p. 738 | WEEDS | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Dec 8, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 47.

WEEDS.

WE are hoeing in the orchard to-day. A few weeds have started since we cultivated it. They will not average one to a square yard. They are very small. They look very innocent. Some of them are quite pretty. But we cut them all down. If one of those weeds should say: "Oh! spare me, I am a harmless little thing; and surely there is room enough in your great field for those trees and for me too. I don't want to supplant them. I could not if I would. I only ask you to let me grow under their shadow." What would we say to this appeal? Would we not reply: "You are little now, indeed, but if we leave you you will grow. In a few weeks you will be large enough to steal moisture from the soil that will affect the growth and fruitage of the trees. The nourishment you would abstract would make several pounds of apples or pears. We plow and fertilize and irrigate here in order to get fruit; and in this effort you will oppose us to the extent of your ability. You are a thief and a robber. But this is not all. If we let you grow you will go to seed. You will scatter the germs of a wide growth of weeds on this mellow soil, and next year we shall have to cut down thousands of your children. No, no, little weed, though you look so innocent, you are dangerous, and you must die."

"But," persists the weed, "did not God make me as well as the tree? What right have you to destroy so ruthlessly anything that he has created or even permits to grow?"

And then we have to go to the Bible. We remind the weed that he is not even named in the first or second chapters of Genesis. The earliest mention of him is in Gen. 3:18. When God cursed the ground after Adam sinned, he said to him, "Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee." Weeds sprang up outside of Eden as one of the consequences of the fall. They belong not to the earth in its natural, but in its fallen condition. God permits them to grow in order to increase the toil and sorrow in which we are to earn our daily bread. The locusts that devour our harvests and make our fruitful fields as barren as the desert, are creatures of God. They are beautiful, too. But shall we therefore yield to them and slave that they may live? There are a great many creatures of God in this fallen world that we must fight against. We don't live in the garden that God beautified and blessed, but outside of it on the soil that has been blighted by sin.

While hoeing these weeds in the orchard I could not help thinking about the weeds that spring up in our hearts. They are evil thoughts and desires that soon grow into evil habits. How innocent they seem at first. They start up in the soul of our fallen nature as spontaneously as weeds. They are not exotics that we have to import. They appear without any seed sowing or planting. And for this reason men say that we have a right to let them grow. But if a habit is useless, if it consumes time or money that might

be profitably employed, then it is a weed. It is not merely a cumberer of the ground, but interferes with the growth of the plants of righteousness and ought to be destroyed.

Nothing in this world, except weeds, grows so rankly as evil habits. An indulgence that looks to-day like that tiny green shoot from a thistle seed will soon become a hedge of thorns. The soil of our moral nature, corrupted by depravity, is full of germs that are ready to spring up and choke away every growth of the good seed of the kingdom. Our business is to watch for these weeds and to destroy them relentlessly as soon as they appear. This is the work of our probation. Upon our doing it faithfully depends our success in this life and our happiness in the life to come.

It will not do for the lazy and self-indulgent to say: "I have a natural appetite for this thing. God made me to love it and to desire it. It is one of his good creatures, and it does me no harm." This is what the drunkard says when he begins to take a little wine to help digestion or to enliven social intercourse. That single glass a day is like the weed in the shadow of my young fruit tree. It is the germ of a possible growth that may blight the hopes of the soul for time and for eternity. It is our duty to look ahead and to inquire what is the tendency of such things. Those weeds in my orchard may die for want of moisture. Gophers may eat their roots and destroy them. But I won't trust to such contingencies. I know that they may live, and if they live they are bound to grow, and therefore I cut them down. And so ought every man to reason who is tempted to form any useless habit. It may not live until it becomes a tyrant. But that has been the history of such habits in thousands of instances. The history may be repeated in your case, and the only way to be sure that it will not is to kill the habit as soon as it appears.

I am sick and tired of hearing people say, "It does no harm." "It is an innocent indulgence." The question for an intellectual and moral being to ask is, "Will it do any good?" Life is too short and the interests depending upon it are too momentous for us to waste an hour or an energy upon things that are useless. If there were in pleasurable indulgences the tendency to positive evil, we cannot afford them heart room any more than I can afford these weeds orchard room. We need all the soil within for the germination and culture of truth and purity and love. John says: "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." The world is not all vice and crime. But it is, in its whole native growth, ungodly. All our devotion to it—its interest and its customs—interferes with that full consecration of the soul to God, in which only it can live. Let us uproot every thought, feeling, or habit that does not tend to promote our growth in grace. Thus only will we be as wise as the orchardist who will not spare any weed that may possibly injure the growth of his trees.—Rusticus.