But other fell on good ground and brought forth fruit.
The fruit thirty-fold seems to represent the case of those who fear; sixty-fold the ease of those who hope; the hundredfold those who love. (Hermann.)
As in the bad ground, the diversity was threefold-the wayside, the stony, and the thorny:-so in the good ground there is a like diversity-the fruit yielding some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. (Zeroing.)
Qualifications for the reception of God’s truth
1. Sensibility to religious impressions.
2. Thoughtfulness.
3. Unworldliness.
4. An honest and good heart.
Growth precious because perilous
Inthe soil of the heart is found all the nutriment of spiritual life, and all the nutriment of the weeds and poisons which destroy spiritual life. And it is this which makes Christian character, when complete, a thing so inestimably precious. There are things precious, not from the materials of which they are made, but from the risk and difficulty of bringing them to perfection. The speculum of the largest telescope foils the optician’s skill in casting. Too much or too little heat-the interposition of a grain of sand, a slight alteration in the temperature of the weather, and all goes to pieces-it must be recast. Therefore, when successfully finished, it is a matter for almost the congratulation of a country. Rarer, and more difficult still than the costliest part of the most delicate of instruments, is the completion of Christian character. Only let there come the heat of persecution-or the cold of human desertion-a little of the world’s dust-and the rare and costly thing is cracked, and becomes a failure. (F. W. Robertson.)
Good ground
1. A good and honest heart is a perfect and sincere heart.
