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 and boundless confidence, the Church, pointing to the Western plains, repeats to us all the divine challenge.  “Do not you say there are yet four months and then the harvest cometh?  Behold I say to you lift up your eyes and see the countries for they are white already to the harvest.” (Jo. iv, 35.)

Before parting with you, kind reader, may we make ours this pressing invitation of the Master.  Yes, the immense West is “white already to the harvest.”  There stand as immense fields of ripening wheat, the Catholic youth of Eastern Canada, the sturdy and thrifty Catholic settlers of the British Isles and continental Europe.  There the rising generation of Catholic children, like the tender green blades of the future harvest, is springing into manhood.  Staring us in the face, their eyes in our eyes, the children of foreign parentage wonder what account we will make of their faith, what protection we will offer it.  They are the new Canadians, the nation of to-morrow.