have they got to show you?  One cries, ‘Come here and see my barn,’ another cries, ’Come here and see my museum;’ the other says, ‘Let me read you my poem.’  That is a picture of the way in which a generation, or the race, takes the great earth and makes it different things to all its children.  With what measure we mete to it, it measures to us again.  This is the rebound of the hard earth—­sensitive and soft, although we call it hard, and feeling with an instant keen discrimination the different touch of each different human nature which is laid upon it.  Reaction is equal to action.”—­Phillips Brooks.

CHAPTER XII.

INFLUENCE, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF REACTION IN LIFE AND CHARACTER.

To the mystery of life and death must be added the mystery of growth.  When Demosthenes exclaimed:  “Yesterday I was not here; I shall not be here to-morrow; to-day I am here,” he suggested a hard problem.  Having solved the enigma, what went before life, and answered that mystery, what follows after death, there still remains this question:  “How can a babe in twenty years take on the proportions of the great orator and reformer?” Rocks do not grow, nor diamonds, nor dirt, but a shrunken bulb does become a lily, and a tiny seed a mustard tree.  In vain does the scientist struggle with this problem—­how an acorn can expand into an oak; how in a single summer a grain of corn can ripen a thousand grains, like that from which the cornstalk sprang.

Men are indeed familiar with the bursting of buds, the cracking of eggs and the growth of children; yet familiarity robs these facts of no whit of their mystery.  No jeweler ever goes into the field with a basket of watches to plant them in rows, expecting when autumn hath come to pick two or three wagon-loads of stem-winders from iron branches; yet, were this possible, it would be no more strange than that in the autumn the husbandman should stand under the branches to fill his basket with peaches or bunches of figs.  For wise men it is no more difficult to think of a growing engine than of a growing oak.  What if to-morrow an engineer should plant a cannon ball.  Having watered it well and kept the ground loose through hoe or spade, suppose that when a few weeks have passed the outline of a smokestack should push through the soil, to be followed a little later by a rudimentary steam whistle, the outlines of a boiler, and, rising through the sod, rude drive-wheels, piston-rods and cylinders, until after six months the great engine should stand forth in full completion.  This phenomenon would be no more wonderful than that which actually goes on before man’s blind eyes, when a tiny seed enlarges into the big tree of California and constructs a vegetable engine that lifts thousands of hogsheads of water up to the topmost boughs without any rattle of chains or the din of machinery.