The spiritual aids will be the prayers, Masses, sacrifices of all kind offered for our Home Missions.  Nothing strengthens faith and stimulates genuine piety, as prayers and sacrifices for the great cause of our missions.  They are so disinterested, they reveal true love for our Blessed Lord.

Only a chosen few are called to go into the field at home and afar and reap the ripening harvest.  But all are commanded by the Master to pray the Father for harvesters.  This sublime apostleship of prayer is the privilege and duty of every Christian.  Is there anything more instructive and more pathetic than the invitation of the Saviour to co-operate with Him in this great work of the Redemption.  “And seeing the multitudes he had compassion on them:  because they were distressed and lying like sheep that have no shepherd.  Then He said to His disciples:  the harvest indeed is great but the labourers are few.  Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest that he send labourers into the harvest.” (Math.  IX, 36, 37, 38.)

The Divine Master cannot but hear the prayer asking Him to send “labourers to the ripening harvest.”  And could we give better proof of devotion to Church and Country?

Great is the seriousness of the present hour, tremendous the task that confronts us after the war.  Never has any generation in history been so freighted with the responsibilities of the future as ours is, marching home from the battlefields of Europe.  We are living in stirring and changeful times.  Nowhere in the Dominion of Canada will the period of reconstruction have more far-reaching effects than in the West.  The after-war problems will meet there with rapid and very often radical solutions.  To understand this issue that faces our country, to grasp it in all its breadth and fulness, should we not broaden our vision, readjust it, we would say, to the new scale of changing conditions?  Only then will we be able to marshal our forces and throw the weight of Catholic principles into the solving of the social, economic and religious problems of the hour.  “The Church cannot remain an isolated factor in the nation.  The Catholic Church possesses spiritual and moral resources which are at the command of the nation in every great crisis.  The message to the nation to forget local boundaries and provincialism is a message likewise to the Catholic Church.  Parochial, diocesan and provincial limits must be forgotten in the face of the greater tasks which burden our collective religious resources.” (Card.  Gibbons.) Let us give to the people that broad, Catholic vision of our present duty to our country and to our Church.  The broader the outlook, the deeper the insight.  The measure of their vision will be the measure of their action.  No leader can meet with success without a certain receptivity to work upon.  This receptivity is formed by spreading ideas, by an educational propaganda.

It may take time before the vision struggles into consciousness and wins its way to the dominance of the mind.  What we need is a systematized, continuous effort that will gradually crystalize that vision into a definite workable project.  A flourish of trumpets and blaze of Catholic zeal, as we are accustomed to witness on the occasion of some special sermon and appeal by a missionary, will only prompt an act of passing generosity.