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Come back and look upon the same field after it has lain a few days without rain under a scorching sun: you will find that while in some portions the young plants have increased in bulk without losing any of their freshness, in others the green covering has disappeared and left the ground as brown and bare as it was when the sower went forth to sow upon it.
The saints forbid that I should put aloes into the honey of their hearts; but this child will grow." Clelia Alba perceived that he had his doubts as she had hers. But they said nothing of them to each other. The issue would lie with Time, whom men always depict as a mower, but who is also a sower, too.
It tells Christ's own experience, and it foretells His servants'. He is the great Sower, who has 'come forth' from the Father. All who follow Him, and make His truth known, are sowers in their turn, and have to look for the same issue of their work. The figure is common to all languages.
Then the ideas associated with a garden or the field are also used as illustrations. The Bible parables from nature are very significant and powerful. They embrace the vine and its branches, the sower and the seed, the lily among thorns, the trees planted by the rivers of water; and thus the facts of the spiritual realm are made clear to us. I often speak of the garden of the soul.
The impossibility of accepting the first suggestion throws us necessarily back on the only other supposition that remains; the sower in the parable must represent the earthen vessel to which the ministry of the Gospel has been entrusted, the human agent employed in the work of the Lord.
The pictures of the wise and foolish builders with which the sermon on the mount concludes show that it was not the use of illustration which surprised the disciples in the parables associated with the Sower, but his use of such puzzling illustrations. Some of the parables of Luke's peculiar section may belong to the Galilean ministry, and even to the earlier stages of it.
They are like some of Millet's paintings "The Sower," or "The Sheepfold," there is very little detail in them but sometimes a little means so much.
The chimney-corner is the true arena for this class of philosophers, and the pipe and mug furnish their all-sufficient panoply. Emerson undoubtedly met with some of them among his disciples. His wise counsel did not always find listeners in a fitting condition to receive it. He was a sower who went forth to sow. Some of the good seed fell among the thorns of criticism.
Gesture is a universal language. The mighty burden of meaning in Millet's picture of the "Sower" is carried by the gesture of the laborer as he swings across the background of field and hill, whose forms also are expressive; here, too, the elemental dignity of form and movement is reinforced by the solemnity of the color.
Then the door, that hung awry like a drooping eyelid, gave a disreputable wink, and the whole front gable of the cabin loomed a giant countenance with a silly forehead and an evil leer. Now it seemed that a hand was hurling snow against the door, as a sower scatters grain, snow that lay like beach sand on the floor, or melted into a crawling pool red in the firelight, red as blood!
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