Harvest Home
The earth is full of God’s goodness, and so is every season. Spring, with its opening blossoms, its exquisite odours, its suggestions of “good things not seen as yet;” and Summer, with “healing in its wings,” with its balmy breezes, with its plenitude of life, and its placid consciousness of power, — each is a witness for Him whose name is Love. But the “fruitful season” is a witness still plainer, and one which speaks to the intelligence of all mankind. And, indeed, each contributes a several item in the testimony to the great Creator. For, if Spring says, “How great is His beauty!” and Summer, “How great His benevolence!” pointing to the rustling sheaf and the laden bough, says Autumn, “And how great is His bounty!”
Every season is a preacher, but of them all we are inclined to think Autumn the most popular and impressive. It needs no acquaintance with Nature’s mysteries to understand his sermon; it needs no peculiar susceptibility to be carried along by his direct and homely eloquence. In the field which he is reaping the unlettered rustic sees the answer to the fourth petition of his daily prayer, and the Christian philosoyher sees his heavenly Father giving bread to himself and his children, as plainly as if it were sent by the hand of an angel, or rained through a window in heaven. And whilst the purport of the discourse is so obvious, it is spoken to great advantage. Around there is little to distract, whilst there is much to fix the thoughts, to open the ear and soothe the spirit. Autumn is the sabbath of the months; and with its mellow light and listening silence, the whole land seems consecrated into a. temple hushed and holy. Nor is there lack of ministers. The laden trees are priests, the corn-fields are choristers; and, yielding to the tranquil influence, if you yourself be devoutly silent, their psalm will come into your soul: —” So Thou the year most lib’ rally Dost with Thy goodness crown, And all Thy paths abundantly On us drop fatness down.
They drop upon the pastures wide,
That do in deserts lie;
The little hills on every side
Rejoice right pleasantly.
With flocks the pastures clothed be,
The vales with corn are clad;
And now they shout and sing to Thee,
For Thou hast made them glad.”
To a mind that sees God in everything there is a special “joy in harvest.” It is a new pledge of Jehovah’s faithfulness: — another accomplishment of that ancient promise, “While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest shall not cease:” — a promise made all the more striking by the incidents which imperilled its fulfilment; — the winter that looked as if it would never go away, perhaps the drought which threatened to scorch the seed in the baked and burning furrow; perhaps the cold skies which forbade the ear to fill, or the drenching floods, which, when filled, dashed it to the earth again; — but past all these perils, or through them all, a mighty Providence has borne the sustenance of a world, and, as it spans the clouds of the dissolving equinox, the rainbow asks on behalf of the great Covenant-maker, “Hath one word failed of all that God hath spoken?” And so it proclaims the lovingkindness of the Lord, the care and munificence of the great Provider. It is not a mere subsistence He secures to the children of men, but it is a feast of fat things; not only the bread which strengthens man’s heart, but the wine that makes him glad, and the oil that makes his face to shine, — all the variety of fruits, and grains, and herbs, and spices; nor bread for the children only, but crumbs for the creatures under the table. Nor at this season can we fail to mark the minuteness of forethought and munificence of kindness with which our heavenly Father feeds the fowls of the firmament; the profusion which not only fills the barn of the husbandman, but which, in every forest and every hedge-row, has a store-house for those pensioners of His who can take no thought for the morrow. With its banquet-hall so wide and so populous, n2 with its heaps of abundance, and its air of open-handed welcome, Harvest is the season which tells us of God’s hospitality.
Besides the palpable Providence, — the visible nearness of a God most gracious and merciful, — a material element in the joy of harvest is the reward of industry.
If the sleep of the labouring man is sweet, so is that labourer’s bread. The fields are bare: the year’s work is done: and as he nestles among the sheaves, so glossy, dry, and fragrant; as he surveys the golden heap, fresh-sifted on the threshing-floor; as he watches the snowy powder flowing from between the revolving cylinders: as he sits down with his rosy children to the household loaf, that bread has to him a flavour which no science can impart, — those sheaves have a grace and a beauty which no pencil can reproduce, for no artist can espy. That bread has the pleasant flavour of personal industry: that garner concentres in itself a year of his own toil-worn history. And now in the snug comfort of his cottage, and amidst rainy gusts prophetic of winter, it calls up to complacent memory the frosty morning when by lantern-light he yoked his team, — the grey- and windy noon when he sowed the seed, — the day when to save the tender crop and the crumbling furrows, he battled with the swollen brook and banked out the thunder-torrent; — the weary nights when he waked so often, and from the dripping eaves and gurgling corbels presaged rotten shocks or flattened fields: and now that all these anxieties and toils are ended, and now that the Most High has given these results to his labour, he that went forth weeping bearing precious seed, comes again rejoicing bringing his sheaves with him.
And the analogy goes up, and upward still, from that rejoicing peasant to the Christian parent who reaps his prayer and efforts in the salvation of his child: — up to the Christian patriot who, after all the ebbs and flows of popular favour, is rewarded with the extinction of an evil, or the reformation of a realm: — up to the missionary who after a ten-years’ sowing, sees coming in the first-fruits of Greenland or Tahiti unto Christ: — up to the martyr who from beneath the Heavenly Altar looks down, — Cranmer on his England, Huss
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and Jerome on their Prague, Wishart on his Scotland, and from his ashes sees a mighty Church upsprung and flourishing: — upward and upward yet to that King of Martyrs and Prince of Missionaries who from His thirty years of husbandry among the hills of Galilee, when His head was filled with dew, and His locks with the drops of the night, — who, from the handful of corn which He then planted in the earth, and at last watered with His blood, already sees fruit that shakes like Lebanon, and who, when at length the harvest of the earth is ripe and Heaven’s garner has received the last of His redeemed, shall see the travail of His soul and be satisfied.
But there are solemn words in Autumn’s sermon. He says, “Be not deceived: God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that so we th to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.”
We see the earnest even now. He that sows to the flesh, — lie who spends his property or his talents in self-indulgence, in idolatrous vanities, in that cruel luxury which is deaf to tlic cry of misery, in gratifying tli(; coarser appetites and passions of this fallen nature, — of the flesh he reaps corruption. His harvest is a heart constantly contracting. His harvest is often a shortened life or a shattered intellect: — a body prematurely blighted and a mind that loses susceptibilities and powers which once lost can never come again. His harvest is more and more of that corruption which he sows, — sin added to sin, — the habit of evil strengthened, — a growing remoteness from virtue and happiness, because a growing proneness to evil and a growing powerlessness against temptation.
And he that soweth to the Spirit, even before he reaps “life everlasting,” — see how rich is his intermediate recom.pense! From that dependent spirit of his and from those devotional habits, see how large is his harvest of peace and serenity! Amidst tumult and agitation see how fixed is his heart, trusting in the Lord: and amidst the flaming shower of each day’s temptations, burning into the souls of many, and leaving dark scars on the conscience, see how on his panoply of faith the sparks die out unpcrceivcd and harmless!
From that God-fearing spirit of his, see how large is the harvest of social respect and personal security! what a fund of confidence and honour has accumulated from those early acts of self-denial, or from one deed of courageous honesty! what a fortune has been founded on a single commandment tenaciously remembered and constantly observed! And from that benevolent spirit of his, see how large is his harvest of love and gratitude! What a music is in his name, what a continual comfort in his presence! See how all hearts open towards his, as instinctively as they close on the approach of others; and see how he inherits the earth, — a meek but universal monarch carrying captive the whole community, and reigning by love in souls which swords and sceptres fail to reach, and which even genius cannot conquer!
But this is only a faint foreshadowing of that final and exhaustless harvest which is to follow this earthly seed-time: for although salvation is all of grace, yet, compatibly with its entire gratuitousness, we know that in this life He who gives grace for grace is pleased to acknowledge the services of His believinii people, for the sake of that Saviour in whose strength they are wrought, and to whose joy their recompense adds; and if in this life? why not also in the life to come? And in somewhat the same sense as reaping is the reward of sowing, we are taught that gracious habits, formed and cherished on earth, shall find their consummation in the still higher and holier products of eternity — whilst the self-denial implied in their culture will be infinitely over-balanced and requited in the joy-s of the life everlasting.
Think of this, you that are well-nigh weary of well-doing: — you that stand alone in a godless household, and who sometimes grow disheartened amidst the coldness, and the opposition, and the jeering: — you who have enlisted under Christ’s banner, but who, if you have not actually forsaken house and lands for His sake, have at least felt constrained to let pass many a golden opportunity: — you who have been for years watching for a soul, if haply you might win it, and who still see it as far from the kingdom as ever:^ — you who have long been contending with a wicked temper or an unholy passion, and who dare not saj that you have gained any sensible advantage over it — oh, be not weary! Think of the joy of harvest. Think of the day when you shall rest from your labours, and these works shall follow you. Think of the day, — the humbling, affecting, overwhelmhig day, when the cup of cold water will reappear as an ingredient in the everlasting glory. Be not weary in well-doing, for in due season you shall reap if you faint not.
Yet be not deceived. God is not mocked, lie that soweth to the flesh shall have his harvest also. Darnel grows as well as wheat, and thistles as well as barley. The awards of eternity are not the inflictions of arbitrary power, but they are the legitimate products, the prolongations, and out-workings of the [>resent: a harvest corresponding to the seed-time: so righteous, so congruous under the government of a just God, so inevitable that the sinner feels, if he does not confess, that the sentence is just. Reader, be not deceived. Let not that day, that harvest-day of sorrow, come on you as a thief — that day when he who showed judgment without mercy shall receive judgment without mercy — that day when he who wrought abomination and made a lie shall find himself excluded from those pearly gates through which nothing enters that defileth — that day when he who used to say to God, “Depart from us, we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways,” shall hear God say to him, “Depart from me ye workers of iniquity: I never knew you.”* Be not deceived. God is not mocked. This must be the way of it. Sin will result in sorrow: carnality will reap corruption. So entreat of God for the Redeemer’s sake to cancel that guilty past — to exterminate the crop of guilt and crime, so that it shall not seed itself in further evil, nor be treasured up as wrath against the day of wrath. Break off your sins by repentance, and from their fearful consequences take refuge in a Saviour’s intercession. And beg earnestly for God’s good Spirit that you, too, taught, led, and quickened by the Spirit, may of the Spirit reap life everlasting.
* Works of Anilrew Fdicr, vol. vli. p. 149.