"The United Seas"

by Robert W. Rogers

Or it would be keenly interesting to every Californian to read about the arrival of the Franciscans in the southern part of our State, who established twenty missions in the rear of each of which was a garden where the orange, olive and fig were planted and bore fruit. Because this explains the inception of the industry in our great commonwealth and puts into our hand the key which unlocks the entrance to these modern gardens of Hesperides—these orange belts now scattered throughout our State.

Or in this day when scholars are feverish to learn the origin of things, we could speak of the world's first orange trees which were found in India. From the two original spices—the bitter and sweet—which were first discovered there, we could trace the evolution of the one hundred different varieties of the citrus fruit which are found in the world today, the original fruit being imported by merchants from India into China in the ninth century and into Europe in the fifteenth century, and then finding its way to America during the period of Spanish exploration.

But we prefer to be interpretive, to come closer home than this. We prefer to consider these fruit bearing orchards as an object lesson immediately at hand and to think of the labor and activity of the people co-operating with nature's forces that have made this golden crop about to be harvested possible. Thus recognizing at once the suggestion coming so eloquently from these trees that, the fundamental secret of all growth in character as well as in nature is adaption to environment and service, not the passive submission of Calvinism alone, nor the uncontrollable egotism of an unrestrained Arminianism, but the union of both, the working of God with man—spiritual co-operation, the most helpful phrase in modern religious thought. So with this primary principle as a premise let us try to interpret in detail the new parable of the orange tree. For the man that has learned its parable has found, as Dr. McClaren would say, the secret of a fine soul culture.

Some days past as I stood upon an elevation commanding a view of that great area of eight thousand acres of orange groves, spreading off into the distance with its wide expanse of tree tops blended into a continuous luxuriant green and its myriads of ripening oranges nestling in the deep green back ground, like countless numbers of gold fish at the surface of a sea or like circular stars in some new sky, these were the three suggestions that came to me as I tried to learn its beautiful parable.

First, the secret of a refined Christian character is an abiding sense of the reality of God, as revealed in Christ. For the finest spirits, the deepest minds and the most arresting personalities from Gladstone and Lincoln down to the ordinary citizen, have been those that have drawn their inspiration and thought from hidden sources. Just as the fruit and leaves of these trees receive their rich color from the sunbeams and absorb their health from the moisture coming from the heart of God's hills, so the cultured souls of history have received their winsome illumination of personality from a light that shineth neither by land nor sea.

We realize that these trees could not grow where there is limited sunshine and a restricted water supply. Neither can men find moral maturity and health until they possess that type of mind which is characterized by spiritual reality. We know that California's far-famed orange orchards would not be possible without incessant sunlight; and that our golden fruit would never again pass through the Golden Gate to the markets of the world, if the sun did not appear to shower down upon our orchards its magic beauty gathered in its own paradise beyond the gates of the morning. But Tennyson, who had a sane knowledge and appreciation of the Sun of Righteousness, was also well aware of the secret of a beautiful life when he said of those who had not discovered it,

""For what are men better than sheep or goats
"That nourish a blind life within the brain,
"If, knowing God, they lift not bands of prayer
"Both for themselves and those who call them friend?"

At first I could not understand why the owners cultivated their orchards so incessantly. But when I was told by one of the experts that continual pulverizing of the soil made the moisture more accessible to the roots, permitted the oxygen of the air to find its way to the tree, and liberated the nitrogen in the soil so that it would be absorbed, then I saw clearly that there was a scientific reason for the constant harrowing; and felt that it might be very practical to demand that we deepen our convictions so that we can go into the fields of human life equipped with the mighty contagion of something to say that will go deeper than the ears, to harrow the inner life of patronizing listeners. For without the prophet whose harrowing words opens up a way to the nerve of conscience and quickens the deeper emotions of the soul men will not become eager to receive truth and the masses will remain proselytes of mammon and low ideals. Indeed the irresistible characters in religious service like the great singers are those who have had their hearts broken; but at the same time and as a result, their interest in righteousness deepened and their wills nourished and strengthened.

These trees are peculiarly beautiful and strong because they send their roots into a well prepared soil thrilling with the liberated elements of life and their branches into God's air to woo the purity of the sunlight. And the young who are to lead us safely in the future are those whose souls have been cultured by helpful and trying experiences—those who have been taught to think deeply, to see far in vision and to act bravely because the conviction of truth and experience has liberated from the subconscious mind—or the subsoil of their lives—those elements which send through the whole man the iron of the prophet and the revealed wisdom of the apostle.

One of the strange characteristics about the orange is that the tree is unusually sensitive and the fruit very hardy. Indeed the tree can be blighted by a frost that will not injure deciduous fruits so that it must be planted in localities protected by a warm climate and God's hills, and often watched and tended like an infant child. But the orange itself, which is so hardy, has an advantage over many other varieties of fruits and can be shipped into any market in the world. For the citrus fruit is not perishable in the same sense that the plums and peaches are and after being removed from the trees may be kept for weeks with advantage without being destroyed by decay or losing its beauty.