THE HARVEST OF SOULS
In the preceding pages we have seen briefly the nature and obligation of a vocation, and glanced at a few of its privileges and advantages. Yet some, even among Catholics, may be found to ask what need is there for so many priests and nuns?
Long ago, while yet the Savior trod this earth, we read that once He sat by the well-side, weary from His journeying. As He paused to rest, His gaze fell upon the waving cornfields stretching far out of sight, the ears bending under their load of countless, tiny seeds, each bearing its germ of life. To the eyes of His soul, devoured with a burning zeal, it was an image of the vast multitude of human beings He had come to save, of the souls of those with whom He lived and the myriads who would follow Him. Silently He looked at the solitary husbandman, sickle in hand, slowly gathering the sheaves of golden corn, then sadly turning to the disciples, He said, with a hidden meaning in His words: “The harvest indeed is great, but the labourers are few. Pray ye, therefore, the Lord of the harvest that He send labourers into His harvest.”
The words died away, but their echo has never ceased to sound. “The harvest is great, but the labourers are few.” Turn where we will, in no matter what part of the globe, and there we shall see still the harvest of souls, waiting to be garnered into the Master’s granaries.
“Send me half a million priests,” writes a Jesuit missioner from India, “and I promise to find them abundant work at once.”
“For the love of God, come out to us. I have come across millions of men here in Africa who need but to hear Our Lord’s words and deeds to become so many good and happy Christians.”
Another, as he gazes at the teeming Chinese population around him, exclaims: “The ten thousand catechumens of my district would be a hundred thousand tomorrow if there were priests and nuns enough to instruct and receive them.”
“The harvest indeed is great” – a total Pagan population in the world of 995,000,000 (nine-hundred and ninety-five million) [in 1910 – ed.], or eight out of every thirteen of the human race, who have never heard the Name of God, each with an immortal soul looking for salvation. America, on the authority of Archbishop Ireland, with its forty thousand converts in one year; England, registering, at the last census, twenty million of her people as having “no religion”, while from every town and village of our own land comes the cry for more Brothers, Priests and Nuns to labor in the fields “white with the harvest.”
“Pray ye, therefore,” still pleads the Saviour from the tabernacle, as He gazes on the vast work yet to be done, “pray ye the Lord that He send labourers, many and zealous, into His harvest.”
