Philosophers destroyed God’s winsomeness.  The reformers came in to lead men away from medievalism back to God himself.  Men found hope again in redemptive love.  They saw that any conception of God that dispirited and depressed men was perverted and false.  No man hath done more to establish this fact than him who long ago said:  “Any presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ that does not come to the world as the balmy days of May comes to the unlocked northern zones; any way of preaching the love of God in Christ which is not as full of sweetness as the voice of the angels when they sang at the advent; any way of making known the proclamation of mercy which has not at least as many birds as there are in June and as many flowers as the dumb meadows know how to bring forth; any method of bringing before men the doctrine of salvation which does not make everyone feel, ’There is hope for me in God—­in the divine plan, in the very nature of the organization of human life and society,’ is spurious—­is a slander on God and is blasphemy against his love.”

Hope hath her harvest also for teachers and reformers.  Often men think their work is squandered.  They seem to be sowing seed not upon the Nile, to find it again abundantly, but in midocean, to sink and come to naught.  Parents and teachers break their hearts, fearing their watchfulness and instruction have failed.  Men sow wheat and wait six months for a harvest; but they sow moral seed Sunday and on Monday whip their children because the seed has not ripened.  They forget that apples bitter in July may be sweet in August.  To-day’s vice in the child is often to-morrow’s virtue, as acid juices through frost become saccharine.  Yesterday the mother rocked a little angel in the cradle; to-day she moans:  “Alas, that I should have rocked a little fox, a little serpent, a little wolf!” To-morrow the child becomes a model of truth and integrity.

The sage might have said:  “It is good that woman should hope and wait.”  Truth’s errand has always been a successful errand.  Not a single social truth or civic truth or moral truth has ever been lost out of the world.  Secrets of cruelty and fraud, secrets of oppression and sin perish, but nothing that makes life happier or better hath been forgotten.  We do not have to keep God and truth alive, they keep us alive.  Vegetable seeds can be killed, but not moral seeds.  When God issues his silent command to the earth flying into winter and wheels it back toward summer, it is given to no man to put a brake upon warmth; nor can he go up against the spring with swords and banners.  But easier this than staying the upward march of mankind.  God is abroad upon a mission of recovery.  Open thy hand, O publicist! and sow thy seed.  The seed shall perish, but not the harvest.