The sower who casts in the seed, the father or
mother casting in the fruitful word are accomplishing a pontifical act
and ought to perform it with religious awe, with prayer and gravity, for
they are laboring at the kingdom of God. All seed-sowing is a mysterious
thing, whether the seed fall into the earth or into souls. Man is a
husbandman; his whole work rightly understood is to develop life, to sow
it everywhere. Such is the mission of humanity, and of this divine
mission the great instrument is speech. We forget too often that
language is both a seed-sowing and a revelation. The influence of a word
in season, is it not incalculable? What a mystery is speech! But we are
blind to it, because we are carnal and earthy. We see the stones and the
trees by the road, the furniture of our houses, all that is palpable and
material. We have no eyes for the invisible phalanxes of ideas which
people the air and hover incessantly around each one of us.
Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and
silent propaganda. As far as lies in its power, it tends to transform
the universe and humanity into its own image. Thus we have all a cure of
souls. Every man is the center of perpetual radiation like a luminous
body; he is, as it were, a beacon which entices a ship upon the rocks if
it does not guide it into port.
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