Thoroughness in spiritual culture.
There is put before us here an agricultural figure, which our observation of fallow ground in England, at present, fails to give us the power of understanding. When we look at an English ploughman turning a piece of meadowland into arable, there does not seem anything very difficult about his work. Why, then, should breaking up the fallow ground be so hard? Why should this be reckoned an appropriate figure for something evidently difficult, something, it would seem, habitually shirked and the necessity of attending to which the men of Judah and Jerusalem did not sufficiently recognize? The answer is to be found in a state of things which, after all our efforts, will probably present itself imperfectly to the mind. By many of the Hebrew husbandmen the cultivation of their land seems to have been managed in a very imperfect, careless, happy-go-lucky sort of way. In the moveless East, what things are today tell us pretty well what they were two thousand years ago. Dr. Thomson, speaking of the plain of Gennesaret—a district which Josephus describes as extremely fruitful—says, "Gennesaret is now pre-eminently fruitful, in thorns. They grow, up among the grain, or the gram' among them." And again on the same page, "These farmers all need the exhortation of Jeremiah, 'Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.' They are too slot to neglect this; and the thorns, springing up, choke the seed, so that it cannot come to maturity". The truth, then, was that the land was but half reclaimed from the wilderness. To have properly reclaimed it, and then kept it in a satisfactory state, would have required a great deal of trouble. And since from such fertile land the husbandman, with but little effort, could get enough to serve the passing day, he did not concern himself to make the land do its best.
Hence we see that this admonition, whatever its first aspect of obscurity, is really a most important one for all of us. The exhortation is to nothing less than thoroughness in spiritual culture. Thoroughness in the cultivation of the heart, as a soil wherein the seeds of Divine truth are sown, pays in the highest sense of the word. Look at what science, skill, and the bold investment of capital for the enrichment of the soil and for machinery to save labor, have done for modern farming. The full productiveness of God's earth seems to be apprehended by comparatively few. And if this is so in things natural, there is no wonder at all that we should be so little conscious of this thoroughness required in cultivating our spiritual nature. There are many human hearts where subsoil plowing is as yet unknown. There is g soil that grows an abundant crop from plants of human origin, but the seed that God sows either falls dead or dies after a brief struggle to find hold and sustenance in the heart. The word through Jeremiah here is but the germ from which our Lord expounded his parable of the four kinds of soil. There is laid on each one of us a heavy burden—the stewardship of a human heart. And yet it is a precious and honorable burden. Far beyond the ripest, sweetest, and most copious fruits of the soil beneath our feet, is the fruit that may come from within us. But the culture must be thorough. True, that means toil, patience, watchfulness, discrimination; but what great work was ever done without them?—Y.