No one can explain how the inanimate can thus become living tissue, but the sun keeps warming its leaves with caresses, and the kindly winds bring tribute from distant lands; and the guarding stars keep sending their benign forces, and the cool hand of the darkness offers its chalice of dew, so that the seed becomes a tree, whose nectar attracts the bees and butterflies, and whose wide-extending branches become the home and playground of the birds. There is nothing seemingly more insignificant than the planting of a garden unless it be the beginning of a good and useful life. It is simply planting a thought in an ordinary human brain. The wise philosopher may examine the thought and pronounce it quite commonplace; the grammarian may test it and say that it could be constructed in a more exact and polished manner; the physiologist may examine the brain and pronounce the texture of its convolutions as being most ordinary. There is nothing anywhere to indicate that the combination of that particular thought and that particular brain could result in anything particularly extraordinary. The possessor of the brain may feel no different after the planting of the thought and have no presentiment of what it shall mean to him in the years that follow. But the whole universe knows about the thought planting. As the stars remember the buried seed, so all the divine forces of earth and heaven are set to work about the planted thought. Days and weeks may pass without the world observing any appreciable results, and it may even forget the planting. But God has not forgotten. He is remembering it, guarding it with divine care, and the results will appear sooner than we think. That is the reason, I believe, that Christ took the mustard seed for the foundation of a parable. The seed is not only one of the smallest, being so little that it can slip unnoticed from your grasp, and hide within the crevice of a clod, mocking your solicitous search, but it is of most rapid growth. Within a fortnight it will overshadow the garden, and before the season is ended will tower twelve to fifteen feet in height, its sturdy branches affording shelter, and protected nests, for many birds. Divine thoughts within the brain are capable of this marvelous development. The planting may be an unattractive thing to do; the mind itself may be as unresponsive as the soil at the first planting of the seed, but God has not forgotten his truth, and all the universe is working for its fullest development. Soon, very soon, will it manifest its marvelous nature by rapid growth and bloom.