Seeds

MY YOUNG FRIENDS: I have here this morning quite a variety of seeds. Some of them are very small, and some, as you see, are quite large. But each kind have in them a principle of life, which makes them differ from sand, or small stones of similar size, because if I plant these in the ground they will grow.

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 over, 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, and they think that they will do them no injury. But the fact is, that these boys are influenced in all their life 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 his valuable time should be spent in reading good books and good papers, and securing such information as will be of value and assistance all through life. For life is a very great struggle, and no boy can afford to waste his time in the beginning.

If he is ever to amount to anything in this world, it is important that he 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. If you plant one sunflower seed, it might produce as many as 4000 seeds. If you plant one single thistle seed, it has been known to produce as high as 24000 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 that 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 this globe.

In ten years the product would be sufficient to plant not only this whole world, 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 we plant. So it is with the thoughts and the words which we have in our minds. Good thoughts grow 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, it goes on reproducing itself, over and over again in your life, 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. Now, there is another interesting feature of these seeds to which I want to call your attention. And that is that the life in the seed may continue for a very long time, even hundreds of years.

Over in Egypt, centuries ago, they built large pyramids, and when a king died, instead of burying his body in the ground, they embalmed it with spices and dried it, so that it did not decay. Then they wrapped it up in cloths, and with these cloths and bandages they sometimes wrapped wheat or some other kind of grain, and some of these mummies, for so they are called, which have been buried possibly twenty-five hundred years, have been found, and when the wheat has been taken out of the hands of these mummies and planted in the ground, under favorable conditions, it has grown, just the same as the wheat which was harvested from the fields only last summer.

The life which was in the seed had not been destroyed by the many hundreds of years which have passed since it was placed in the hands of the mummies. A little over fifty years ago there was a very interesting case of this kind in England. At Dorchester they were digging down some thirty feet below the surface; and at that depth they came upon the remains of the body of a man, with which there had been buried some coins. By the date upon the coins, they knew that this body had been buried at least seventeen hundred years.

In the stomach was found quite a large quantity of raspberry seeds. The man had doubtless eaten a large number of raspberries, and then might have been accidentally killed very soon afterwards, so that the seeds were not injured by the gastric juices of the stomach.

These seeds were taken to the Horticultural Garden, and there they were planted. What do you think! After seventeen hundred years and more, these seeds grew, and in a short time there was an abundant fruitage of raspberries, just the same as though the seeds had been gathered from raspberries which grew only the year before.

Although hidden and seemingly dead, yet these seeds retained their life for seventeen hundred years or more. In this same way there is a deathless power in the words which we speak. Sometimes parents and Sunday-school teachers, and preachers also, become discouraged because they do not at once see the good results of their labors. Just the same as in the case of the seed, so in all our teaching, and the kind words we speak, and all the good deeds we do, there is in them a deathless power.

Even though we die, and are laid away in our graves, yet sometime in the lives of those who come after us, the good we have done shall surely bear a fruitage of blessing.