This is the ninth month, though by its name it is numbered the seventh. It marks the time when harvests are gathered, and fruit glows on the orchard trees, rich and glorious compared with the pallid blossoms of spring. It is the time of garnered sheaves and quiet, meditative days, wherein we do well to think gratefully over the goodness and richness of life which God makes us inherit. The promises in Scripture are continually reaching to universality. They include mankind as such, and express the certainty that at some time the nations shall be glad because they shall understand the righteous judgment of God and be governed by Principle. This thought is brought out in the sixty-seventh psalm: "Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us."
When Paul made his famous address to the people of Lystra, at the time when their priest brought oxen and garlands, intending to do sacrifice to him and to Barnabas on the theory that they were gods walking among men, because they had been able to heal a congenital cripple, the apostle earnestly turned their attention to Principle, described by him as "the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein." Then he went on to show the connection between this source of good and the regular flow of blessings which came to them, proving thus that though God was unseen, He nevertheless was not "without witness." He then called their attention to the universality of divine good will, "in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness."
Why then does it happen, with this universality of production, with earth's fertility proven in such varieties of fruit and cereal characteristic of different climes, that people should be destitute and hungry? One can easily see that this would not be so if men were more generally guided by Principle, and sought their own happiness in the right way. Men are not swine to find satisfaction in thrusting others aside from the food supply that they may gorge themselves; yet when food is translated into terms of money there is a tendency on the part of many to feel that anything will justify their selfish grasping of that which represents food for thousands. The animal which must concentrate its whole attention upon its own things is not a model for man. The real model is of course Christ Jesus, in whose demonstration and teaching we find uplifted humanity meeting and being glorified by divinity.
