s disciples' attention to a harvest more worthy of
their attention than the one they were discussing: "Were you not saying
that we must wait four months till harvest comes again[12] and cheapens
the bread for which you have paid so dear in Sychar? But lift up your
eyes and mark the eager crowd of Samaritans, and say if you may not
expect to reap much this very day. Are not the fields white already to
harvest? Here in Samaria, which you only wished quickly to pass through,
where you were looking for no additions to the Kingdom, and where you
might suppose sowing and long waiting were needed, you see the ripened
grain. Others have laboured, the Baptist and this woman and I, and ye
have entered into their labours."

All labourers in the Kingdom of God need a similar reminder. We can
never certainly say in what state of preparedness the human heart is; we
do not know what providences of God have ploughed it, nor what thoughts
are sown in it, nor what strivings are being even now made by the
springing life that seeks the light. We generally give men credit, not
perhaps for less thought than they have, for that is scarcely possible,
but for less capacity of thought. The disciples were good men, but they
went into Sychar judging the Samaritans good enough to trade with, but
never dreaming of telling them the Messiah was outside their town. They
must have been ashamed to find how much more capable an apostle the
woman was than they. I think they would not wonder another time that
their Lord should condescend to talk with a woman. The simple,
unthinking, untroubled directness of a woman will often have a matter
finished while a man is meditating some ponderous and ingenious
contrivance for bringing it to pass. Let us not fall into the mistake of
the disciples, and judge men good enough to buy and sell with, but quite
alien to the matters of the Kingdom.

"There is a day in spring
When under all the earth the secret germs
Begin to stir and glow before they bud.
The wealth and festal pomps of midsummer
Lie in the heart of that inglorious hour
Which no man names with blessing, though its work
Is bless'd by all the world. Such days there are
In the slow story of the growth of souls."

Such days may be passing in those around us, though all unknown to us.
We can never tell how many months there are till harvest. We never know
who or what has been labouring before we appear on the sc