rael was "not gathered," He was "glorious in the eyes of the Lord"
and "made His salvation to the ends of the earth." For it was life
that had been sown.

So no matter, if we never see the full up-springing on earth of the
Spirit-seed scattered. It is all the more likely that God may trust
us with a great multiplying if our faith does not need to witness it.
He can grant us spiritual harvests out of sight, of which He only
gains the glory. In "the things which Christ hath ... wrought by us ...
by the power of the Spirit of God" there is a multiplying energy
that can reach, not single souls only, but other souls through them:
a Holy Ghost touch that can fire trains, so to speak, far reaching
beyond the sphere of what we see or know.

Such is the power of multiplication in the earthly seeds that it
needs a constant battle, and the survival of the fittest, to keep us
from being overrun with one and another. The henbane, for instance
(by no means the most prolific) would, they say, if every seed had
its way every year for five years, produce from a single plant ten
thousand billions--enough to cover the whole area of the dry land of
the world, allowing seventy-three plants to the square metre.[footnote*:
"Natural History of Plants"--Kerner and Oliver] Perhaps God permits the
seeming waste of such an overwhelming proportion of the seed formed,
to show us the Fountain of Life that there is in Him; and to teach
us that there is no straitening in the Spirit of the Lord. "There is
no limit" (as someone has said) "to what God can do with a man, provided
he will not touch the glory."

And God's possibilities for these germs of Spirit-life are not bound
by time. Jesus is drawing so near that already our thoughts and hopes
begin to step over the shrinking foreground of "the present age," and
to rest in the ever-opening horizon beyond. Who can tell what harvest
after harvest may be waiting in the eternal years, after the summer
of earth has faded into the far past?

Yes, we have to do with One Who "inhabiteth" eternity and works in
its infinite leisure. Some years ago, when a new railway cutting was
made in East Norfolk, you could trace it through the next summer,
winding like a blood-red river through the green fields. Poppy seeds
that must have lain buried for generations had suddenly been upturned
and had germinated by the thousand. The same thing happened a while
back in the Canadian woods. A fir-forest was cut down, and the