You will find three lessons sowing in Hosea. In the sth chapter he makes it provide a memorable watchword of revolution. "They have sown the wind _and they shall reap the whirlwind:" like produces like but in a changed form and on a vaster scale. At the end of the second chapter it yields a beautiful definition of religion—the kind of religion Hosea was pleading for, a vital union and fruitful cooperation between God and man. In the verse before us Hosea finds in the parable of sowing a challenge to the Church "Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; brea up your fallow ground, for if is time to seek the Lord "ill He rain righteousness upon vou" It is not hard to disengage three truths here (1) in God is the power of the (2) in Man is the possibility harvest and (3) the risk of barrenness. Let us take them in turn.
But this truth brings a challenge as well as a gospel, for it calls for cooperation on our part, if summer is to result in harvest.
This brings us to the question of our treatment of the soil. Hosea pictures the field over which the power of Summer broods as of two kinds, furrow and fallow. The furrow is tle soil that is turned over-by the ploughshare, turned towards the influences of the sky and ready for the sower. The fallow is the soil that has been undisturbed, neglected, overgrown. In Greece as Xenophon tells us, the problem of the soil was met by rotation of crops, but in Israel it was made to enjoy its Sabbaths, ie. remain unworked, Lie fallow. Now these two kinds of land represent two kinds of disposition in mankind, one making for reception, the other for rejection of that which comes from God.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.