p. 16 | Autumn Days

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Oct 27, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 42.

Autumn Days.

Once again the days of autumn are upon us. Somber, sober days some call them. The poet writes,

“The melancholy days have come, The saddest of the year.”

Yet so it does not seem to us as we look out upon nature on this balmy October day, not here in California alone, but as well in the Eastern and Middle States, as the old geographers named them. True, there have been some soaking rains, some heavy frosts perhaps, many of the deciduous trees are becoming leafless, the fields of grain have given place to stretches of unsightly stubble. These are among the losses which autumn brings us; but they are not serious. Never shall we see, till autumn visits us again, such beautiful slumberous haze softening into peculiar beauty the light which falls upon landscape and water scene. There is stubble in the field, but the barns and granaries are filled with golden, blessed harvest. The earth has yielded her store of roots; the trees with open, extended hands have reached out their fragrant fruit, oftentimes ungratefully received by the poor mortals who grasp it. Cellar and cask and jar are filled with the store which autumn has brought so bounteously. The dry pastures turn to greener hue, the empty brook-beds again babble in song, and even the frost and the sun enter into copartnership for a time to clothe the forests in oftentimes barbaric splendor; brown and gold and crimson, with banks and islands of living evergreen. Autumn is not sad. Why should it be? If we sowed good seed in good soil, we have reaped abundant harvest. Let life be such that our moral sowing shall be so sure in Jesus Christ that the harvest-days shall be the gladdest days of all; of triumph of a life filled with bounteous good.