What are the conditions of the Church in these new and promising Provinces?  It is not the time, nor is it the place to discuss errors or absence of policy that have crippled the Church’s work and growth in that period of rapid transformation.  We take facts as they are now.  The Church in Western Canada to hold its ground, to extend its work and develop its institutions, has an absolute need of the help of the East.  The barrier of immense distances to which are added, for long months, unfavorable climatic conditions; diversity of nationality, variety of racial ideals, differences of language, customs and traditions; absence of Catholic traditions and a prevailing atmosphere of unbelief and irreligion; such are, in a few words, the tremendous obstacles against which the Western Church in its infancy has to contend.

This vision of distress, the Extension wishes to place before every Catholic in Canada; this call for help, it wishes him to hear.

But particularly the future of the Church in these Provinces forms the subject of the Extension’s preoccupations.  We all realize the vast possibilities of our Western Provinces, and the important part they must of necessity play in the future affairs of our Dominion.  The Church’s influence then will be what we make it by our efforts now, and its progress will be in exact proportion to the amount of our foresight.

This responsibility of the present and the future, the Church Extension preaches to all in season and out of season.  Like the beacon by the sea, it is ever turning its revolving lights over the immense uncharted ocean of our Western missions and hopes that with time, every Catholic in Canada will take his course on them.  For, let us not forget it, if we do not take care of our mission districts, others will, and that to the detriment and loss of the Church.—­Fas est ab hoste doceri!  It is permissible, says the proverb, to receive a lesson from an enemy.  Only those who have worked out West on the missions know to what extent unscrupulous and most aggressive proselytizers are always on the ground, ever at work among our people.  They are digging broad and deep trenches around the settlements of our Catholic foreigners, particularly Ruthenians, draining to their profit the dormant energies of the new Canadian.  The invasion is slow but sure, the leakage, great and continual.  This lesson that comes from the tremendous activities of the various Protestant denominations should strike home more forcibly.  The more stinging the lash, the more sudden the rebound.