[Illustration:  Fig. 26]

“Let us see how very much like this are our very own lives.  We do not have a springtime and a summer and an autumn and a winter of life every year.  No, we have but one of each during our lives, if we reach old age.  Springtime is our childhood, summer is our young manhood and young womanhood, autumn is our middle age and winter comes when the hair is white and the footsteps faltering.  The first part of a full life is the seedtime, and the latter half is the harvest-time.  Some of us may think that we may, while we are young, form habits that are bad and expect to get rid of them before the harvest-time.  Still others of us do not seem to find out very early in life that there is a seedtime and a harvest-time, and we realize it only after we have reached the harvest period, and then we cannot change the character of the seed we have to reap.

“But that which is true of the one who has sown the seeds of wrong in his younger years is just as true of him who has sown good seeds in his childhood and youth.  There is no more comforting thought than that which comes with the assurance that God will send the rich harvest if we sow early in life the seeds of purity of living and the seeds of loving kindness.

“The wrong thoughts which try to crowd into our childhood and youth are like the weeds which threaten to destroy the good grain, and sometimes succeed.  Let us watch them carefully and uproot them.

“The Christian welcomes the thought that there is to be a harvest-time.  The sinner hates the thought; he would that his entire life be a seedtime; but it cannot be.  The law of seedtime in life is just as firmly fixed as are the seedtime and harvest of nature.  Let us learn the lesson.  It means life or death to you and to me.”

THE TWO FLAGS
    —­Rally Day
    —­War

Both of Them Inspire Us to the Best Living—­An Illustration with
Music.

THE LESSON—­That the same spirit which brings success in war must animate the fighters against evil.

Rally Day, which is observed at the opening of the autumn activities of most schools, has become one of the greatest days of the Sunday School year.  It should be made a glad occasion of reunion and resolution.  This talk is unique, in that it combines music with the speaking and the drawing.

The Talk.

“It was fifty years ago, boys and girls, that the terrible war between the North and the South was in progress.  On both sides the soldiers were bravely loyal to their cause, for the reason that each great army believed it was right; each side rallied round its flag—­and loyalty was the thing most necessary.  In most conflicts, as in the case of one nation fighting with another, it is only necessary to bring a war to a point where the weaker is convinced of the superior strength of its enemy.  Then the war ends and the weaker is still a nation and has lost only that which was destroyed during the course of