THOUGHTS, WORDS, DEEDS—THEIR LIFE AND PERPETUITY.
Suggestion:—Seeds, or grain and fruit of any kind can be used for illustration.
MY YOUNG FRIENDS: I have here to-day quite a variety of seeds. Some of them are very small, and some, as you see, are quite large. The seeds of each class have in them a principle of life, which makes them differ from sand, or small stones of similar size, because if I plant these seeds in the ground they will grow.
Different Kinds of Seeds.
When you take different kinds of seeds, there is one thing that is very interesting about them. It is the different kinds of coverings in which they grow. For instance, if you take a chestnut, it grows in a burr with sharp thorny points; others are folded as though rolled up very tightly in leaves, as you will find in the hazel nut or filbert. Some seeds grow in rows, like beans and peas in a pod. Some grow in a very soft bed, like cotton seeds. Some grow imbedded in a downy substance which blows all around, carrying the seed with it, like the thistle, and the light fuzz of the dandelion. Sometimes the seed is buried in the inside of fruit, as in the case of apples, pears, peaches, plums, and various other kinds of fruit. Sometimes it is buried beneath the beautiful leaves of the flower. So you see there is great variety.
Now, these seeds may represent words. There are a great many varieties of words. All words have the principle of life in them, because they express thought; and these thoughts when received into our minds develop into action. Therefore we say that words have a principle of life in them, and it is important that we should be careful not to permit bad words to have a place in our minds. Very often you will see boys and girls reading worthless papers which they think will do them no injury. But the fact is, that these boys are influenced in all their living by that which they read in these papers. It might be very light and trifling, but it tends to corrupt the mind, to give the boy false ideas of life, and it gives him such opinions as are not real, and therefore very injurious to any one. It is much better that a boy's valuable time should be spent in reading good books and good papers, and securing such information as will be of value and assistance to him all through life. For the life of every boy and of every girl is a very great struggle, and no boy or girl can afford to waste time in the beginning. If they are ever to amount to anything in this world, it is important that they should begin very early in life.
I want to call your attention to another characteristic of these seeds. And that is when a single seed is planted, it grows up and produces a very great number of other seeds. If you plant a seed of wheat, it will produce 30, 60, or sometimes 100 other seeds. If you plant one sunflower seed it might produce as many as 4,000 seeds. If you plant one single thistle seed, it has been known to produce as high as 24,000 seeds in a single summer. If you were to plant only one grain of corn and let it grow until it is ripe, and then plant the seeds again which grew on these few ears of corn, and thus continue to re-plant again and again, we are told by those who have calculated it very carefully, that in only five short years the amount of corn that could be grown as the result of the planting of the one single seed would be sufficient to plant a hill of corn, with three grains in every square yard of all the dry land on all the earth. In ten years the product would be sufficient to plant not only this entire world, both land and sea, but all the planets, or worlds which circle around our sun, and some of them are even a thousand times larger than our own globe. So you see that there is wonderful multiplying power in the different kinds of grain which you plant.
So it is with the thoughts and the words which we have in our minds. Good thoughts enter into good acts, and these acts influence others just as though the same thought was sown into their minds, and then it springs up into their lives and influences them. Just so when we have read a book, whether the book is good or bad, its influence goes on reproducing itself, over and over again in our lives, every time in a multiplied form. Suppose with your money you send some Bibles to the heathen, and as a result a single person is converted. Immediately that person would influence other heathen people whom he would meet, and so, one after the other, these heathen would be influenced as the result of what you have done. This good influence would go on repeating itself over and over again, as long as the world shall stand, and only in eternity would the wonderful results of what you have done be fully known. So it is with all that we say and all that we do; it goes on repeating and multiplying itself over and over again.
