On Planting the Seed Mark 4:3

Ecce exiit seminans ad seminandum...

"'The main undertaking of a Christian Church' is not according to the notion of the day "to make men good members of society, honest, upright, industrious and well-conducted,' but to make saints, to form those rare, hidden souls who are the heirs of the world to come. And it does this 'not as a system, nor by books, nor by argument, nor by temporal power,' but by the handing on of the seed of life from man to man and from age to age."

The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, Christopher Dawson, Sheed and Ward: London, 1945, 40.

Cf. Newman

N.B. Saint Thomas Aquinas in his Philosophical Summa (Summa Contra Gentiles) says that the revealed truths of God which might be known by nature should be also handed down because there are three "inconveniences" in leaving these truths simply to the inquiring mind.

1. Those who come to a mere "natural" knowledge of God are few (because of lack of proper disposition, lack of leisure to pursue it, and laziness),
2. Only after a long time and much toil would those few come to the knowledge of those truths.
3. Because the rational investigations of men are also mostly mixed with falsities because of the weakness of our intellect in judging and because of the mixture with fantasies.

Summa Contra Gentiles Liber I, Cap. IV Quod veritas divinorum ad quam naturalis ratio pertingitconvenienter hominibus credenda proponitur

That is why Christ, the Sower, sows the seed and the Saints pass it on yielding some thirty, some sixty and some a hundred-fold!

The Word must be received and the Word must be passed down.