Take one more look at our meadow. The summer days are cooling down, and the storms have begun to come. The ground is bare and blackened, the stalks and leaves are battered to shreds: but seeds are everywhere. The earth is strewn with the husks. Whence they come none can tell, and they are broken down into nothingness. All is death--death reigning. The first showers are only bringing in a fresh stage of it where all seemed dead before, beating them, bleached and weather-worn and split, into the softened mould. Everything is quiet, for the seeds have gone down into the resting stage through which they all have to pass, whether it is during the frost in England, or the burning African summer. Do we not know the counterpart in the inner world, when Spirit-seed has been shed, and a strange waiting-time comes in which nothing happens--a silence on God's part in which death has to be allowed to reign before it is swallowed up in victory? But all is on the very verge of a flood-tide of life, for the seed-vessel has reached its highest ministry now. The last wrappings are torn, and from every rent and breach the bare grain is shed forth and brought into direct contact with the soil: and suddenly, as if by miracle, the quickening comes, and the emerald shoot is to be seen. Can we read our last lesson? Here, in service, we see the same goal being reached as in the soul's inner history. Both end in absolute simplicity, in Christ alone. For the highest aim of ministry is to bring His immediate presence into contact with others--so to bring Him and them face to face that He can act on them directly, while we stand aside, like John the Baptist, rejoicing greatly. We used to look at our inner life as separate from our service: but as we go on they merge into one--Christ--the same Christ; whether folded to our hearts in His secret temple, like the seed in its husk, or set free in contact with those around to carry on His quickening work--all and only Christ. "Christ the beginning, and the end is Christ." We saw how the soul's first step is to let Him in as its life: the last step in a sense can go no further. It is only that the apprehension of Him has increased, and the hindrances and limitings have been swept away. Christ--Christ--Christ--filling all the horizon. Everything in us: everything to us: everything through us. "To live is Christ."--Amen. End of Project Gutenberg's Parables of the Christ-life, by I. Lilias Trotter