The land is bound to grow its crop. The more the land has been enriched, the greater will be that crop, of useful grain or rank weeds. And the only way to keep the weeds from gaining the victory is by sowing good seed and pulling the weeds. A friend in Detroit once called my attention to the luxuriant weeds in a fenced lot we were walking by. In the vacant lot close by, the weeds were stunted. In the fenced lot a market gardener once lived. He had enriched the soil.

Our country is to have a rank growth of something. Rich in the blood of many nationalities, with freedom well-nigh to license, what will the harvest be if left without spiritual husbandry? Dr. Mulhall\'s "Dictionary of Statistics"[271] tells us how the crop looks now. The ratio of murders to each million inhabitants has stood as follows in the countries named: England, 711; Ireland, 883; France, 796; Germany, 837; and the United States, 2,460. Only Italy and Spain exceed us. Do we wonder why the foreigner is worse here than at home? The answer is easy. He has left the restraints of a watchful government; our liberty is for him license. On the frontier he is exposed to the worst influences, and for years has no religious instruction nor even example. Is it strange that death reaps such a harvest? The sowers go forth to sow. In due time that seed ripens to the harvest.

The Police Gazette is sowing dragon\'s teeth most diligently. The log shanties of the lumbermen are often papered with them. Nice primers these for "young America"! Sober Maine sends streams of polluted literature out here, with cheap chromo attachments, and the Sunday-school lesson in them for an opiate.[272] The infidel lecturer is sowing his seed on the fruitful soil of runaway guilt. The callow scientist is dropping seed long since dropped in another way by real scientists. The whole country is sown with newspapers of all grades, and the crop is coming up. What shall the harvest be?

"Be not deceived, whatsoever a nation soweth, that shall it also reap."

In a very large number of new settlements all the above agencies are in active operation before the missionary arrives; and, oh, what a field he finds! The farmer on the new farm cannot use the drill and improved implements for the uneven places and stumps, but must needs sow by hand, and sometimes between the log piles, a little here and a little there, and then, between times, spend his strength underbrushing.

So the missionary starts without a church building, choir, organ, or even a membership, his pulpit a box in a vacant store, or in a schoolhouse or railway[273] depot, or some rude log house of the settler; his audience is gathered from the four corners of the earth—representatives of a dozen sects, backsliders in abundance, and those who have run away from the light of civilized life. Many among the latter have broken their marriage vows, and are now living in unlawful wedlock.

I remember once preaching on this evil to an audience of less than twenty, and was surprised at the close of the meeting to hear a woman............