the same field
and look around them, and then they all cry out together. One of them
exclaims, 'How rich!' another cries, 'How strange!' another cries, 'How
beautiful!' And then the three divide the field between them, and they
build their houses there, and in a year you come back and see what
answer the same earth has made to each of her three questioners. They
have all talked with the ground on which they lived, and heard its
answers. They have all held out their several hands, and the same
ground has put its own gift into each of them. What have they got to
show you? One cries, 'Come here and see my barn,' another cries, 'Come
here and see my museum;' the other says, 'Let me read you my poem.'
That is a picture of the way in which a generation, or the race, takes
the great earth and makes it different things to all its children.
With what measure we mete to it, it measures to us again. This is the
rebound of the hard earth--sensitive and soft, although we call it
hard, and feeling with an instant keen discrimination the different
touch of each different human nature which is laid upon it. Reaction
is equal to action."--_Phillips Brooks_.

CHAPTER XII.

INFLUENCE, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF REACTION IN LIFE AND CHARACTER.

To the mystery of life and death must be added the mystery of growth.
When Demosthenes exclaimed: "Yesterday I was not here; I shall not be
here to-morrow; to-day I am here," he suggested a hard problem. Having
solved the enigma, what went before life, and answered that mystery,
what follows after death, there still remains this question: "How can a
babe in twenty years take on the proportions of the great orator and
reformer?" Rocks do not grow, nor diamonds, nor dirt, but a shrunken
bulb does become a lily, and a tiny seed a mustard tree. In vain does
the scientist struggle with this problem--how an acorn can expand into
an oak; how in a single summer a grain of corn can ripen a thousand
grains, like that from which the cornstalk sprang.

Men are indeed familiar with the bursting of buds, the cracking of eggs
and the growth of children; yet familiarity robs these facts of no whit
of their mystery. No jeweler ever goes into the field with a basket of
watches to plant them in rows, expecting when autumn hath come to pick
two or three wagon-loads of stem-winders from iron branches; yet, were
this possible, it would be no more strange than that in the autumn the
husbandman should stan