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.
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