---

The mustard seed is one of the tiniest of seeds, although in the fierce heat of the Jordan valley it will grow up into a herb as high as a man on horseback, and throw out sprays on which the birds of the air perch and feed, attracted by its pungent fruit. Take such a seed into your hand and consider it, and you will find it hard, round, dry, and apparently dead and inert. Pat it under a microscope and dissect it; and, small as it is, you will find that it contains a germ far smaller than itself in which its whole potency is summed up. Born in the air, nourished by the sunshine and the dew, it yet cannot live and appropriate their virtues while it remains in them, so long as it lies in the pod, or continues above the ground. But bury it in the soil, and soon a process of dissolution and disintegration sets in which is also a process of vitality and growth. Its main bulk rots, but rots only that it may feed the tiny germ of quickened life which resides within it, for even a seed must lose itself to find itself, must die that it may live. Through death it rises into a new life, pushes its way through what, compared to itself in size and weight, are whole mountains of obstruction and resistance, piercing clod after clod, and compelling each to yield its virtues, and to minister to its needs; until, at last, it rises into that fellowship with the air and the sunshine and the dew for which it yearned and was designed. "The mountains of the earth are dead in comparison with its life." Hence it commands them to be removed, and they obey. So astonishing is the vital energy of even the smallest seeds that " mushroom spores, which singly are almost invisible," have been known to lift large paving stones an inch or two from the earth in the course of a single night.

(Almoni Peloni.)

---

---

KJV: And when they were come to the multitude, there came to him a certain man, kneeling down to him, and saying,

WEB: When they came to the multitude, a man came to him, kneeling down to him, saying,