Impressions, Transient – Charles Spurgeon

WHEN I hear it said of such-and-such preachers that they have many converts for a time, but that few of these can be found after a month or two, I am grieved that there should be so much truth in the statement, but I am not at all surprised; for you shall go into your garden, and you shall see tens of thousands of buds upon the trees in the month of April, and yet, in the autumn, you shall not find more than one apple for every thousand blossoms. This being the case, is the gardener disappointed? Does he not count the one apple a good percentage on the amount of flower? Suppose there be but one apple—perhaps there had not been that one if there had not been the thousand blooms. No one expects every bloom to become a fruit, and we cannot expect every one who is impressed under our ministry to become really a living child of God.