Mullein

     This exotic looking plant with its big fuzzy leaves will poke up here and there

and let us know he is not to be forgotten.  The center stem will get to be quite tall and thick with little yellow flowers around the top section.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  



"The earth is covered with beauty everywhere, and is teeming with various plants in their early stages of growth. With them comes a new world of animated nature, in the form of insects, whose name is legion. Very few plants escape them. The mullein, chickory, dock and murdock, are, perhaps exceptions. The more tender and delicate a plant, the better they like it, and that is very sensible in them. Scarcely a plant among all our farm crops or the garden vegetables, escapes their ravages. They are everywhere. They will cut off your thrifty hills of beautiful squash plants in a single day and night, and the row of beautiful egg plants, that were tipped with dew and shone so brightly in yesterday's morning sun, are utterly worthless today, drooping, mutilated, dying! Birds, squirrels, and mice destroy the corn; caterpillars and canker worms destroy the foliage of the fruit trees; and the apple-worm, moth and curculio either drop an egg upon the fruit or puncture it, or seal over an egg, and thus introduce an enemy into the very citadel of life, which preys upon its vitals until death ensues. All the fruits, rains and grasses have their enemies, and nothing but vigilance will save the plants of the cultivator from common destruction.  

What were these creatures made for? is a question sometimes asked by persons, when the long and careful labor of their hands is cut off in a single day! We an only reply, that they were created and placed in our midst by the same wise and beneficent Being that created us, and who has made it our duty to cultivate and subdue the earth, and make it teem with fertility. If we cannot fathom the mysteries of a single blade of grass, how can we expect to penetrate his designs in the multiplication of so many creatures that destroy the labor of our hands. The thought that he created them--and undoubtedly for wise purposes--should hush very murmur, and lead us to accept what he has given in grateful trust and confiding love." 




October 10, 1865 

UrSe, ARSH 147 





 


  "The parable of the mustard seed. Matt. xiii. 31, 32: "Another parable put he forth unto them,

saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field: which indeed is the least of all seeds; but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof." The usual construction of this parable, is, that the seed represents the smallness of the church in its beginning, consisting only of the twelve apostles of Christ sent out to evangelize the world; that this little beginning is to eventuate in the universal triumph of the church of Christ, and the conversion of the world and introduction of millennial glory. {1842 JoL, PREX1 29.2} 

But is not the meaning obviously this, that Christ is the mustard seed; that in his death he was planted, and in his resurrection he germinated into new life; and that every soul saved through his death and resurrection is an additional branch to the tree? The branch of the mustard tree no more literally lives and flourishes and bears fruit by its union with the stock and root, and the sap it receives from that root, than the Christian has spiritual and eternal life from the indwelling of that quickening spirit which raised up Christ from the dead. It is to the church the sap of life. The indwelling of the quickening spirit of Christ in the believer is the mystery of godliness. It is religion; so that each believer can say, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life that I now live in the flesh is by the faith of the Son of God. It is the resurrection, power and eternal life. The blood of Adam, which all men derive by natural generation, does not give them second life, or raise them from the

dead to eternal life! But the spirit of him that raised up Christ from the dead, if it dwell in us, will quicken our mortal bodies also. This being the case, it will readily be perceived that the perfection of the tree cannot consist in its universal triumph, all over the world in any one age of probationary time. For while there is yet one more member to be added to the tree, or while death reigns in the world, the tree must of necessity be in a state of imperfection and immaturity. But in the dispensation of the fulness of the times he shall "gather together in one, all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth, even in him." Eph. i. 10. Then there will be a perfection of the tree, and each branch will by in its place, mature and perfect. It cannot be before." 




1842 JoL, PREX1 30