longs for the day when his appearance upon the street shall mean an ovation from the people, must make himself the people’s slave, defy all demagogues, brave the fury of party strife, oft be execrated by politicians and sometimes be hated by the multitude.  Having sown self-sacrifice and love, he shall reap fame and adulation.  For nature’s law is universal and inexorable—­like produces like.  The sheaf is simply the seed enlarged and multiplied.  The sowing contains the germ of all the harvests to be reaped.

The new biography of Benedict Arnold tells us of the despair of the traitor’s final days, the remorse that gnawed his heart, the agony that filled his life.  Yet no arbitrary degree was imposed upon Arnold.  He plotted the surrender of the interests committed to him as a general, planned the stratagem that ended in the capture and execution of Andre, and received $30,000 in gold for his treachery.  Having gone over to the enemy, he placed himself at the head of a band of English troops and went forth to destroy the towns and villages of his boyhood and pillaged the homes of his old friends.  He sowed avarice, and of avarice he reaped $30,000.  He sowed distrust in America; he reaped distrust from the Englishmen who had bought his honor.  He sowed treason; he reaped infamy.  He sowed contempt for the colonists, and, dying, he reaped the contempt from his old friends, who counted his body carrion.  For the harvests of the soul represent not arbitrary degrees, but the workings of natural law.  If Ceres, the goddess of harvests, makes the sheaf to reap the seed, conscience, recalling man’s career, ordains that like produces like.  What a man soweth that shall he also reap is the law of nature and of God.

The heroes of the Old Testament are common people capitalized.  What is unique in the experience of these sons of greatness holds true of all of lesser rank.  The career of one of these giants is a pictorial exhibition of this principle of the spiritual harvest.  Young Jacob was shrewd, crafty and full of foresight.  If Esau, his brother, was a “hail fellow well met,” the child of his impulses, Jacob was a diplomat and very wily.  One day, when the father, Isaac, was blind and old, Esau grew restless, and at last went away with his companions, for he dearly loved to hunt.  In that hour ambition tempted Jacob and avarice led him away.  Advantaging himself of his brother’s absence, Jacob used the skin of a kid to make his hands hairy, like the hands of Esau, and, simulating the brother’s voice, he extorted from his dying father those tokens that, according to the Eastern custom, made him the successor to his father’s title, wealth and power.  Full twoscore years passed swiftly by and the deceit seems to have brought is large money returns to crafty Jacob.