The land is bound to grow its crop. The more the land has been enriched, the greater will be that crop, of useful grain or rank weeds. And the only way to keep the weeds from gaining the victory is by sowing good seed and pulling the weeds. A friend in Detroit once called my attention to the luxuriant weeds in a fenced lot we were walking by. In the vacant lot close by, the weeds were stunted. In the fenced lot a market gardener once lived. He had enriched the soil.

Our country is to have a rank growth of something. Rich in the blood of many nationalities, with freedom well-nigh to license, what will the harvest be if left without spiritual husbandry? Dr. Mulhall's "Dictionary of Statistics" tells us how the crop looks now. The ratio of murders to each million inhabitants has stood as follows in the countries named: England, 711; Ireland, 883; France, 796; Germany, 837; and the United States, 2,460. Only Italy and Spain exceed us. Do we wonder why the foreigner is worse here than at home? The answer is easy. He has left the restraints of a watchful government; our liberty is for him license. On the frontier he is exposed to the worst influences, and for years has no religious instruction nor even example. Is it strange that death reaps such a harvest? The sowers go forth to sow. In due time that seed ripens to the harvest.

The Police Gazette is sowing dragon's teeth most diligently. The log shanties of the lumbermen are often papered with them. Nice primers these for "young America"! Sober Maine sends streams of polluted literature out here, with cheap chromo attachments, and the Sunday-school lesson in them for an opiate. The infidel lecturer is sowing his seed on the fruitful soil of runaway guilt. The callow scientist is dropping seed long since dropped in another way by real scientists. The whole country is sown with newspapers of all grades, and the crop is coming up. What shall the harvest be?

"Be not deceived, whatsoever a nation soweth, that shall it also reap."

In a very large number of new settlements all the above agencies are in active operation before the missionary arrives; and, oh, what a field he finds! The farmer on the new farm cannot use the drill and improved implements for the uneven places and stumps, but must needs sow by hand, and sometimes between the log piles, a little here and a little there, and then, between times, spend his strength underbrushing.

So the missionary starts without a church building, choir, organ, or even a membership, his pulpit a box in a vacant store, or in a schoolhouse or railway depot, or some rude log house of the settler; his audience is gathered from the four corners of the earth—representatives of a dozen sects, backsliders in abundance, and those who have run away from the light of civilized life. Many among the latter have broken their marriage vows, and are now living in unlawful wedlock.

I remember once preaching on this evil to an audience of less than twenty, and was surprised at the close of the meeting to hear a woman say, "Did you know you gave Mrs. —— an awful crack on the knuckles to-day?"

I said, "No!"

"Well, ye did, ye know."

Mentioning the circumstance with surprise to another, I received for an answer, "Well, she needn't say nothin'; she's in the same boat herself!"

Depressed in spirits, I told my troubles to a good lady who I knew was "one of the salt of the earth," and noticing a smile come over her face, I asked her what she was smiling at. She replied, "The third was as bad as the other two!"

Just here is one of the greatest hindrances the missionary has to contend with. I am not sure but it rivals the saloon. One missionary I visited told me that in one little hamlet, on his field, there was not a single family living in lawful wedlock. It is next to impossible to do anything with the parents in such cases. But there is one bright side to this dark picture. Almost without exception, they like to have their children attend the Sabbath-school. Here is prolific soil in which to sow good seed, and we cannot commence too soon.

We are living in rushing times. I have just read in a paper that one town in Ontonagon County, one year and a half old, has three thousand inhabitants, forty-five saloons, twelve hotels, two papers, forty-eight stores, two opera houses, and an electric plant! With villages springing up in every county, and the immense onflowing tide from foreign shores, the lone missionary on the frontier ofttimes would despair, but for the promise of the Master, the miracles of the past, and the joy of hope's bright harvest in the future. And so, "going forth weeping, bearing precious seed," he sows beside all waters, with full expectations that "He shall come again rejoicing, bringing His sheaves with Him."

That the reader may have an idea of the vastness of the field, and the distances between the workers, I will jot down a few facts. In 1887 there were thirty Congregational churches in the three conferences of Grand Traverse, Cheboygan, and Chippewa and Mackinac. These conferences had an average width of sixty miles, and stretch from Sherman, in the south of Grand Traverse Conference, for a hundred and fifty-eight miles, as the bird flies, to Sugar Island, in the north of Chippewa and Mackinac Conference.

No one can say we were crowded. My nearest neighbor was sixteen miles away, the next thirty, and the next forty; and, unless a change has come very lately, this is the only self-supporting church in the three conferences—and that because it was settled thirty years prior to many of the other churches. Ten years ago there were hundreds of miles of unbroken forests where to-day are crowded summer resorts and busy villages, filled with representatives of the most diverse nationalities under the sun. I have preached to a good-sized audience with not a single person in it that was born in the United States. And the cry is, Still they come. Now send on your harvesters!