Matthew 13:4
And when he sowed,
some [seeds] fell by the way side,
and the fowls came and devoured them up
Illustrations
Hardened by Habit
The best way of presenting before you what I mean will be to take a plain illustration.
A child
Suppose a little child, just beginning to open its eyes and unfold its faculties upon this wonderful world of ours.
There you get the extreme of capacity for receiving impressions from without, the extreme of susceptibility to the influences that come upon it.
There are things that passed out of its mind; the child forgot all about it; but then suddenly it comes back to the child’s mind, maybe weeks and weeks afterwards, showing how deep a mark it has made.
It is the law of the human nature that, when it is beginning to grow. it shall be soft as wax to receive all kinds of impressions, and then that it shall gradually stiffen and become hard as adamant to retain them.
A rock
A rock was once all fluid, and plastic, and gradually it cools down into hardness.
If a finger-dent had been put upon it in the early time, it would have left a mark that all the forces of the world could not make nor can obliterate now.
In our great museums you see stone slabs with the marks of rain that fell on it while it was cooling down, or with the footprint of some wild bird that passed across the beach in those old, old times.
The passing shower and the light foot left their prints on the soft sediment; then ages went on, and it has hardened into stone; and there they remain and will remain for evermore.
Man’s spirit
That is like a man’s spirit; in the childish days so soft, so susceptible to all impressions, so joyous to receive new ideas, treasuring them all up, gathering them all into itself, retaining them all for ever.
And then, as years go on, habit, the growth of the soul into steadiness and power, and many other reasons beside, gradually make us less and less capable of being profoundly and permanently influenced by anything outside us; so that the process from childhood to manhood is a process getting less impressible.
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