Autumn Is Not Sad

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 30, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 44.

Autumn Is Not Sad

The days of autumn are here, somber, sober days, some call them.

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

writes the poet. Yet it does not seem so to us as we look out upon nature on this balmy October day, not here in California alone, but in the Eastern and Middle States, as the old geographers named them. We see them to-day as often of yore. True, there have been some soaking rains, some heavy frosts perhaps; many of the trees are becoming leafless; the fields of grain have given place to stretches of unsightly stubble. These are among the losses 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 have with wide extended hand reached out their fragrant fruit, oftentimes ungratefully received. 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 sun enter into co-partnership 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 we be? If we sowed good seed in good soil, we have reaped abundant harvest. Let life be such that our sowing for life shall be so sure in Jesus Christ that the harvest shall be the gladdest day of all, the triumph of a life, filled with bounteous good.