p. 12 | FRANCES E. BOLTON by Frances E. Bolton

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 13, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 41.

FRANCES E. BOLTON

By Frances E. Bolton

NATURE’S MEANING. No. 5.

WHEN we enter a stranger’s house, we look about for indications of the person’s taste and character. We judge something of the individual by the environment. The books, pictures, embroidery, arrangement, all tell something of the life-story. Poverty may cramp expression; sickness, sorrow, discouragement put a check to the manifestation, yet the reader of human nature will find the traces of what is within.

The works of God in a juster sense tell His nature. To study His works that we may know Him, love Him, and thus become changed into His image, is to do the same thing that all nature urges upon us. The whole duty of man is to love God with all the heart and our neighbor as ourselves. This greatly simplifies life, lays off its rigorous burdens, and brings us to Him who gives rest unto the soul. It puts us in an attitude of listening to, looking for, following of, one leader. He who bade us consider the lilies of the field, the fowls of the air, and directed us to nature, leads in pleasant and holy pathways, beside the still waters, and into the green pastures.

Both Old and New Testament abound in figures from nature for the teaching of spiritual truth. One need go no further than his door-yard to find a field of spiritual instruction. Is it uncultivated? Is the soul untilled? “Break up the fallow ground” in your garden, and ask the great Gardener to teach you how His plow will prepare your heart for divine seed. He will make “the wilderness like Eden,” and “the desert like the garden of the Lord.” Go through the processes that insure fertility to your dooryard, and find how God will make your soul “like a watered garden.”

The seed breaks in the darkness and in the silence, and comes up gradually, first the bud, then the blade, then the ear. Looking on the miracle of growth, shall we not take heart, and trust that, tho we hear no explosions in our souls, yet the great Miracle-worker is causing His own Word to flourish within?

We have in the burial and death of the seed, the symbol of the death of Christ and of self. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.” The death process is silent, discouraging, painful, but not hopeless. When all is lost, all is gained. He that loseth his life shall find it. The seed springs up in a new life, more radiant, more fruitful. No longer bound within by that which nourishes itself alone, it lives for others. Christ came from the grave, to ascend on high, to make intercession for us before the Father, and to pour upon the world the pentecostal life. And we also, like the seed in the death damp, shall come up, maybe as silently, into a fuller, more spiritual life, even from the grave of all that we have known in the past. Our death is a daily one. Every day forgetting the things that are behind, we must press on. It is so with the plant. The leaf must be forgotten, even sacrificed for the bud. The bud withers and drops away for the fruit, and the fruit ripens, and forgets the tree that bore it for a higher mission of sacrifice. We lay down the life of yesterday for a fuller, better life to-day, all along growing up into the likeness of God-like sacrifice.

Nature’s teachings can not be merely theoretical. They must be lived to be understood. The teaching must be in experience. Blessed are the children who from their first years learn the lessons of Christ, beholding in nature the outworking of God’s life and love. In the light of God’s Word, nature becomes a divine teacher, and all through her paths, we trace the shining footprints of the Son of God.