March — Sowing. 93 



XIX. 



Sowing — Its sublime Trust — Spiritual Sowing — Parable of the Sower 



— Intellectual Sowing — Our Age more favorable to it than other Ages 



— An Old Peasant — The First Sower — The First Cultivator of the 

 Cereals — Roman Bread — Our Ignorance of our earliest Benefactors. 



OF at least equal dignity is the great religious act of 

 sowing, with its sublime well-grounded confidence 

 in the natural repayment of what we wisely trust to 

 Nature. We are so familiar with this act of confidence 

 that the meaning of it is almost lost to our apprehension, 

 yet man's trust in the order of the universe is never more 

 grandly proved than when he goes forth from some poor 

 house where the children have scanty bread, and carries 

 the precious grain and scatters it on the ground. There 

 is another kind of sowing on which it is not always 

 possible to have such secure reliance, because it is so 

 difficult to know accurately the condition of the soil. 

 He who sows corn sows it in earth that can be analyzed, 

 and agricultural chemistry can tell him with great 

 certainty what may be his chances of success ; but who 

 knows the minds of nations and their chemistry ? who 

 can tell whether the most precious seed-thoughts of 

 philosophy will lie utterly unproductive or yield illimit- 

 able harvests ? The condition of that soil varies from 

 year to year ; one year you might as well sow corn on 



