At Harvest-Time

"Then He said to His disciples,"The harvest is plentiful,
but the workers are few." Matthew 9:37

       One of the Savior's most solemn parables is concerning the harvest-time of life, of which he says plainly, " The harvest is the end of the world." Throughout the realm of nature this is a cheery, joyous season. On every side the fair earth is yielding her most precious and life-preserving products. The sound of the gleaners cutting, cradling, stacking, and binding the golden grain, the threshers separating wheat and chaff, the sweet breath of garnered hay and corn - the combined gifts of field, orchard, and garden - bring welcome promise of abundance and good cheer for the coming months, when neither sign of leaf nor verdure will show above the frozen and snow-clad earth. So much, ah, so much depends upon the harvest- time ! If the corn-field, the vineyard, and the orchard show but a meager supply as the result of the kind of seed sown in the spring; if meadow and garden yield but indifferently, only partially filling the high lofts and wide bins which should be filled to repletion, how serious the outlook for man and beast! It was for the future - the long, barren months to come - that the farmer plowed, sowed, and planted when the year was young; and if at the end - at harvest-time - an insufficient showing proves lack of care on his part he will share the blame and shame of an unprofitable servant indeed.

       In language so clear that the unlearned and the young can understand, the Savior, in the parable of the wheat and the tares, shows that all along the journey of life mankind are sowing seed of some kind, which at the end of life is going to produce a harvest, the sure outcome of the kind of seed sown. Nature is inflexible in certain results, founded and fixed by the great Creator of nature and her laws. What the farmer sows he will be sure to reap. Never yet since the world began have men gathered grapes from a bush of thorn, or figs from a tuft of thistles. And every one throughout Christendom who is old enough and intelligent enough to read the Bible must know and understand that he occupies the place of a sower who will ultimately reap whatever is sown in the heart as to religious or irreligious belief, as to faith in Christ as a Redeemer, or as to indifference concerning the final condition of the soul. Christian at Work.

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