root, and the pigeons come and pick it up. We usually think of the
hard life as if it were a life of sin. We speak of a hardened sinner,
of a hard man, as of persons whom good influences cannot penetrate.
But the hard soil of the parable is not that of sin. It is that of a
roadway, hardened simply by the passing to and fro. It is the
hardening effect of habit. Sometimes, the passage says, your life gets
so worn by the coming and going of your daily routine, that you become
impenetrable to the subtle suggestions of God, as if your life were
paved. Some people are thus hardened even to good. They lose capacity
for impressions. {117} Some people are even gospel-hardened. They
have heard so much talk about religion that it runs off the pavement of
their lives into the gutter. Thus the first demand of the sower is for
receptivity, for openness of mind, for responsiveness. Give God a
chance, says the parable. His seed gets no fair opportunity in a life
which is like a trafficking high-road. Keep the soil of life soft, its
sympathy tender, its imagination free, or else you lose the elementary
quality of receptiveness, and all the influences of God may be
scattered over you in vain.

{118}

XLVII

THE THIN LIFE

_Matthew_ xiii. 1-9.

The first thing which hinders God's seed from taking root is, as we
have seen, hardness,--the life which is trodden down like a road; an
impenetrability of nature, which is not a trait of sinners only, but of
many privileged souls. The second sort of unfruitful soil is just the
opposite of this. It is not the unreceptive, but the impulsively
receptive life. It is not too hard, or too soft, but it is too thin.
It is a superficial soil which has no depth of earth, and so with joy
it receives the word; but the seed has no depth of earth and quickly
withers away. This sort of soil receives quickly and as quickly lets
go. It is like that unstable man of whom St. James writes and who is
like the wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. We see the
wave come flashing up out of the general level, catching the sunshine
as it leaps and crowned with its spray, and then we look again for it,
and where is {119} it? It has sunk again into the undistinguishable
level of the sea.

Thus the parable turns to this instability and says: "It is bad to be
hard, but it is bad also to be thin." When tribulation or persecution
arises, something more than impulsiveness is needed t