Experience will come, but until he has had it, why should you require its tokens? The war is at hand, but is it wise to bid him ape its trophies while its grim earnest is scarcely yet to him a dream? Parents, anxious parents, heartily do I sympathise with your yearnings. You long to know certainly that your child is indeed a faithful and obedient child of God. Nevertheless, to hurry the work is often to mar it. Forced fruit, if you get it, is poor and flavourless, compared to the natural growth. And how much falls blighted from the bough! You have seen gooseberries red before full grown, and while others about them were green. But you know that this is not ripeness, but only its caricature. And I have seen such a mere painful caricature in the talk and conduct of the child. Be content,
“Learn to labour,—and to wait.”
Put in the seed watchfully, wisely, diligently, not rashly, nor over profusely; pray before, and during, and after the sowing; and then trust to God and wait. Dig not up the seed to see if it is sprouting; despair not if through long Winter months scarce any tender blade appear; suffer that the ground which ye have diligently, painfully, prayerfully sown, should bring forth fruit with patience.
My other instance is that of the desire and endeavour for holiness. How many that are but beginners in the race, chafe and fret because they cannot be at once at the goal. How many a one, but a babe in holiness, expects to be at once a man, without the gradual growth, the patient succession of day and night, and sun and shower, through this dusty toilsome Summer of our life. And depression, discouragement, sometimes falling away, results on this unwise hurry. The seed tries to grow with unnatural rapidity, and, therefore, having no root, it withers away. Oh wait, and work, and trust, seedling saint, and fear not but that God will send the full growth: yea, if thou wilt, even bid thee bend with fruit an hundredfold for Him. Only remember, God’s order is, first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.
Yes, let us take comfort from the thought of the gradual growth and ripening of Summer days. Every day’s sun, every night’s dew, add a little. And at last the grain bows heavy and ripe, and the fruit reddens upon the branch, and weighs it towards the ground—that was once but a thin weak blade, or a small crude, sour, green bullet.
And—-for an ending of the discourse of Summer days—working thoroughly, and working patiently, the earth also works steadily on, and in spite of discouragement; of the loss of many dreams, and the experience of many failures. Its songs have gone; its freshness is over-gloomed; and dust has gathered upon its light and glory. Blights, and caterpillars, and frosts, have marred much; and the poetry and early fascination of Spring is over now.
But it goes on steadily, in the dry Summer glare, in the drought, and dust, and silence; patiently, uncheered by showers, and with many a leaf curling, many a fruit dropping. Though life often seems monotonous, and prosaic, and dry, it none the less steadily and persistently, and without giving up or losing heart, toils on.
Ah, thus in our Summer days, in the time of our manhood, when life’s poetry has fled, and we are not that we wished to be, and we do not that we wished to do; and the romance, and the glory, and the glitter of the once distant warfare, when
“Among the tents we paused and sung,”
has resolved itself into the stern realities, and prose, and smirch, and dust, of the long toilsome march, the weary watching, and the sob and sweat of the struggle and the contest; when this is so, let us gravely, solemnly settle down to the, at first sight, uncheered duties and blank programme of the work of Summer days. Yes, when the dull every-day routine of dry work is near to making us heart-sick and over-tired; when