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 friendship.  Seed which can come to fruition under no other conditions springs into vigorous life under the power of warm friendship.  Many a seed which might have developed and borne rich fruit has shriveled and dried in the chill of unfriendliness and misunderstanding.  These cultivators of the heart soil must learn very quickly the value of sunshine.  Young life needs the rain and has it, but young life loves the sunshine, it blossoms in the presence of hope and expectation, it droops in the atmosphere of distrust.

If one obeys the law in the sowing of the seed and follows the direction in its nurturing, the Lord of all harvests will himself give the increase.

  “God’s Word should be sown in the heart like seed;
  Then men’s hands must tend it, their lives defend it,
  Till it bursts into flower as a deathless deed.”