And then we shall have, as He had, that independence of visible results that we have just seen in the plants. He left the world--this one world out of His mighty universe in which God had come to dwell--with no more to be seen from His travail than a few hundred brethren, every one of whom had forsaken Him only six weeks before, and of whom but a hundred and twenty had enough purpose of heart to follow on to Pentecost. And still He could say, "Yet surely My judgment is with the Lord, and My work with My God." And though Israel was "not gathered," He was "glorious in the eyes of the Lord" and "made His salvation to the ends of the earth." For it was life that had been sown. So no matter, if we never see the full up-springing on earth of the Spirit-seed scattered. It is all the more likely that God may trust us with a great multiplying if our faith does not need to witness it. He can grant us spiritual harvests out of sight, of which He only gains the glory. In "the things which Christ hath ... wrought by us ... by the power of the Spirit of God" there is a multiplying energy that can reach, not single souls only, but other souls through them: a Holy Ghost touch that can fire trains, so to speak, far reaching beyond the sphere of what we see or know. Such is the power of multiplication in the earthly seeds that it needs a constant battle, and the survival of the fittest, to keep us from being overrun with one and another. The henbane, for instance (by no means the most prolific) would, they say, if every seed had its way every year for five years, produce from a single plant ten thousand billions--enough to cover the whole area of the dry land of the world, allowing seventy-three plants to the square metre.[footnote*: "Natural History of Plants"--Kerner and Oliver] Perhaps God permits the seeming waste of such an overwhelming proportion of the seed formed, to show us the Fountain of Life that there is in Him; and to teach us that there is no straitening in the Spirit of the Lord. "There is no limit" (as someone has said) "to what God can do with a man, provided he will not touch the glory." And God's possibilities for these germs of Spirit-life are not bound by time. Jesus is drawing so near that already our thoughts and hopes begin to step over the shrinking foreground of "the present age," and to rest in the ever-opening horizon beyond. Who can tell what harvest after harvest may be waiting in the eternal years, after the summer of earth has faded into the far past?