e sower who will win a
harvest--Labor and Patience. He must cultivate the soil, else only the
meager harvest can be his. The art of cultivation is the one so many
would-be harvesters fail to learn.

To realize what the art of cultivation can accomplish one needs to read
carefully the increase in the record of the producing power of certain
wheat fields in our country during the past four years. Courage comes
with the study of the reports of modern miracles accomplished through
the advice and instruction of the agricultural schools and colleges
which have escaped from the thraldom of the abstract. Every one should
look once into the faces of boys and girls of the rural schools who
having been instructed in the art of cultivation have practised it and
increased the value and quantity of the output on their fathers' farms,
ten-fold. It fills one with hope to look into the bright eager face of a
fourteen-year-old prize winner, holding side by side in his hand the
stalks of corn, one small and meager, the other rich and full, made so
by the art of cultivation which he has so patiently practised.

What the cultivation of the soil has accomplished in the agricultural
world it can accomplish in the teaching of religion. If young America is
irreligious today it is because we have sown the seed and left it to
itself. In the soil of young hearts are the elements which make a sane,
full output of religious life possible--but cultivation is _necessary_
and, if we are to raise the type of our girlhood, _imperative_. We shall
be compelled to resist the temptation to give up because the seed does
not grow faster.

Those entrusted with the cultivation of this human soil into which the
seed has been dropped must know what that seed needs as it
develops--urging forward here, that through self-expression it may grow
strong, restraining there, that it may not spread itself out and through
over-expression become weak. Only loving personal knowledge of each
individual life will make possible this guidance and restraint. They
must know the environment in the midst of which the good seed is
striving to climb to fruition, else they cannot know just what to drop
into the soil to stimulate the seed in its fight for strength, nor how
to protect it from growths that threaten to choke it.

Those entrusted with the cultivation of this soil, if they are to be
successful, must learn to use the mighty stimulus to growth that comes
from simple friends