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The leaven of sin that touched humanity at the first has infected the whole. The fact of a universal corruption appears in all history, and its origin is explained in the beginning of Genesis. The whole lump has been leavened: break off a bit at any place, at any time, and you will find it tainted.
Many centuries before the Christian era the Egyptians were acquainted with the means of making fermented or leavened bread; afterwards this practice spread into Greece, and it is found in esteem at Rome two centuries B.C.; from Rome the new method was introduced among the Gauls, and it is found to-day to exist almost the same as it was practiced at that period, with the exception, of course, of the considerable improvements introduced in the baking and grinding.
It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it. And again he said, Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.
He had been the one bright ray in the dull gray of her life. His love, come so quickly, so suddenly, to her had leavened the memory of her unloved years. Their recollection had been thrust into the background to give place to the sunshine of a precious first love. And now it must all go.
Will it not be easy to be diligent when we feel that we are 'ever in the great Taskmaster's eye'? There are many reasons for diligence the greatness of the work, for it is no small matter for us to get the whole lump of our nature leavened with the good leaven; the continual operation of antagonistic forces which are all round us, and are working night-shifts as well as day ones, whether we as Christians are on short time or not, the brevity of the period during which we have to work, and the tremendous issues which depend upon the completeness of our service here all these things are reasons for our diligence.
They are leavened with reflections on all possible moral and religious problems, and criticism of the traditional conceptions of the gods plays a leading part in them.
Bel Bree lived in New Hampshire; fifteen miles from a railway; in the curious region where the old times and the new touch each other and mix up; where the women use towels, and table-cloths, and bed-spreads, of their mothers' own hand-weaving, and hem their new ones with sewing-machines brought by travelling agents to their doors; where the men mow and rake their fields with modern inventions, but only get their newspapers once a week; where the "help" are neighbors' girls, who wear overskirts and high hats, and sit at the table with the family; where there are rag carpets and "painted chamber-sets;" where they feed calves and young turkeys, and string apples to dry in the summer, and make wonderful patchwork quilts, and wax flowers, and worsted work, perhaps, in the long winters; where they go to church and to sewing societies from miles about, over tremendous hills and pitches, with happy-go-lucky wagons and harnesses that never come to grief; where they have few schools and intermitted teaching, yet turn out, somehow, young men who work their way into professions, and girls who take the world by instinct, and understand a great deal perfectly well that is beyond their practical reach; where the old Puritan stiffness keeps them straight, but gets leavened in some marvelous way with the broader and more generous thought of the time, and wears a geniality that it is half unconscious of; the region where, if you are lucky enough to get into it to know it, you find yourself, as Miss Euphrasia said, encouraged and put in heart again about the world.
The bread employed in the Eucharist is with some Christian sects unleavened, and, indeed, leavened cakes seem to have been introduced solely as a protest against certain so-called Judaizing tendencies. The Latin Church still contends for the propriety of employing unleavened bread, and from the seventh century unleavened bread was used at Rome and leavened bread at Constantinople.
There are the longer lists of others to whom kinder fortune did not set duties in the eye of the world; but Miami made of them citizens who leavened the lump of that growing West which was then a sprawling, irregular line of pioneer settlements, and is now an empire. Search through it, above and below the Ohio, and beyond the Mississippi.
It is by the accumulation of ideas, whether immediately applicable or otherwise, that humanity has done, and will continue to do, better to-day than yesterday, and better to-morrow than to-day. If we live on peas and beans, which we dispute with the weevil, we also live by knowledge, that mighty kneading-trough in which the bread of progress is mixed and leavened.
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