ness, overcome it. It is the manly summons from the
soft theory of life to the principle which one may call that of
progress through overcoming resistance.

A great many lives are spoiled by the soft theory of life. They expect
to get out of life a comfort which is not in it to give. They go about
looking, so to speak, for a "soft course" in the curriculum of life,
hoping to enroll in it and be free from trouble. They ask of their
religion that it shall make life easy and safe and clear. But the
trouble is {111} that the elective pamphlet of life does not announce a
single soft course. The people who try thus to live are simply
courting disaster and despair. Some day, perhaps in some tragic
moment, every man has to learn that life is not an easy thing, but that
it is at times fearfully and solemnly hard. Nothing is more plainly
written on the facts of life than this,--that life was meant to be
hard. Trouble and disaster, and the inevitable blows of experience,
are absolutely certain to teach this truth sooner or later, and the
sooner one learns it the better for his soul. And if life was not
meant to be easy, what was it meant for? It was meant to be overcome.
It stands before one like the friction of the world of nature, which is
always seeming to retard one's motion, but which makes really the only
condition under which we move at all. If there is to be any motion
through life, then it must be by overcoming its friction. If life was
meant just to stand still, then it might stagnate in a soft place; but
life was meant to move, and the only way of motion is by overcoming
friction, and the hardness of the world becomes the very condition of
spiritual progress. What we call the rub of life is {112} then what
makes living possible. What we call the burdens of life are the
discipline of its power. Not to him who meets no resistance, nor to
him whose shoulder is chafed by no cross, but to him who overcometh is
the promise given that God will be his God, and that he shall be God's
son.

{113}

XLV

THE PRODIGALITY OF PROVIDENCE

_Matthew_ xiii. 1-9.

I wish to dwell for several mornings on this parable of the sower, and
for to-day I call attention to the air of prodigality which pervades
this story. There seems to be an immense amount of seed wasted. Some
of it falls on the roadway; some of it is snatched away by the birds;
some of it is caught among the bushes. Yet the sower proceeds in no
n