Attend well, Tornik, that you may well understand: the food and life of all the people of this world is the fruit of husbandry. Our wide-spreading natural land, like a mother, nurses us with her plant-yields of many kinds. Though the earth brings forth fruit of herself, as Jesus said,1 yet man must be the earth's fellow-laborer. The Lord God, by His bountiful work of creation, has prepared beforehand seeds of every kind; but man too has his great share of the labor: he must plow, sow, water, and see to the needful tending, so that he may reap, thresh, and gather into the granary — and thereafter enjoy the fruit of his labor. Thus, Tornik, with Mother Earth's self-given fruitfulness man's labor also must be joined. But you must know this besides: the earth's self-yielding and our labor can yet bring forth nothing, unless the bountiful will of the heavenly Father makes the sun rise over this world with its all-pervading light, and gives command to the clouds to rain upon the mountains, the plains, and the fields we have sown. You will see it sometimes — for we are wont to remember God most in our distress — how the people, with fervent and broken hearts, lift a cry toward heaven: God, give rain, rain! And the compassionate God, hearing the people's voice, pours from heaven's clouds the rain of His good will.
Do you take my meaning, Tornik? Heaven's sun and rain, the earth's self-yielding, and our labor, joining together, prepare the sustenance of life for the people of the whole world; and men enjoy it and are filled, some more, some less. The bread of the wheat we work; the flesh of the beasts we raise, the fresh butter, the ghee, and the cheese; the greens we tend; the honey of our hives; the grapes and the wine of the vineyards we plant; the excellent fruits we bring on from our hand-set saplings — they go up even to the king's table and adorn it with royal abundance; the rulers of the world's states and all the city-dwelling peoples enjoy them, each according to his degree and his means; and surely we too, in our measure, enjoy the fruit of the labor of our sweat.
Leave aside bread, and all else that the village people prepare for men's life and sustenance — that is not all; see how that same laboring people prepares the covering of man's nakedness, which the Lord God covered but once, with the fig leaf.2 Now let me number for you, Tornik, all the first stuffs which the tiller of the earth raises by his working and delivers over to the craftsman. We work the cotton and give it to the weaver, and he makes shirts for the people; and the craftsman garment-maker — how many kinds of flower-patterned calicoes he devises, with which the merchants' houses of the world and the shops of the bazaars are filled!
We plant the mulberry, and we raise the silkworm's wondrous cocoon, which by the merchants' hands reaches the hand of the silk-weaving craftsman; and he makes marvelous stuffs, in which the queens of this world and the women of the palaces preen themselves like peacocks. In old times those garments of luxury were an honor set apart for royal houses and princesses alone; but now the families of the common people also deck themselves in the same purple-gleaming robes.
Leaving the culture of the silkworm — who is it, then, that works the precious flax, from whose seed we press the oil to light our lamps, and sometimes make pilaf with the oil, which is far more wholesome than the oil of the olive? And from the flax's stalk the craftsman's hand makes the choicest of linens, whiter than snow, of which one shirt's-length is worth as much as a gold piece. But besides linen and cotton and silk there are still other plant-stuffs, from which the ingenious craftsman prepares — not for clothing only, but for all the world's writers, and for printing — paper in boundless quantity; not to speak of the grasses: even from the shavings of wood, which we count worthless and burn, paper is made.
Let us leave, Tornik, the things that belong to food and clothing, which are made ready by the village people's labor. Who is it, then, that plants the trees of the forest, and makes ready the timbers, past number and past count, for the dwellings of the world's people — to say nothing of the dry land, the timbers too of the ships that go upon the sea? Though in the beginning the Lord God had adorned the mountains and plains of this our world with self-sown forests, yet the earth's inhabitants, cutting them, have by now used up those everlasting forests of the old ages. Thereupon began the culture of forestry, which is an important branch of agriculture. And do you know how many new forests they now raise, planting and tending? Would that you had the fortune, Tornik, to go to Europe and see those beautiful cedars, and the other forests of every sort, each set apart, old-planted and new-planted, which the forest-keeping laborer tends and guards: he knows how to cut the old in due order, to set the young sapling in its place, or to sow the forest seed; and to tend it with such skill that in a few years those little seeds become great trees and cover the face of the ground — under whose shade the toiling laborer rests and draws his sweet untroubled sleep, while the forest's sweet-voiced nightingales sing a lullaby over the weary workman.
By saying only this much, quick-learning Tornik, I think you have well understood how great and how needful are the fruits of husbandry, which the laboring people furnishes to the city people of this world. And the city people, receiving all that enjoyment, in its turn provides for the most pressing needs of the village people; whereby a harmonious exchange comes about on both sides, and thereby the peoples of this world, set apart one from another, order their lives well — the villager in the village, the townsman in the city.