to send them. It is a direct passing on of that which comes to
us from God, stripped of all self-effort: the message spoken "not in
the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost
teacheth": the work done "striving according to His working whic