to a brighter day breaking on the horizon of time, a day tinted
with the rising sun of Christian doctrine. . . .

_Instaurare omnia in Christo_ . . . to re-establish all things in
Christ, is the only reconstruction that will last.

CHAPTER XVIII.

ULTIMA VERBA

The Canadian West offers to one who has never gone beyond the Great
Lakes but a misty vision of boundless prairies that stretch over three
immense Provinces and lose themselves in the foothills of the
snow-capped Rockies. Conflicting are the impressions that assail the
traveller's mind, various the feelings that crowd around his heart when
leaving behind him the East, he faces, for the first time, the "great
lone land" of the West. From the immensities of the fertile prairie
comes to him an invigorating air of optimism which fires him with
enthusiasm and confidence in the possibilities of the country and gives
him the assurance of its future. From the vast horizon that melts away
into the distant blue skies "he seems to hear the footsteps of Freedom
treading towards him." This mysterious attractiveness of the boundless
desert that the plough has just turned into restful and fertile meadows
has at all times a peculiar fascination. But it is at harvest season
that our glorious West it at its best. Then under the deep blue
firmament, in the glorious sunlight and exhilarating atmosphere of the
rolling prairie one can hear, as it were, "the song of the land." With
the hum of the binder, it comes to him froth the long rows of golden
sheaves, it rises from the fields where yet waves the ripening harvest.

Nature indeed is then most beautiful in the West. But for the
Christian soul to whom Faith "is the evidence of things unseen and the
substances of things we hope for," the visible harvest leads to the
thought of that spiritual harvest to which the Master so often points
in the Gospel. Under all the feverish activities which characterize
our Western communities lie deep in the consciences of men those unseen
realities, those spiritual values and eternal issues which constitute
the religious world. In the mysterious furrows of the human heart is
ripening the harvest of eternity.

The Church of God ever stands as Christ by the mysterious well of
Jacob, at the intersection of the highways of History. Now, as in the
days of the Saviour, winter has set in; a cold blast of indifference
and unbelief sweeps over the land. Yet with the Master's vision an