James 3:18

And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace It is commonly said that "the fruit of righteousness" means "the fruit which is righteousness." The analogy of a like structure, however, in Luke 3:8 ("worthy fruits of repentance"), Ephesians 5:9 ("the fruit of the Spirit"), and other passages, is in favour of taking it as the fruit which righteousness produces. Every good deed is a fruit produced by the good seed sown in the good soil, and not choked by thorns. And every such deed is, in its turn, as the seed of a future fruit like in kind. It is "sown in peace" (we must remember all the fulness of meaning which the Hebrew mind attached to peace as the highest form of blessedness) either "by" or "for" (the former is, perhaps, meant, but the phrase may have been used to include both) those that make peace. We cannot fail to connect these words with the beatitude on the peace-makers in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:9). We can as little fail to note the resemblance between this portraiture of the true wisdom and the picture which St Paul draws in 1 Corinthians 13 of the excellence of Charity or Love. Differing, as the two teachers did, in many ways, in their modes of thought and language, one fastening on the more practical, the other on the more spiritual, aspects of the Truth, there was an essential agreement in their standard of the highest form of the Christian character. A comparison of the two helps us to understand how the one teacher held out the right hand of fellowship to the other (Galatians 2:9), and to hope for a like accord now among men who seem to differ in their conception of Christian Truth, if only they agree in their ultimate aim and standard, and feel, in the depth of their being, that Love is Wisdom, and that Wisdom is Love.