He who delights in the ever-recurring miracle of the springtime sometimes finds himself looking back, in the midst of midsummer's sweet fulfilment, to recall the days when the world was just putting forth its first shy promises of coming joy. He loves to remember the first downy fluffing of the pussy-willow, the first flash of the bluebird's wing, the first faint blush of the peach tree, the first glimpse of the pale anemone hiding from the April sun. How deliciously frail and exquisite it all was!
Perhaps, if he is given to philosophizing, he loves to think how much that slowly unfolding panorama of silent loveliness is like a human being just awakening from its long dream of life in matter. Delicately sensitive as some opening bud is that consciousness which is just gaining its first glimpse of heavenly reality. Midsummer's glorious profusion it cannot yet understand. All it can grasp is God's wonderful today, wherein it feels in every fiber of its being the same divine unrest which sooner or later transforms the acorn into a mighty forest king. Time was when a child's foot might have crushed the tiny sprout with which this same acorn was indicating its newly awakened activity. Shall we not remember this, we to whom our brother's welfare is of vastly more importance than even the sweetest of shy woodland things? And shall we not be as considerate of the thoughts which are unfolding in his consciousness as we are of the flowers which are unfolding in his garden?
The apostle James once wrote, "Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain." Unfortunately we sometimes do not seem disposed to wait for any rain at all. We stand in the midst of a field just turning green with slender blades of wheat, and anxiously inquire where the wheat ears are. In our eagerness to find them we sometimes tramp around until we have crushed more tender little blades than we can ever know. Why should any one expect to find in April the fruits of July? It is only little children who dig up on Tuesday the seed they planted on Monday, to see how it is getting along. Let us not be little children, but reasonable and reasoning men and women. There is always the right time for every right thing; and to wait for that right time, and to wait for it quietly, confidently, and joyously, is the test of real greatness.
