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Perhaps you save up your pennies, as I did long ago, until you have enough
to buy a packet of flowerseeds. As you unfold the packet, and see the
pictures of the flowers that are to be, on the little papers inside--the
scarlet poppy, the yellow marigold, the blue lupin, and the many-coloured
sweet peas--you almost feel as if you already saw these bright flowers
blooming in your garden. But open the little parcels one after the other,
and what do you find? Nothing bright or sweet or beautiful; only little
brown seeds, tiny as grains of March dust, or so light and feathery that
your breath would blow them away.
Do you then throw them into the fire, and say they are no good? Not so. You
take the greatest care of these little grains. You prepare the earth, and
make a soft bed for them, then cover them up, carefully marking the spot
with the name of the flower whose seed you have sown there. You water that
bare place, and wait to see green leaves push themselves up through the
dark soil; for well you know that within each tiny brown seed the flower
that is to be, lies hidden.
To see your seed grow, and your plant live and bloom, does not surprise you
at all. But how astonished you would be if, in the spot where you had sown
white candytuft, you were to find yellow tulips!
Such a thing can never be; for the mother-plant from which the seed came
must always produce plants of its own kind. You never saw a bean grow into
a cherry-tree, or a pink change into a rose, did you? God gives the seed a
body "as it hath pleased Him, and to every seed its own body.
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