One day a young man graphically described for me the vast wheat fields of northern China, the place where he had lived as a child. In picturesque detail he portrayed the whole process of the growing of wheat. "The tares," he said, "are not known to be tares until sometime before harvest. As the wheat turns golden ripe, the tares then appear."
"Have you ever seen a tare?" he asked. "Until the wheat is in the bearded head, the two cannot easily be distinguished, and one ignorant of this fact would possibly destroy the young wheat as well as the tares. The tares have no useful fruitage, but only the harvest can prove this."
Having been strictly reared in the Buddhist faith, this young man was overjoyed years later to find, in the Christian Bible, Christ Jesus' parable of the man who sowed good seed in his field only to find tares in it also.See Matt. 13:24-30. As he studied the Bible along with Science and Health, the textbook of Christian Science by Mrs. Eddy, he found Mrs. Eddy's explanation of the parable in divine metaphysics in this statement: "Mortal belief (the material sense of life) and immortal Truth (the spiritual sense) are the tares and the wheat, which are not united by progress, but separated." Science and Health, p. 72.
