| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 8 |
Page 5 |
The friendships that sprang up in a day and at once became so ardent prove short lived, and leave only emptiness and sorrow behind. Few other causes are productive of so many failures in life as thinness, superficiality. Noble possibilities perish because there is no depth of soil in which heavenly plants can root themselves. The trouble is not with the native endowment – that may be princely; it is with the culture, the training. With depth of soil the harvest would have yielded a hundredfold; but by reason of its shallowness there is no harvest at all.
We need to give serious thought to the warning against shallowness of life. The farmer’s remedy is picks and bars, and the breaking up and removal of the rock. Then, in the deepened soil the seeds will grow, taking firm root and coming to perfection. We should seek the deepening of our spiritual life so that the words of God may find entrance, and may grow into a harvest of beauty. “It is bad to be hard, but it is bad also to be thin.” No price we may have to pay should be thought too great if the result is the development of all the possibilities there are in our life.
We cannot miss sore testing. Ever life will have its trials. Our Lord in his explanation of the parable says that when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, the man with the shallow life straightway stumbleth. He cannot stand in the battle. The plants of righteousness growing in him have no deep root, and cannot endure the summer’s heat.
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