Requited toil.
"They shall not labour in vain." This is God's comfort to all his faithful servants. Success is not to be measured by our sight, or by the statistics and seemings of superficial men.
I. HARVESTS ARE SOMETIMES LONG DELAYED. It has been so in our foreign mission fields, and it is so often here at home in our Christian Churches, and it is so in our families. But the Divine seed only "slumbers;" it does not "perish." Harvests often sprout in greenness and wave in golden glory over men's graves.
II. HARVESTS ARE NOT TO BE MEASURED BY THEIR FIRSTFRUITS. There, in a school or a church, some Henry Martyn, some Wilberforce, some Heber, some Livingstone, is brought into Christ's fold. Perhaps that soul is the only one soul we can make estimate of in a whole year's toil. We may, perhaps, feel disappointed—only one; but that one soul may be, under God, the means of giving spiritual life to a new continent. We must wait and work, and never weary, for Christ must reign. And the sower shall in due season reap, if he faint not.—W.M.S.