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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a50cad1 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #74857 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74857) diff --git a/old/74857-0.txt b/old/74857-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index fb33474..0000000 --- a/old/74857-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2200 +0,0 @@ - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74857 *** - - - - - -EMPTY CHURCHES - - - - -_By the Same Author_ - - - RURAL LIFE - RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS - - - - - EMPTY CHURCHES - - _THE RURAL-URBAN DILEMMA_ - - BY - - CHARLES JOSIAH GALPIN - - IN CHARGE OF THE DIVISION OF FARM POPULATION AND RURAL LIFE, - BUREAU OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, - UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. - - [Illustration] - - THE CENTURY CO. - - _New York & London_ - - - - - COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY - THE CENTURY CO. - - PRINTED IN U. S. A. - - - - - _In Memory of_ - MY FATHER AND MOTHER - _Who Spent Their Lives - In Loving Ministration in - Country Parishes_ - - - - -PREFACE - - -This little book invites you to read it at a single sitting. If read -later, a section at a time, in the light of the whole story, it will -give you a better account of itself. It is, I frankly acknowledge, -written out of emotion. It does not therefore, I fear, contain all the -words it implies--half the time falling into symbols and incidents to -force a meaning; half the time taking for granted that you do not care -to open or close every side gate along the way. - -The view of a layman, as this easily betrays itself to be, may prove -something of a shock to the rank and file of the clergy; but it will -serve, at least, to show that a section of laymen take religion more -seriously after all than they do economics, which forms their daily -adventure. Deep in our hearts, many of us know that business is the -great masculine sport of the age; and in comparison, the rôle of -the priest and pastor and the function of the church lie in the far -different realm of the heroic. If I seem in this essay to expect too -much of the church and too much of the preacher, my only apology is my -inability to read into the Four Gospels, that stand on my desk along -with the other tools of life and work, a philosophy of ease or of -complacent _laissez faire_. - -Although a confirmed lover of the country, the farm, the farmer and -his children, I am none the less a firm believer in the city--its -necessity, function, and destiny. Rural social welfare, as I see it, -is of utmost concern to the American city. This is why empty churches -along the countryside bring tragedy to city and country alike. This -is why ecclesiastical statesmen should go to the country and see -with their own eyes the havoc wrought upon the farmer’s family by -competitive religion among Protestants. - -And this is all the little book sets out to do--to take everybody to -the rural communities with wide-open eyes, to see the empty churches, -the children without God, the farm tenants without religion, the -parsons on the run for the city, and the beginnings of a new type of -rural church. - -I wish gratefully to acknowledge my indebtedness in this essay to -the staff of the Institute of Social and Religious Research, New -York City, upon whose authoritative statements I have much relied. -To the Curtis Publishing Company, Philadelphia, I desire to express -appreciation for their kindness in allowing me to reproduce here -materials which have appeared in “The Country Gentleman” during the -past year. - - C. J. GALPIN. - -March, 1925. - - - - -EMPTY CHURCHES - - - - -EMPTY CHURCHES - - - - -CHAPTER I - - -Recently, in a cross-roads country church, a minister of the Gospel, -underpaid, somewhat shabby, but eager and inspired, a man with a -message to give, stood before his congregation to present that message. -The flame of inspiration in his haggard young face flickered and died -as he looked down at the scanty congregation assembled before him to -hear the Word of God. At a glance he counted his handful of hearers. -Six. - -Through a window on one side of the little church, he could see -two other meeting-houses nestling in the curve of the road. Through -a window on the other side, he looked out at a third--four country -churches of four Christian denominations, almost identical in doctrine, -there within two stone’s-throws of one another. - -In three of these churches, including his own, he knew that the members -of the congregation might be counted upon the fingers of each pastor’s -two hands. The third church was closed that day; its flock could afford -only an occasional shepherd. - -In all four of those churches put together, not one fair-sized -congregation. In all four, not one pastor paid a salary large enough to -enable him to live on his income as a minister. In all four, men and -women taxed by religion beyond their ability to pay, yet unable to -support their church without outside aid. - - -_Jealous Denominations_ - -The young minister thought with pain of other sections of the country -through which he had traveled all day without seeing one church of any -denomination. He knew that an appalling percentage of farm communities -throughout the United States were entirely without churches, that -thousands of children, hundreds of their elders, had never listened to -the preaching of the Gospel. Yet here there were four churches at the -country cross-roads! - -That afternoon that young pastor wrote me a letter, wrote it in pain -and bitterness, but also in hope, in earnest desire to get the facts -before the nation: - - I saw in the paper the other day some mention of the chief rural - problems of the United States. May I call your attention to what - ministers in every country district regard as the stiffest problem - known to them and to their people? I refer to the problem of the - competitive religion, which affects not only pastors, but the entire - rural population, financially and spiritually, as well. The spiritual - rivalry set in motion by well-meaning home-mission boards and zealous - and jealous denominations is undermining the present and the future - welfare of the country church by ignoring the law of supply and - demand. If you can suggest any solution for this great problem, we - shall all be grateful. - -The case was in no way overstated by this young man. It is quite -true that there are few, if any, greater rural problems to-day than -the problem of the country church. It is undeniable that any honest -student of conditions in rural churches is confronted by staggering -and depressing statistics of overchurching and underattendance in some -sections, and of entire lack of attendance due to no churching at all -in others. - -Any map that showed the present rural church distribution of the United -States would be alarmingly reminiscent of a map of a country with large -areas of sterile famine-land. Nine persons out of every hundred in -rural America can not get to church because there is no church for them -to attend. This means that one seventh of all the rural communities of -the United States are entirely without Protestant churches. Pathetic -reports of the spiritual hunger of these land dwellers, living in a -Christian nation yet entirely shut off from Christian organization of -every kind, come from these communities. - -“No Protestant sermon has ever been preached in this locality,” is one -S O S sent out from a neighborhood of two hundred persons. “Not a child -in this district has ever attended Sunday-school,” deprecates another -community of approximately the same size. “This back-to-the-land -movement is fine, but why should loyal land dwellers have to condemn -their children to heathenry?” demands a distracted mother, in a remote -section of a Western State. “My children are growing up to be little -savages, as far as religion is concerned. They have never been inside a -church in their lives, and they don’t know what Sunday-school means.” - -Only one fifth of the rural population goes to church. - -Two fifths of the rural churches of the country are standing still or -losing ground. - -A quarter of all rural churches have no Sunday-school. - -One fifth of all rural churches are kept alive by home-mission aid. Of -these subsidized churches, a large number are in active competition -with churches of very similar doctrines. - -Seven out of every ten rural churches have only a fraction of a pastor -apiece. - -One third of all rural pastors receive so low a salary that they can -live only by working at some other occupation. - -One half of the rural churches of the country make an annual gain in -membership of as much as 10 per cent. - -In striking contrast to this churchless seventh of the country, are -the other six sevenths of rural America, many of them so overchurched -that they are crying out for relief from the burdens the churches -are laying upon them. There are ten times as many churches for every -thousand persons in some of the rural districts of the United States as -there are in New York City. Yet the percentage of attendance for every -thousand persons is slightly lower in these rural sections than it is -even in New York. Obviously, such a showing indicates a startling lack -of system in the distribution of rural churches, a woeful waste of the -religious potentialities of the country. - -Recently, a thorough survey of the rural church problem of the United -States was made for the first time in the history of the country, under -the direction of H. N. Morse and Edmund de S. Brunner, of the Institute -of Social and Religious Research, of New York. Some of the statistics -obtained by them are presented in the foregoing paragraphs. - -These facts, of course, offer a severe shock to those who have the -little white church of the countryside enshrined in memory along with -the little red school-house. We have fallen into the rut of taking it -for granted that our country churches not only keep pace with the best -religious life of the nation, but even stay a step or two in advance, -if not in theology, at least in interest in godly things and in piety. -We have come to think of country folk as the true church-goers of the -United States. To this sentimental point of view the facts stated offer -a true affront. - - -_Fewer Church-goers_ - -There are to-day approximately 101,000 rural churches in the United -States. A long time ago, when there were only a hundred such churches, -virtually the entire country population attended them. Some time -later, when there were a thousand churches of the kind, the average -of attendance was still exceedingly high. But of recent years the -percentage of rural church-goers has almost seemed to be in an inverse -ratio to the increase in churches. One out of every five is not a -showing that would have brought joy to the Puritan Fathers. What is the -reason for, this precarious situation in the rural churches of our -nation? Does it indicate that our country population is made up of a -less God-fearing folk than in former years? Does it demonstrate that -religion is less near to the hearts of the farm workers of the United -States than is true of its city dwellers? Or are these conditions the -logical outgrowth of a faulty system, the inevitable result of a church -distribution spiritually and economically unsound? - -More than one thing must be taken into consideration in any fair-minded -attempt to answer these questions. For instance, there is the fact that -during the past few years the number of tenant-farmers in the United -States has steadily increased, until now thirty eight per cent. of the -farms are tenant operated, most often on the basis of the one-year -lease. Any fact that tends to make the farmer more or less a transient -in the community naturally deters him from forming social or religious -relationships. - -Another reason frequently given for the low average of rural church -attendance is that so high a percentage--nearly 30 per cent.--of -the nation’s land workers are new Americans, the foreign-born, or -the children of the foreign-born. There are States, such as North -Dakota, where nearly every other farmer belongs to other than American -nativity, and whole sections of the country, as in the Middle West, -where foreigners are in excess of two fifths of the population. It is -estimated that at the present time more than fifty per cent. of these -people are unministered to by any church, Catholic or Protestant. Where -anything like an earnest and comprehensive attempt has been made by -churches to be of aid to them, as among the Mexicans of California, it -has been marked by astonishing results. Then why have the churches done -practically nothing for the foreign-born in rural sections? If the new -American can make good on the land, is it too much to ask the church to -make good with the new American? - -When I hear it said that no one is really interested in religion any -more, I cannot help thinking of an elderly Yankee farmer in the State -of Vermont, one J. C. Coolidge, father of our President, a man who -talks little about religion, but who for years has given virtually -all his leisure time, and a considerable slice of time not leisure at -all, to keeping alive the little white church near his farm at Plymouth -Notch. He hauls the wood from his own land that the congregation of -that little church may listen in comfort to the Word of God; he even, I -am told, does the janitor work himself, since the church has no funds -for a janitor. There is nothing especially remarkable in this. There -are thousands of such men all over our country, men to whom the church -is a thing to make sacrifices for, to keep alive at whatever cost. - -But in many districts it really seems that the fewer churches a county -is able to afford, the more it is apt to have. Out of the 211 churches -financially aided by home-missions societies in several counties where -intensive studies were made by the Institute of Social and Religious -Research, I am told that it was found that 149 of these churches could -have been dispensed with without essential loss to anyone. All but -thirty-four were competitive. - - -_Untrained Country Preachers_ - -Another grave charge is made against the church to-day in our country -districts. Farmers feel that they are neglected by the ministers of -their churches. - -It is also charged that many rural pastors lack both adequate training -and ability for their high calling. The real marvel is that so many of -these men are of the high type they are. - -It has to be admitted that there is ground for the charge of -incompetency among some of the rural pastors of the United States. -These men, it is true, are most inadequately prepared for their work. -How are they to afford more training for a calling which will never -pay them any returns upon it? That these men can develop into able -preachers has been demonstrated by those who have had the opportunity -to complete their courses in the summer school for ministers, -inaugurated, I believe, by the Presbyterian Board and now conducted by -several denominations. But most of them do not have this chance. - -It is competitive religion that is largely responsible for these two -dangerous factors in rural religious life--the non-resident pastor, -too occupied to be a true spiritual shepherd; and the incompetent -pastor, too incapable to be a leader of his people. - -But Christianity will not vanish from our country districts. Nowhere -is there better soil for the seeds of true religion than in the sturdy -soul of rural America. - -It is not so much _isms_ or _ologies_ that the rural population wants -as it is religious facilities for themselves and for their children. -Some time ago, when a study of fifteen Western States was made by the -Home Mission Council, it mentioned the following fact: - -“The general feeling manifested by the returns shows little care for -denominationalism. What these people want is some one to present Bible -facts in an acceptable manner.” - - -_The Call Can Be Met_ - -This is as true to-day as it was when it was written ten years ago. -Sunday-schools for their children; an adequate number of churches, not -fewer than will meet their needs or more than they can support; usable -churches, open the year round, with able ministers in charge--these are -the things the population of our rural districts wants. - -How are they to get them? By the installation of system into the -religious life of the country sections. There are enough churches in -the United States to-day, if they were distributed on the basis of -a real need rather than on the grounds of competitive religion, to -reach the remotest sections of our country. The money now expended -on nonproductive churches would purchase real vitality for essential -churches all through rural America. - - - - -CHAPTER II - - “_Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, - When wealth accumulates, and men decay._” - - GOLDSMITH. - - -Regular men and women long for children as they long for good luck, -long life, and sweet happiness. But they do not want just children, -any kind whatever so that they be children. No indeed! It is always a -whole, healthy child, a bright, intelligent child, a loving, obedient -child, a beautiful, virtuous child, that lives warm in their dreams. -And a child with such characteristics costs more than many men and -women can pay; for a well-bred child, like a well-bred colt, is the -product of many favoring tides of good fortune. - - -_Farms, The Place of Children_ - -So it is that the Johns and Marys who leave the farm and its open -spaces for city life give up having children of their own,--often -without knowing it when they leave the country, to be sure,--and find -themselves later doomed to work out human contentment in some other -way; for the high cost of city space, of just sufficient elbow-room for -a child to grow in and acquire the human characteristics desired, is -almost as prohibitive as if a law were on the statute-books forbidding -the rearing of children in city blocks. While my critic is biting his -thumb at this “exaggeration,” gravely asserting that he knows there -are many families of children in our American cities, I have caught -his eye and will hold it long enough to tell him a thing disclosed by -the last United States Census report, viz., among the thirty millions -of farm people, there are 4,000,000 more children under twenty-one -years of age than there are among any thirty millions of city people. -And this bald fact virtually declares the truth I am uttering--that -the country contains the children of the nation, that the farm is -the natural rearing-ground of well-bred children, and that the city -core--the stamping-ground of business and adults--abhors children as -“nature abhors a vacuum.” - -My story will not reach home, however, unless one pauses a moment to -let this census fact soak in. Here is an excess of children living on -our farms that would make a small nation,--bigger than Switzerland, -bigger than Chili, than Norway, than famous little agricultural Denmark. - - -_Cities Get Youth from Farms_ - -And what will become of this excess of children? What else than this? -The farms will manage to feed them, clothe them, educate them until -they come of age, when, possessed of the strong right arm, they will -turn their backs on the farm and farming, and go to recruit the -nerve-fagged industry of cities. - -The farms feed industry, professional service, and city life with -muscle, intellect, and imagination. This is the romance, and there is -not a word in it of wheat, corn, cotton, or cattle. This every-day -function of the farm, often spoken of lightly, almost as if it were a -poetic fiction, is the solid stratum of fact upon which the plot of my -story rests. The annual editorial blast, “Keep the boy on the farm,” -never concerns this slowly moving stream of young adults cityward, for -these are a surplus, an excess. And they must go, as sure as fate. A -legion of editorials could not dam back this flow. - -We are not without some definite information, moreover, as to how this -surplus of farm population works its way to the cities of the nation; -for a unique study has been made by the United States Department of -Agriculture--of the movement of 3000 young people from a thousand farms -in one community--over a period of one hundred years--a community -where (and this fits into my story) the God of the Puritans has been -known by the children from the days of the first log cabins. We know -just which farms sent their surplus crop of young folk away. We know -exactly where they went in the United States. And, furthermore, we know -what vocations they recruited, and what achievements in these vocations -they made. In a nutshell, we know in some measure what the contribution -of human force and influence was from these thousand farms, farm by -farm, to the upbuilding of the cities of the nation. The unfolding -picture of this farm community’s impact upon the nation’s life during -the century just passed is precisely the thing many persons have looked -for to put national meaning into the daily disappearance from the -farms of the surplus of young adults which every few years amounts to a -strong small nation poured into city industry. - -I cannot pass this remarkable study by without naming some of the men -who as “exportable surplus” left the old farmstead to work out careers -in cities. I will name only those whom you know, and know to honor. -You remember Governor George Peck of Wisconsin. You knew him as the -_Peck_ of “Peck’s Bad Boy.” Farm number 555 among these thousand farms -gave Governor Peck to Wisconsin. Governor Reuben Wood of Ohio came from -farm number 119. Governor Cushman Davis, of Minnesota, afterward United -States Senator, was the product of farm number 556, just as much as the -wheat from that farm was a product and went into national trade. Farm -number 618 gave Charles Finney to American Christendom and to Oberlin -College as its honored president. Farm number 701 raised Charles N. -Crittenton, gave him to the wholesale drug business in New York City, -in which he accumulated wealth with which he put into operation his -ideal for friendless girls. The Florence Crittenton Rescue Homes for -girls in seventy-two cities of the United States tells his story. -One of the little hamlets in the community produced Daniel Burnham, -America’s leading architect, at home equally in Chicago, New York, or -Rome, Italy. - -But these brighter lights of the exodus do not by any means convey -what is perhaps after all the greater influence and might of the -majority of the human surplus who went forth and found their places and -played their rôles as less widely known personalities in enterprises -of banking, manufacture, teaching, or merchandizing, where they helped -weave the fabric of America and its institutions as we know them in -every-day life. - -The force of this plain story of the human product of good farms, in -a community where God was known, lies not in what might be considered -the exceptional character of the community, but rather in the fact -that the story of this particular community of farms is the story, in -one respect or another, of all American farm communities. This study -convinces both men of the farms and men of the cities,--as it sets -their memories to work about the migrants from the land whom they have -known--that as the farming communities wax or wane, so wax or wane the -cities and the nation. - - -_Many Children Virtual Pagans_ - -And here an unsuspected villain enters my story. Do not laugh in -your sleeve when you discover that the villain is a fact, merely a -fact; but, by the by, a very stubborn and blistering fact. Of the -fifteen millions of farm children--children under twenty-one years of -age,--more than four millions are virtual pagans, children without -knowledge of God. If, perchance, they know the words to curse with, -they do not know the Word to live by. This saddening fact is the solemn -disclosure of the recent study, already mentioned, made by the Social -and Religious Institute of New York City. - -A survey of 179 counties in the United States, representatively -selected, enables the Institute with confidence to assert that -“1,600,000 farm children live in communities where there is no church -or Sunday-school of any denomination,” and “probably 2,750,000 more -who do not go to any Sunday-school, either because the church to which -their parents belong does not have any, or because they do not care to -connect themselves with such an organization.” - -One does not get the real inwardness of this fact until one appreciates -that these 1,600,000 of pagan children are not scattered evenly, or -more or less evenly, among the other millions of children who are in -contact with the Bible, but are in a great measure homed in bibleless, -godless communities. The nation might possibly assimilate a million -bibleless children if they were brought up among several millions of -children who know the concepts of religion; but absorbing godless -children in great numbers from whole godless groups is a bird of a -different feather. What is still more disconcerting, the trend, we are -led to suppose, is not from bad to better, but from bad to worse. - -“There is no national passion for seeking out the godless community and -setting the Bible there,” we hear on every hand. - -“The promoters of Bible study are too apologetic to business, to -education, to pleasure, even, and go not about their tasks as those who -have a commission from the nation,” many say. - -But these bare statements fail, perhaps, to get hold of us. We must -have particulars and the pulse of the thing. And so I wish to take a -page out of my own experience and let you read it. - - -_Trapped in a Godless Community_ - -My duties, a while back, took me into the clover-bearing hills of a -promising county in a dairy State. I stayed the night with a farmer’s -family, enjoying the hospitality and confidences of the home. Never -shall I forget two episodes of the evening. - -The milking was finally over--twelve mighty good cows. I had been -allowed to milk three, taking the mother’s place on her favorite -milking-stool. Certain cows were “tender” and responded kindly to her -gentler touch. - -The house was on a side hill sloping steeply to the road, and across -the road was a thinly timbered twenty-acre lot. The warm milk had -been poured into ten-gallon cans and carried up to the house, where -stood, in a neat little milk-house, a cream separator. When all was -ready, the separator began to sing, the cream came trickling out, the -skim-milk poured into a ten-gallon can, as the gaunt six-foot-three, -narrow-shouldered farmer turned the crank. At the first whirring -tune-up of the separator, I hear a scurrying of feet in the timber lot -below, and soon a regiment of hogs and pigs were at the fence, standing -with hind feet in the long trough, front feet over the top rail of the -fence, black heads in a row, beady little eyes peering up the hill, -open mouths giving vent to a long-drawn squeal of jubilant petition. -As the whir of the separator grew into a liquid hum, the squealing -chorus rose to heaven, filling the valley, investing the farm, like a -piece of symbolism, with the imperious demands of animals and crops -upon the total energies of the family. Finally the last drop of milk -went through the separator. Then the father put his hands to two -handles of two ten-gallon cans of skim-milk; one son grasped the other -handle of one can; another son caught hold of the handle of the second -can; while each son in his remaining hand held a pail of the milk. Then -they three, with two cans and two brimming pails, took up their stately -march abreast down the hill to the squealing chorus at the trough. -It looked for all the world like some priestly ritual. The milk was -poured into the trough. The pigs ceased to chant and began to suck, -guzzle, push, and grunt. So the day’s work was over, and we sought the -house. Darkness fell over the hill and valley and the filled pigs lay -down to sleep; while the farmer gathered his family about him, took up -his Bible and read the Scriptures, even as did the cotter, whom Burns, -the farmer Scot, made us know: - - The priest-like father reads the sacred page, - How Abram was the friend of God on high; - Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage - With Amalek’s ungracious progeny; - Or how the royal bard did groaning lie - Beneath the stroke of Heaven’s avenging ire; - Or Job’s pathetic plaint and wailing cry; - Or rapt Isaiah’s wild, seraphic fire; - Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre. - -Conversation in the morning brought out the fact that this hillside -home was virtually the only one, in this clover community, struggling -to bring up its children in the knowledge of God. No church, no -Sunday-school, no parochial school, no Bible class. The gaunt father, -gathering emotion as he overheard his own story, said: - -“I have only one problem now. In twelve years my cows and hogs have -paid for themselves, paid for my farm, built my barn and house. The one -problem is not money any longer, but it is my boys and girls. They are -just now at the point where the home can no longer hold them, and they -will, I fear, sink into the mire of this godless community.” - -“What do you mean, ‘mire’?” I inquired. - -“Well, it is hard to put into words,” he continued. “Perhaps this will -give you some idea: since I have been here, now twelve years, not a -wedding has taken place anywhere hereabouts that has not been forced. -And this is not the worst of it.” - -“Why don’t you start a Sunday-school?” I urged. - -“Too late!” he sighed. “My children are almost beyond me. I was, I -fear, too busy with my cows and pigs, and the children just grew up -before I knew it.” - -“What will you do?” I could not refrain from asking, more to myself -than to him, in my own perplexity, as I tried to share in the problem. - -“The only thing I can do,” said he, as if the conversation had -strengthened a previous resolution half-heartedly entertained, “is to -yield to my wife’s judgment; sell the farm, go to some safe community -where there is a church, Sunday-school, and a high school. We people -here in this community made our great mistake in starting out wrong. We -made a religion of our pure-bred hogs and cattle, and let our boys and -girls go to the dogs.” - -This tale of children, who turned out to have been unwittingly -sidetracked by cows and hogs, recalled my own experience in breaking -some new land in the Skims at a period in my life when the doctor had -said: “What you need is to get close to the land. Crawl around on the -soil a year or two and you will learn over again how to sleep.” - -Well, with my old horse The Cid and a mail-order one-horse plow, I -went through the motions of plowing that pine cut-over from which the -pines had been skimmed off like cream from a milk-pan. Surveying the -scratched and torn field, somewhat bruised and bleeding, I will declare -it was, I said to myself: - -“It doesn’t look really plowed; but it will be all right when I get it -dragged.” - -Then The Cid did his very best at dragging. Dutifully--with an inner -chuckle, I am sure, at my green expectations, for he was a seasoned -old Skims horse himself--he plodded along and over the field. At last -I stood sweating and weary, looking it over, and was obliged to own up: - -“It doesn’t look dragged; but it will be all right when I get it -cultivated.” - -I went through the form of marking and planting, and though I couldn’t -see the rows very well, I quieted my discontent by saying to myself, -“It will be all right when I get it hoed.” - -But when the corn came up, it was accompanied by such a community of -weeds, briers, grass, and small bushes, that I couldn’t cultivate -because I couldn’t see the corn. - -After I had in much perplexity stared at the cultivator and then at the -field, I looked that piece of work square in the face and averred: - -“If I ever plow again, I am not going to kid myself into thinking that -the cultivator will straighten out the sins of the plow.” - -This raw-boned farmer and his wife, possessed of the fairest intentions -in the world for their children, had become trapped in a godless -community before they were aware of it; all because the seed-bed of -human life had not been plowed deep with social religion at the very -outset. Is this community a fair example of bibleless country groups? I -believe it is. I am sorry to admit it, but I believe it is a fair type. - - -_When the Bible Has No Interpreter_ - -If a nation can not build civilization securely without a knowledge of -history, neither can children build character without a knowledge of -those men and women of history who have essayed to know God. The Bible -is the story of such persons. It is biography. It is lives of those in -whom the soul of man in his search for God has risen to its highest -levels. There is no substitute for this Bible biography,--except, if -you please, another Bible. - -And perhaps, in point of Bible illiteracy, next to the community which -has no Bible in it, lies the community in which, though there is a -Bible, the leaders in teaching the Bible, or rather in explaining -the Bible to the children, are themselves grossly ignorant, if not -demoralized. The Bible is a book of many stories, of a host of -incidents, of innumerable ideas. Selection is vital. To select from the -Bible and hand on its meaning in grave ignorance is to run the risk -that all ignorance runs. Here is where many a rural community suffers, -when it is commonly thought to be provided with a knowledge of God. - -It fell to my lot recently to visit a small rural community of -twenty-five families of this type. Only three of the families were -totally without church connections, or at least church traditions. -One church building has fallen in. One lies torn down. The third, -still standing, is rotting. It is supposed to be “haunted.” Splits -disorganized and discouraged the people. A fourth rude church structure -has come, but splitting up from within has begun. Ignorance of a crass -sort rules. The Bible has had no well-balanced soul to interpret its -wonderful truths. - -The family histories of this settlement run--to speak very grimly -indeed--like an anthology of despair and depravity. Listen: - -“She drowned her babies regularly in the creek.” - -“He was said to be the father of his own daughter’s first child.” - -“This woman was subnormal and has three illegitimate children.” - -“This other woman is a menace to every man in the community.” - -“He committed suicide.” - -“She poured kerosene on the cat and set fire to it.” - -“Boil nails in water to find out if person for which water is named -committed a crime. If nails crackle and knock against the pan, then -person named is guilty.” - -“A person dies hard on feathers. We took mother’s bed out from under -her three times when we thought she was dying.” - -“Our children don’t need to go to school to learn to read. The Spirit -teaches them to read.” - -The people of these families looked, in the face, like people you meet -in any fair group of folks; but their minds, their deeds, their hopes, -their fears! There’s the rub. Is this group of twenty-five families -typical of country communities where the Bible is fought over by blind -leaders of the blind? I am afraid it is. I admit it with shame, but I -admit it. The Bible,--as if it were a plow found by persons who knew -not its use, but who scrapped hard for its possession as an ornament -of their dooryards,--the life-giving Bible in these hands is still a -closed book and a locked-up treasure. - - -_Pedigreed Austerity Better Than Ignorance_ - -Human life at its best is no mere accident which may happen anywhere -under any conditions. The best has its pedigree. It is the result -of infinite pains with children as with crops and animals. Even the -austere, narrow-gaged leadership having a pedigree is far better than -this ignorant, illiterate type. - -I remember well as a lad how my father, a country minister, collegebred -and trained in the theological school of his particular denominational -stripe, stood rock-like in his parish for temperance. It was a grape -country, with several wine distilleries. My father taught abstention -from wine-drinking and preached against the distilleries. One -church pillar was in the wine business and furnished the sacramental -wine. My father finally carried his logic to the point where he made -announcement: - -“Next Sunday at the Communion we shall not use fermented wine.” - -Sunday came. A larger congregation than usual assembled. There was a -tenseness of silent emotion in the stiff Sunday-dressed village and -farmer folk, which I can feel yet, after forty years. - -The communion-table was set. I see my father now, as he picked up the -flagon of wine and poured into the chalice. He paused--on his face a -sudden look of bewilderment. Then slowly he poured the chalice of wine -back into the flagon, strode to the door, and emptied the contents on -the ground. Quietly resuming the ceremony he said: - -“We will commune without wine to-day.” - -The distiller had done his dirty work and put one over on the country -parson. But the parson, although he caused a sense of consternation -to creep over the church folk,--akin to the horror in the multitude -when _Count Antonio_, in Anthony Hope’s tonic story, laid hands on -the Sacred Bones in midstream,--by this daring act helped plug the -bung-holes and spike the spigots in the cellars of that county. And the -whole countryside, be it said, responded to the resolute will of my -father to make God known to a community steeped in wine. - -My father probably shared the narrow-mindedness of his particular -pedigree, but he certainly hewed to the line like a prophet of old. -His crop of young converts came usually in winter; but the snow and -ice had no deterring chill for him. He never thought of postponing -the baptismal rite till summer. He had a large hole cut through in -the little river near by, for water helped mightily in his system of -doctrine. He didn’t spare me either. At eleven years of age, he led me, -as he did my country playmates, out of the sleigh, down the snowbank, -into this ice-water. There was no softening of the ideals of life -in that parish, I can tell you. And the God of Daniel was known and -acknowledged there in fear and trembling. - -When, in after years it fell to my fortune to live on the Skims and to -woo sleep with logging, stumping, and “scratching” the land, I saw -what a real Sunday-school would do even in a submarginal community for -the children of the pine cut-over. There was the farmer widow woman -with the man’s hands. What would have been her chances of rearing her -seven children to usefulness and self-respect without that weekly -community-school under good leadership? - -I hear again her breezy, cheery call to her brood as she drives up to -the little church. - -“Pile out.” - -“Pile in,” when Sunday-school is over. - -A slap of the lines, and a piece of rural America goes back to its -cabin, minds sprayed with race lore. A mighty wholesome sight in a -community of tools with broken handles, of harnesses toggled with -hay-wire, of fortunes “busted”, of the blind, and of those who could -not sleep. - -There was the old retired farmer, Scotch McDugle, too, eighty years -old. He would come over from next door of an evening and swap Skims -stories for a cheery welcome and a listening ear. It would be -midwinter. The sheet-iron stove showed red. - -“Come in, Mr. McDugle,” my wife would say. “Take off your hat and -mittens.” - -“Oh, no, no,” he would reply, “just stepped in to say ‘howdy.’ Can’t -stay a minute.” - -Then McDugle would settle down for the evening close to the red-hot -stove, mittens drawn tight, Scotch cap pulled close down over his ears. -As he got limbered in memory, he would go through a set of queer -antics with his lips and tongue--little dry, staccato sputters. He -reminded me in this of a courtly neurasthene I once met who said, as he -went through similar tongue motions, “I beg your pardon, but I have a -hair on the tip of my tongue which I seem never able to get off.” - -Farmer McDugle’s favorite theme was the making of great American men -out of “hard knocks” and “a good pinch of God.” He reveled in Lincoln, -whom he had known; and he never got tired of weaving the people he knew -in with the race-heroes of all time. - -As I think of McDugle and his ilk in these later days, I can not help -suspecting that bleak little Scotland and God in the life, despite -the stain of the “wee drap o’rye,” account for many of America’s -man-making rural communities. - - -_When Catholic and Protestant Agree_ - -The chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Catholic Rural -Life Conference, in a call published (in the April 1924 number of “St. -Isadore’s Plow”) for the second annual Catholic Rural Life Conference, -says: - -“We have two distinct entities of population, and, we might say, of -civilization in the United States--the urban and the rural. The church -is decidedly urban. So far as the Church is concerned, the country -towns and villages are still ‘pagani.’” - -Thus you see Protestant and Catholic agree in seeing the menace of -rural paganism within the borders of Christian America. - -This is not the moment to settle the blame for this condition on any -persons or sects. It is rather the time for a statesmanlike move to -meet the menace. Bible instruction of worth, dignity, intelligence, -in every community, made accessible to the last child, is an aim -which alone can meet the case. But this is an herculean stunt, and -requires some of the same sweep of coöperative, universal momentum as -drove out yellow fever, malaria, and is fighting pellagra, hook-worm, -and tuberculosis. Bible illiteracy ranks as a problem with book -illiteracy; and as great a unanimity is required to root it out as to -eradicate book illiteracy. A hundred different religious bodies in -the United States have striven more or less fitfully in the past with -this problem. But far more is needed than the hundred-headed effort. -When, in the late war, the Allies came to their senses and found that -their struggle was not a rope-pull nor a barbecue, but a life-or-death -struggle, they elected Foch to give universality of will to the cause -of defense. - -The children of rural America deserve by good rights a Foch to lead -the forces of Bible literacy against a creeping, godless paganism. I -have refrained from presenting the religious case for this crusade. The -menace is so great that the social appeal should be sufficient--and -should reach every intelligent lover of America, be he fundamentalist, -modernist, ethicist, or just plain man. - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -William James, the Harvard psychologist, used to say in his class-room: -“I must fight the devil and his wiles, for God needs me. I may help -save the day.” - -In the same room, the next hour, Josiah Royce, the philosopher, would -say, “I must set my heel on Satan’s neck, for God’s victorious spirit -is in me.” - -Whichever of these two schools of moral action one belongs to, one is -bound, you see, to fight the devil and his guile; and in country life -this is no joke, for as it turns out, the devil waved a mighty wicked -wand over the American farm tenant when he jockeyed him on to the land -into the shoes of the departing farm owner. It was a devilish, cunning -trick to decoy the owner, body and soul, into town and into the town -church--away from the little country church of his fathers. It was, -however, the meanest lick of Satan against the peace of the tenant -to bewitch him into flitting from farm to farm and from community -to community. And now the situation has come to such a pass that, -unless the American church has the grace and backbone and subtlety to -outgeneral the devil in his game, the devil wins; for in matters of -religion, the landless man is between the devil and the deep sea. - - -“_Churches Detour--Tenants Ahead_” - -It is old stuff, in a way, this cheerless story of farm tenants -and religion. Pick up, as I have done, either at random or quite -methodically, booklets, chapters, articles, or pamphlets dealing at -first hand with the farm tenant, and the tale of his religious handicap -runs drearily, hopelessly to the same sad end. For example, take -this rather mild statement from a member of Roosevelt’s Country Life -Commission: - -“The farm owner who has moved to town and is renting his land cannot -be expected to be a real, vital force in the rural church. Nor can -the tenant who has a one-year lease, or whose tenure is uncertain, be -expected to cultivate the Christian graces by intimate fellowship -with his neighbors and associates; in other words, to take root in the -community and become a part of it.” - -“Why, then,” it will be asked, “try to dress up the outworn subject -again?” - -The plain answer, without any apology, is simply this: The farm-tenant -case, as a phase of religion in eclipse, has not yet cast an image on -the American mind. The American church,--and I class together all the -Christian bodies in this sweeping term,--the Christian conscience of -the American church has apparently reversed itself and “passed by on -the other side” of this bedeviled situation. Now such an attitude, such -collective behavior, is ruthless, well nigh unforgivable, and in fact -incomprehensible. Words must continue to be spoken until the church -ceases to detour around the tenant. - - -_The Flood of Tenancy Unabated_ - -And first of all, in order to see the gravity of the case as it stands, -one must sense the resistless character of the sweeping flow of tenancy -itself. Decade by decade the flood has risen. In 1880, 25.6 per cent. -of the farms in the United States were tenant farms; in 1890, 28.4 per -cent.; in 1900, 35.3 per cent.; in 1910, 37.0 per cent.; in 1920, 38.1 -per cent. - -If one looks a little closer at the regions where the flood is -highest--almost over the dikes, so to speak--the truth strikes home a -little stronger. In the east South-central States, containing Kentucky, -Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, the percentage in 1880 was 35.2; in -1890, 38.6; in 1900, 49.1; in 1910, 52.8; in 1920, 49.6. In the west -south-central area, containing Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, -the percentage in 1880 was 35.2; in 1890, 38.6; in 1900, 49.1; in 1910, -52.8; in 1920, 53.2. In the west north-central area, containing, as a -very vital part of American agriculture, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, -North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, the percentage in 1880 -was 20.5; in 1890, 24.0; in 1900, 28.6; in 1910, 30.0; in 1920, 34.1. - -When the United States Census Report for 1920 came out and was scanned, -it was discovered by every one that in the decade between 1910 and 1920 -the flood of tenant farms had in number gone down in some States a -little, as in Alabama and Mississippi, a fact which brought a decline -in the east south-central area from 52.8 per cent. in 1910 to 49.6 per -cent. in 1920. But lest the friends of agriculture in America should be -put under ether by this disclosure, Dr. C. L. Stewart, now professor -in the University of Illinois, while a member of the United States -Department of Agriculture, in a statement entitled, “The Persistent -Increase of Tenant Farming,” called attention to the fact that the -bare number of tenant farms is a less accurate index of the sweep and -meaning of tenancy than the acreage involved and the value of that -acreage: - -“When measured on the basis of acreage and value, the number of rented -acres per thousand and the number of dollar’s worth of rented land per -thousand was not only higher (in 1910 and 1920) than that shown on the -preceding basis (number of rented farms), but has been growing at much -faster rates during both of the decades since 1900, especially during -the decade just ended.... In the light of this analysis, the tide of -tenancy is shown by the latest census to have continued with little or -no abatement.” - -In sober truth, this flood-tide of tenancy is no mere passing -phenomenon in the adolescent experience of America, but is a settled -characteristic now being wrought into the texture of American life. -As a social and economic force, tenancy is here to stay. Statesmen -may well build their dikes higher against it; but American religious -leaders--the makers of ecclesiastical policy--must from now on -gravely take farm tenancy into their reckoning, or assume spiritual -responsibility for its continued religionless character. - - -_Locating the Devil’s Quarry_ - -Let us draw a bit closer to these tenant folks and look them in the -eyes. There they are, in round numbers two and a half millions of -tenant operators; or, perhaps, better reckoned for our purpose as -twelve millions of people, counting all persons in the tenant families -both old and young. But, as almost everybody knows, there are a few -vast differences among tenants, and we must sift a little and sort out -the group that the devil is laying his finger on and claiming as his -own. - -A tenant who is a son or daughter of the landlord, or otherwise -related to the landlord by blood or marriage, is without question -not only a privileged person and his family a privileged family -among tenants, but, what is more to the point, living on family -lands as he most generally does, the “related tenant” is so often an -owner in prospect with a deed “in escrow” as the law would put it, -that while nominally a tenant, he is an owner in thin disguise, and -virtually has in the community the status of an owner. The census does -not declare what percentage of the twelve millions of tenant folk -belongs to this favored class; but whatever the percentage is, it is -obviously decreasing with the decreasing percentage of owner-operating -families. Representative studies made by the United States Department -of Agriculture indicate that 23 per cent. of the tenant population -belongs at present to this group. If we accept this estimate, then, in -1920, there were 2,760,000 persons in the families of “related tenants.” - -To protect my story against the will to exaggerate the landless -element, let us call the total number of “related tenants” three -millions; and then let us deduct this whole group from the twelve -millions of tenant folks. This leaves nine millions of tenants -unprivileged by birth or marriage in respect to land. - -Lest any one should feel, furthermore, that I am trying to make, under -cover, a case of the colored tenant,--whose situation is confessedly -special and should not, for obvious reasons, be confused with that of -white tenants,--let us sift and sort again and take out three and a -half millions of colored tenant folk, old and young. The residuum is -five and a half millions of white tenants. This is the group that has -swelled in numbers during the past four decades. This is the group -that is all the time spreading over more and more acres, all the time -creeping on to more and more valuable land. This group of landless -men, women, and children (I do not mean to say that this is the only -landless group of white farm people, for the agricultural-labor class -makes another story), occupying more and more the strategic positions -in agriculture and country life, contains the devil’s quarry. - - -_Tenants On the Go_ - -We must add one more particularly distressing feature to our general -picture. In December and January in the South, or in March in the -North, there is a great stir among these tenants, for moving-time -has come. During the year between December 1, 1921, and December 1, -1922, according to a statement put out by the U. S. Department of -Agriculture, entitled, “Farm Occupancy, Ownership, and Tenancy, 1922,” -“nearly 663,000 shifts on farms exchanging tenants” occurred of which -“nearly 250,000 tenants were indicated to have either discontinued -farming for some other occupation or moved out of their communities.” - -In this exodus, poverty tags along, poverty carrying in her apron -all the witch’s ills--hard luck, dimmed lights of the mind, illness, -inferiority written in behavior, stolid despair, indifference to -improvement, insensibility to refinements. In the South, poverty hangs -on to the coat-tails of the “Cropper”--him of the lowest estate of the -tenant. In 1920, according to the United States Census Report, there -were 227,378 white croppers, more than one million white cropper folk. - -Behold a host, comparable with the host of Israel on the way to Canaan. -The roads are filled with teams, with jags of household belongings, -with led or driven cattle, horses and mules, with loads of women and -children. A small nation is folding its tents and moving on ere its -tents have fairly got pitched. White tenants alone,--and mind you, out -of the group of five and a half millions of landless people,--an army -of 1,375,000 souls; and of these, more than a half a million going -across the border of the community into a strange land for another -short sojourn. This is the picture you will see every year--over a -quarter of all tenants moving, and ten per cent. of all tenants moving -into strange associations among strange people. - - -_Outcasts From the Church_ - -In their recent study, “The Town and Country Church,” Dr. H. N. Morse -and Dr. de S. Brunner, of the Institute of Social and Religious -Research, have this convincing word to say about the church and the -farm tenant: - -“The church in the country areas is not, generally speaking, the church -of the landless man. In a study of all the churches in 179 counties, -located in 44 States, the situation, which we believe is reliably -representative of conditions in the United States as a whole, is -this: The percentage of farm owners who are members of churches in -the South is 59.5, while of tenants who are members the percentage is -33.5; in the Southwest, of owners, 26.2, while of tenants, 9.2; in the -Northwest, of owners, 16.4, while of tenants, 7.4; in the Middle West, -of owners, 47.9, while of tenants, 20.3; in the Prairie, of owners, -55.6, while of tenants, 15.8.” - -These two authorities on the farmer’s church, draw from their study of -the high and low tenancy areas in 175 counties this further conclusion: -“The larger the proportion of farm tenants in an area, the more -conspicuously unreached by the church is the landless man.” Here are -their figures, see for yourself: - -“In counties where tenancy runs from 0 to 10 per cent., the percentage -of farm owners who are church members is 13.7, while the percentage -of tenants who are church members is 12.4; where tenancy runs from 11 -to 25 per cent., the percentage of owners as church members, is 26.8, -while of tenants, 19.8; where tenancy runs from 26 to 50 per cent., the -percentage of owners is 48.2, while of tenants, 23.6; where tenancy -runs over 50 per cent., the percentage of owners who are church members -is 63.6, while the percentage of tenants who are church members is -23.9.” - -When we look into this statement, it is plain that in the low tenancy -areas the “related tenants” on “family lands” bulk large, and they -rank, as we know, with owners themselves; but when we get into the -high tenancy areas, we strike the core of tenants unrelated to the -landlord. Here is the mass of our 5,500,000 landless tenant folk, and -here is where the church has weakened and fallen down. Five millions -of these white landless tenants are in the high tenancy areas. And -applying this church study to our problem, while the church reaches 55 -per cent. of the owners in these areas it reaches only 24 per cent. -of the tenants. That is, 1,200,000 of these landless tenants only -are inside the circle of direct religious influence, and 3,800,000 -are outside. If these 5,000,000 persons had been owners of land, or -inheritors of land in waiting, the church would have reached 2,750,000 -of them instead of 1,200,000; in other words here are 1,550,000 tenant -people who are outcasts from the church simply because they are -landless folk. And these outcasts--these religionless pariahs--are on -the increase from year to year as tenancy increases its hold upon the -nation. - - -_One Hundred Per Cent. Material for Religion_ - -It surely will not be misunderstood if a layman should call to mind -that the genius of Christianity is its perennial Gospel--just good -news--to the poor, the broken in life’s struggle. If a fitter multitude -than these tenants for the good tidings of the Christ can be found on -the face of the earth, I would like to learn of them. The ordinary life -of these outcasts, these wanderers from spot to spot seeking the sun -that refuses to shine, has precisely all of those breakdowns which the -Christian religion promises to repair--poverty, invalidism, death, -sin. It seems to me that these pariahs are just naturally made to order -for the kind of religion that the American church has to offer; but as -I see it, and I have looked this thing in the face from angle after -angle, they haven’t got a ghost of a show at it the way the church -system of the country at present works out. Speaking straight from the -shoulder, the devil wins, unless--And where is the person who will rise -and name the great “unless” that can fix this church system up and set -the heel of the church on Satan’s neck? - -The history of the church, running back through the centuries, is, -as I read it, dotted with awakenings, with the rise of a thought, of -a hope-dream, with the rise of a man who out of the very fog and -blackness of popular waywardness, wantonness, unbelief, depravity, has -stood up and successfully denied that human life must be all to the -strong and that the poor must live unillumined. This has been the type -of man who has lit the torch of love and solicitude and faith in the -world that has lighted the race generation after generation. Is this -not the time in the life of the American church and this the occasion -in America for such a man to arise and call a halt upon the detour of -the church around the farm tenant? - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -“Hireling!” A sour epithet to hand a preacher; but the word is not -mine. Look at it, if you will, in its original setting and judge for -yourself: - -“I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd giveth his life for the -sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own -the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and -fleeth.... The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth -not for the sheep.” - -So spake the Man of Sorrows, who, as he went about preaching the Gospel -of the Kingdom, spake as never man spake. And nineteen centuries -of unbroken Christian usage look down upon “pastor and flock” as an -almost perfect characterization of preacher and parish. Passing quickly -through the gateway leading up to the porch of my tale, let me in a few -words taken from “Town and Country Church in the United States,” set -before you the pastor-and-flock-hard-luck story in rural America: - -“The total number of communities within the town (town refers to places -of 5,000 people or less) and country area is 73,230.” - -“There are 33,808 communities, or 42 per cent. of the total number, -that have churches, but do not have within them any resident pastors.” - -“It would require 34,181 more ministers giving their full time to the -work of the ministry to provide one for each community, if they were -evenly distributed.” - -“The great advantage of the town over the village, and of both town -and village over the country, in the matter of resident pastors, is -a characteristic of all regions and of virtually all counties. Thus, -while 78 out of every 100 town churches have resident pastors, and 60 -out of every 100 village churches, only 17 out of every 100 country -churches have them, and less than 5 out of every 100 country churches -have full-time resident pastors.” - -In a nutshell, this is the inglorious fact: 30,000 flocks in rural -America have no shepherds. Thirty thousand rural flocks are open to -the wolf--because (for it so appears) American preachers care not for -country sheep. - - -_Sentenced to Purgatory_ - -An eminent rural-life leader a few weeks ago came back from a -country-life conference of rural ministers, reporting that these -ministers had a saying among them, “A country charge (pastorate) is a -sentence to purgatory.” - -This report sounds like a piece of clerical humor; grim, maybe, but -harmless and meaning nothing. Would to God this were true! Then perhaps -the picture of these 30,000 shepherdless flocks might turn out to -be only a nightmare. I tried to shake the thing out of my mind; but -immediately the long line of my ministerial acquaintances passed -unwillingly before me; and I solemnly affirm that, with a few princely -exceptions, these men after being plunged into their ministry, coming -up for air, as it were, faced toward the city parish as flowers turn -toward the light; from the country, they struck out for the village; -from the village, they struck out for the town; from the town, they -struck out for the city; from the city, they struck out for the -metropolis. - - -_The Preacher’s Flight_ - -The more I struggled to free myself from a conclusion on this matter, -the deeper into conviction I sank. I recalled, much against my -inclination, a bad half-hour several years ago at the headquarters of -one of the great religious bodies of America. The occasion was the -meeting of the National Social Service Commission of that denomination. -I had just finished reading a report, which expressed the idea that we -might look forward to the day when country parishes would be put up -in packages containing people enough supporting one church, so that -churches in the country would be as powerful, ministers in the country -would be as influential, as city churches, on the one hand, and city -ministers on the other. A captain of city industry was a member of the -commission. During my paper, hands in pockets, he paced the floor up -and down--somewhat to my discomfiture as I recall. When I concluded -reading, he broke out with: - -“Bosh! All bosh! The country church will always be of little account. -It gets culls for ministers--it always has; it always will. Just as I -left the farm for the city to improve my lot, so every country minister -who can will leave the country parish for the city parish to improve -his lot.” - -That I suffered a shock as if by lightning may easily be imagined. The -steel-blue tone of this man did something to my heart; did something to -my faith in human nature hard to define. This captain of industry--and -I suspect that this is what did the damage--never seemed to question -the legitimacy of the preacher’s flight. Representing, as he did, the -leading laymen of his denomination, quietly accepting the exodus of -country preachers as perfectly normal--because running true to the -economics of good business instinct--he appalled me with his cynicism. -And it took me many a month, I confess, to get back my belief in -humankind. But it came back, and came back strong in the following -manner: - - -_Around the Glover’s Cot_ - -By accident, one summer, I made a find; in one of the 30,000 pastorless -parishes, a man lying prone on a cot; the cot standing on a stone-boat; -the stone-boat lying close to a deep pool in the bend of a little -river, in the shade of a great elm-tree; the man all alone, flat on his -back, silently whipping the trout-pool with his fly. I came to believe -in this helpless fisherman, and again all things good and beautiful -seemed possible. I got the story from his sister, but can give only -hints of it here. - -As a boy on the farm he had made up his mind to get an education. At -sixteen he was looking forward impatiently to beginning his courses -of study, when one day in the woods a tree which the men folks were -cutting down fell on him and broke his back. He never walked again, -nor, in fact, ever again sat up. Doomed to lie on his back, all his -hopes blighted, he asked for something to do with his hands. They gave -him needle and thread, shears and a piece of buckskin. He made a pair -of clumsy buckskin gloves. He made a less clumsy pair. He made pair -after pair, better and still better. Then dozens of pairs, until his -skill built up a small business. But his ambition mounted with success, -and he asked whether he couldn’t study something. - -“Can’t I study law?” he pleaded. - -They got him law-books. He read law, he made buckskin gloves; he -made gloves, he read law. He was admitted to the bar. He became -justice-of-the-peace in his backwoods settlement. Men got to coming -for miles to the glover’s cot to tell their troubles and look into his -deep eyes, hear his counsel, and feel his glad hand. He was a real -peacemaker under the guise of a lawyer. His ethics backed up to and -rested upon the Sermon on the Mount. He bought land, hired it tilled, -built himself a better house, and settled into the character of a -country squire. He was of the little church flock, and the rest of the -flock came to set great store by his good sense, his wholesome cheer, -indomitable activity, and, withal, his straight reliance on God. In -fact, the helpless glover’s dwelling was the meeting-place for the -flock about as often as the church building; for everybody said, “We -get new strength to keep a-going when we meet around the cot.” - - -_The Modern Wolf a Playful Cub?_ - -See how I got back my faith? The prone fisherman on his stone-boat was -a godsend to me. I saw that personal life is so rich that no one can -be broken in body to the point where, in case he “layeth down his life -for the sheep,” he will be making a mean gift. I half suspect that God -raises up out of the ground, as it were, in many of these pastorless -communities a proxy for the parson that, beholding the wolf, leaveth -the sheep and fleeth to the city--a proxy, like the glover-lawyer, who -is no quitter. And in some parishes where the preacher still sticks -(his face set, however, toward the city) I fancy a man or a woman or a -child can be found who is naïvely scaring off the wolf. - -Norris Shepardson was such a man. Farmer, poet, refined spirit, he -went about his work making everybody believe that a new day is fresh -from God. Ambrose Brimmer, a member of the community, didn’t happen -to be much of a churchman, and his Sunday haymaking teased the parson -mightily. I remember well one perfect trout day, when Ambrose was -showing me the holes in a stream strange to my rod, that we got to -talking about preachers. - -“I don’t care a damn if the parson does see me haying on Sunday,” said -Ambrose; “but if I get a sight of Norris Shepardson driving up the -road, I skedaddle and hide, you bet! You know Norris Shepardson. Well, -Norris Shepardson is a Christian and no quack.” - -And Ambrose was right. Norris Shepardson was a Christian from his -eyelashes to his finger-tips; and his sweet belief in you put you -straightway under obligation to goodness when he cast a glance your way. - -It is probably true that I have been something of a modern-life fan. -But when I try to think of the Master’s parables of the shepherd, the -sheep, and the wolf, and of the one sheep that was lost while the -ninety and nine were safe in the fold, I confess that I am troubled -about my modern-life philosophy. - -Are modern sheep any the less in need of a downright shepherd because -they are modern? - -Isn’t there a wolf any longer in times that are modern? Or may he -perhaps be just a playful cub? Or possibly, by this time, a toothless, -plain, doddering beastling? - -Has the age of lofty heroism in religion--the age of sheer contempt -of some of the traditional goods of life--clean passed away? And does -economics furnish the better clue in modern days to those who are -called of God to preach? - -Do we need any 30,000 more preachers in the country trenches? Do we -need any shock troops at all? Isn’t it perfectly orthodox pacifism in -these days for all the picked soldiers in the war on the devil to fall -back into comfortable winter quarters? - - -_Side-stepping the Law of Hire_ - -I try to find my answer to these troubling queries in a glance down -the centuries. There are the barefoot Black Friars of Dominic and the -Gray Friars of Francis of Assisi (him who took poverty for his bride) -in the thirteenth century. They gloried in mean clothes, mean shelter, -mean food, as they ministered out of their own poverty to the poor, -the overlooked, the no-accounts (in cities, then, because the troop of -comfortable parsons were fattening in the popular country districts). - -There are the visionaries and enthusiasts: John Bunyan in the -seventeenth century; John and Charles Wesley in the eighteenth. In the -very face of the plentiful, complacent clergy, they fought the wolf as -if they had been apostles living in the first century. - -There is Jean Frederick Oberlin, in the early part of the nineteenth -century, who protested, “I do not wish to labor in some comfortable -pastoral charge where I can be at ease. I want a work to do which no -one else wishes to do, and which will not be done unless I do it.” - -Oberlin had just won his degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the -University of Strasburg, at a time when Strasburg was a city of France. -His “call” to pastoral duty came all of a sudden with the wind of a -February evening rushing in at the door as a stranger stepped into -the bare room. Struck with the poverty of the place, Pastor Stuber -introduced himself. Beard’s translation from the French presents us -with the picture: - -“I have learned about you, Herr Oberlin. Your name has been mentioned -to me as one who does not follow the beaten paths of ministerial -candidates. You have studied surgery and medicine. You have a knowledge -of botany and herbs. Is this not so?” - -“In my leisure hours I have paid some attention to botany, to -blood-letting, and the experiences of the anatomical room,” replied -Oberlin. - -“Will you be kind enough to explain to me what this little pan means -that I see here by your lamp?” asked Stuber. - -A deep blush ran over Oberlin’s face. “Pardon the cooking, Herr Pastor. -I take my dinner with my parents, and I bring away some bread which my -mother gives me. At eight o’clock I put this little pan over my lamp, -place my bread in it, with a little water and salt. Then I go on with -my studies.” - -“You are my man!” exclaimed Stuber, rising from his chair. “You live on -the diet of Lacedæmon. Yes, you are my man. I see you do not understand -me; but I have got my man, and I shall not let you go. I want you for -the pastorship of Waldbach in the Ban-de-la-Roche. There a hundred -poor and wretched families in want of the bread of life; four or five -hundred to shepherd and to save, poor, wretched, friendless.” - -Oberlin’s heart was in a tumult. This was just the field of labor he -had wished. But what of the difficulties? - -“The parish must be in a very cold region,” suggested Oberlin. - -“My dear Oberlin, I do not wish to exaggerate anything. Six months of -winter; at times the cold of the Baltic; sometimes a wind like ice -comes down from the mountain-tops above; the sick and dying are to be -visited in remote, wild, solitary places in the forests.” - -“And the parishioners, are they well disposed?” inquired Oberlin. - -“Not too much so, not too much. They are frightfully ignorant and -untractable, and proud of their ignorance. It is an iron-headed people, -a population of Cyclops.” - -Oberlin was taking in the situation. He slowly lifted his large blue -eyes and asked: “You say most of the parishioners are extremely poor? -Are there resources to aid the poor?” - -“The parishioners have nothing. Four districts even poorer than the -mother parish are to be served. Not a single practicable road. Deep -mud-holes among the cabins. The people, abandoned to indifference, have -not the least concern to meliorate their condition.” - -“Every one of your words has knocked at the door of my heart like the -blows of a hammer,” said Oberlin. And it was settled that Oberlin would -go to the mountains; and on March 30, 1767, in his twenty-seventh year, -Oberlin arrived at Waldbach. - -No single piece of literature equals the story of Jean Frederick -Oberlin’s pastorate in the Ban-de-la-Roche as an interpretation of -a country minister’s social, economic, and religious relation to -his parish. Overture after overture came to him during the years to -give up his laborious cares in the hills and take charge of a church -where cultured life would bring with it superior advantages, greater -recognized honor, and a satisfactory salary. His answer was the same to -all: - -“No, I will never leave this flock. God has confided this flock to me. -Why should I abandon it?” - -And in that out-of-the-way parish he played the shepherd and the man -for nigh on to sixty years. Like the Venerable Bede in the eighth -century, he died with the shepherd’s crook in his hand. - - -_Preachers’ Alibis Pass Inspection_ - -Now tell me, was Oberlin--remember he is only a hundred years -away from our time--temperamental and absurdly heroic? Was the -nineteenth-century wolf any less tender with the nineteenth-century -flock than the first-century wolf with the first-century flock? Is -the modern “world-the-flesh-and-the-devil” just a bugaboo to frighten -children? Is modern sin a whiter stain on the soul and more easily -washed out than in any previous century? It would take a braver man -than I am to champion modern life to such lengths. - -These 30,000 runaway American preachers,--they all have good reasons -for running. As alibis go, they are perfect--humanly speaking. I have -often heard the recital: “Easier life for the wife,” “education for -the children,” “an American standard of living,” “congenial parish,” -“books,” “travel,” “art,” “greater opportunity for service.” - -Just such reasons as bankers, clerks, teachers, merchants give for -their economic movements--to better themselves, following the law of -hire. And nobody protests; for nobody is in a position to protest, as -the law of hire seems to regulate the life of all. The protest--the -only great protest--comes everlastingly up from the first century: - -“A certain scribe came, and said unto Him, Master, I will follow Thee -whithersoever Thou goest. And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have -holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not -where to lay his head.” - - -_The Plight of Him Who Stays_ - -The preacher that sticks by the farm community takes pot-luck with the -farmer himself; and the socio-economic plight of the farmer has had -front-page head-lines since the time of President Theodore Roosevelt. -To-day, in the time of President Calvin Coolidge, those head-lines have -become bigger and blacker. The farmer’s dollar, meanwhile, has become -small and weak. His taxes have risen overnight like a spring freshet. -His debts stare him in the face. His children are forsaking him for the -high wages and high life of the city. He cannot pay the wages of labor -in competition with automobile factories. - -The farmer’s social system in America has broken down under the strain -of new forces. He needs the social help of men and women who will -share his life, his privations, his hopes and fears. But they are to -be men and women who see the farmer’s plight and, giving themselves -to the task, struggle to organize a modern rural social system. It is -fruitless here to recite the tale of an underpaid country clergy, with -its sequel of a socially visionless, untrained set of honest parsons; -fruitless to point out how denominational strife has cut down the -preacher’s salary to less than a living wage. True, the country parson -has his poverty, and needs not to take any extra “vow of poverty.” This -sort of thing will go on and on until there is a right-about on the -part of those preachers who flee the country as if it were the plague. -Strong men of social vision, men who have come to understand the -farmer’s social and economic plight, must turn their back on the city, -and take up labors for the country flock. - - -_A New Type of Training School_ - -But will there ever be such a right-about-face of virile, holy men -until we have in America a new type of theological seminary for the -training of country-bound ministers of Christ? I doubt it. The present -schools of training are city-set, city-wise, city-satisfied; not but -that a score or more of them give some “rural courses”; not but that a -trickle of men has started already from them toward the country. You -can better understand the case if I were to ask what hope there would -have been for agricultural science, if total reliance had been placed -upon the great city universities, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, -Pennsylvania, to develop the practice of farming. Each of these -universities has already made some notable contribution to agriculture -in one form or another; but the great hope of agriculture lay in a -farming college, and fortunately, the common sense of this country -perceived this truth. - -In like manner, the hope of the rural ministry, in my estimation, -lies in a rural theological seminary under the eaves of one of our -great colleges of agriculture--preferably a college of agriculture -in close proximity to a great state university. Here is the farmer’s -intellectual center. Here are gathered men and women of hope for farm -life. Here are the men and women who have social vision for rural -society. In touch with these men and women, under the spell of the -intelligent hope for the American farm and farmer, a school of religion -can grow up which will train men to go into the country and help redeem -it from its present social chaos. They can carve out community churches -of distinction. They can create a line of such churches, wholly in -rural territory, which will furnish steps of promotion for the most -strenuous and ambitious pastors. Flight is not the cure of the plight -of country parsons. The cure is rather intelligent consecration to the -country flocks. - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -“But,” went on the author of Christian idealism,--mind you, in the same -breath in which He had paid to His followers the superb compliment, “Ye -are the salt of the earth,”--“if the salt have lost its savor--” - -And the story of Protestant home missions in rural America during the -last two or three decades has in it the taste of this “lost savor.” - -Let me lay bare before you,--with the shame of a churchman very much -embarrassed, it must be confessed,--not so much the facts of this -unsavory home-mission story, for the facts have been public property -for some years, as an interpretation of the facts and an appraisal of -the damage done to American churchdom. - -For the benefit of him who does not understand the situation at all, -a word is necessary. Here is the picture, and here are the essential -features in the picture, whatever variations there may be in minor -details. - - -_Twice Too Many Churches_ - -A community of rural folk of a definite population is spread out before -you. Christian churches, usually from two to ten in number, are alive, -if not all going concerns in the community. Whatever differences there -may be in the membership rolls--and of course we shall expect many -points of difference here--or in the number of services per week or per -month, or in the presence or absence of resident pastors, or in the -organization of the churches into Sunday-schools, mission societies, -clubs, social committees and the like--whatever the variations may be, -I say, the number of persons in the community, counting every single -soul, is far short of enough to man all of the churches, use any -reputable standard of church organization you please to measure by. - -Furthermore, in the type community in question, some or all of the -churches are weak and ineffective, if not virtually down and out. -Moreover,--and this is the central feature of the picture,--one church -is, or several or all of these churches are, receiving subsidies -in the form of money from the home-mission funds of the respective -denominational state body or national body or both, the sum of money -being just enough to keep the particular church competitively in the -running in that community. - -The essential fact in this situation may be stated thus: In a community -where there is known to be a mass of persons (in commercial parlance, -“volume of business”) sufficient to build and maintain only from -one to five churches, there are actually found to be from two to -ten; and the excess of churches over and above the number which the -volume of business justifies is the direct result of the injection of -home-mission money into the community. - - -_Veiled Hate_ - -It does not require a clever mind to know what will happen. When from -two to ten kernels of corn are planted in a piece of soil which has -nutritive elements sufficient to bring only from one to five stalks -to maturity, we know that a struggle for life is on which may doom -one stalk, several stalks, or even all stalks. It is so with the -competitive churches; but the corn simile fails to illustrate the case -at the really tragic point. The subsidized churches, which make up the -redundance, create in the community what is known by everybody there -to be a case of veiled malignancy. Self-respecting persons either hold -themselves aloof from formal religion there, or, conscience-stricken, -stand helplessly bewildered, or in plain disgust they pick up and -leave. And the community turns sour. The salt has lost its savor. - -If you would sense the disaster of this competition, please read -between the lines of the following resolution, passed within the last -year, by a minister’s association in a small rural community where six -Protestant churches are breathing the air that is hardly enough for -three! - - “Whereas we are joined together as Christian ministers in the - association of brotherly fellowship and helpful co-working, we hereby - agree that the following principles shall guide and control us - individually, and, so far as our proper influence can go, our several - congregations in our mutual relationships.... - - I. That we decline and discourage proselytizing in any form. - - II. While we recognize that every man is free to worship where and - as he wills, yet we realize that shifting from one denomination to - another save from absolute religious conviction is not edifying, but - harmful. Wherefore, we will not encourage those who from pique or - temporary dissatisfaction with ministers or people of their own local - congregations wish to unite with ours. - - III. That we will not, save in exceptional cases, receive into our - Sunday-schools as regular members thereof, children of families who - are affiliated with other congregations of the town. - - IV. That whenever we come across new-comers to the town who are - affiliated with, or declare preference for, some Christian body other - than our own we will not (if the church of their choice be represented - by a congregation here) ask them to unite with our congregation or - send their children to our Sunday-school until we have given to the - minister or church officials of the church of their preference the - name and address of such persons, and allowed reasonable opportunity - for them to claim their own.” - -It is clear on the face of it that the recognized principles of -Christianity have failed to keep these churches sweet to one another; -and resort is, therefore, had to a contract--a perfectly human document -of agreement, such as governs sinners in mundane business--in hope that -an-out-and-out bargain may accomplish what Christian love can not. - -These ministers agree _not_ to proselytize, _not_ to encourage -lifting members from another church, _not_ to receive children into -the Sunday-school from families of another flock, _not_ to pick up -new-comers without advertising them and waiting a reasonable length -of time for a claimant. This document of “nots”--of things not to -be done--naïvely uncovers the teasing things that were done behind -curtains. - - -_Dispensing With Mission Aid_ - -Before reading further, you will wish to know whether there is much of -this sort of thing going on in rural America; whether, in fact, it is -not fussing over trifles to beckon anybody to look at this thing. - -The best authorities, after a long study on this subject, are quoted as -estimating that the amount of Protestant home-mission money annually -wasted in competitive religion in rural communities is at present -$3,000,000; and if we may generalize from twenty-five thoroughly -studied counties, widely separated, where there are 211 churches aided -by home-mission money, of which 149 are disastrously competitive, “most -of the home-mission aid which is now granted could be withdrawn without -any danger whatsoever of leaving communities (rural) with inadequate -facilities.” - -The official report goes on to say, “Aside from any possible loss in -denominational prestige, which a purely objective study such as this -can not undertake to measure, on a careful examination of all the data -at hand, it seems that 149 of the 211 aided churches in these counties -might be dispensed with, to the general advantage of the religious life -in their communities and to the greater glory of the Kingdom of God.” - -This thing, look at it from any angle you please, is as rust on the -wheat, a rot in the potato, a blight on the peach-tree, a boll-weevil -in the cotton. God knows that the farmer already carries along enough -of a handicap in community matters without being afflicted with this -canker on his religion, as a discipline. It certainly looks like -jumping on the man that’s down. But this sin against the farmer is not -the worst of the wicked business. - - -_Worse Than Wasted_ - -What hurts most in this paradoxical practice is the prostitution of the -most beautiful gift in all religion. - -“Missions!” - -The very word conjures up angels of mercy. It brings to mind the last -words of Christ to his disciples and to his followers of all time. And -this mission money (it is not so pathetic that it sometimes is the -widow’s mite or that it is sometimes earned in feebleness with many a -pain) is the purest money handled by men. It is the visible sign of -tears of longing for love to govern men. Missions are the church’s -great romance. When out of the barrenness and weakness of my little -life, I put into the hands of the church a gift for the whomsoever, -in faith, I do it with a prayer that it will help bring peace to some -soul, harmony to some family, blessing to some community which is -beyond my power otherwise to help. - -To think, then, that the tip of your prayer and mine, the sweetest -thing we can give, is poisoned, and shot into a rural community, -there to hurt--Well the words, are not so much wanting to express -my indignation and yours, as the mind fails to comprehend how such -tactless blunders can happen. - -“Why do these church bodies do this wicked thing?” you enquire. - -Let the words of a high church official I once knew convey to you not -so much the real reason, as the state of mind out of which the thing -grows! - -“So long as there is a family of our faith in that village, that family -shall have the sacraments of our faith ministered to it.” - -He might just as well have added, “even though the heavens fall”; for -what he did was to force a subsidy into a community to help a small -faction of his particular church to survive when the majority of the -people, even the majority of his own little church organization, had -voted voluntarily to cut down the number of churches and eliminate the -unnecessary one. The high church official just ripped open a community -sore, when it had begun to heal. He poured gall in again after somebody -had sweetened community life for a moment. - - -_A New Religious Ethics Between Churches_ - -The egotism of a particular church group; the flaunting individualism -of a particular denominational combination of persons, whose personal -egos are, religiously, to be subjected, but whose combined ego is to be -exalted! Here is an uncharted sea of ethics and religion between church -groups. Shall it not be discussed? Especially when it grinds the rural -community to powder? Shall it be good Christianity for one Christian -sect to crowd and shove just like a bully in a mob? - -The day and generation is getting suspicious of pietists of all sorts -who can tell sinners how to behave individually to one another; yes, -who can even tell the labor group how to behave to the employer group -and the employer group to the labor group, but who have no conception -of what Christian principles apply as between one church group and -another church group in the realm of religion, except to beat the other -church group at all costs. If I were not heart and soul captured by the -character, life, philosophy, and guidance of Jesus himself, if I were -not thrilled by his words, and electrified by his life and death, more -and more the older I grow, I should be tempted to see in this cutthroat -group egotism of competitive Christian church groups a decline of -Christianity itself. - -“They all do it” is a lame excuse for sinners; but for a church body, -it is tragic. Think of a million people, more or less, possessing one -shibboleth, trying to embody earnestly the Christ, while deliberately -hamstringing another Christian church body which is doing the same -thing! - -But who is to blame? Whose sin is this prostitution of a holy thing? - -Did you ever happen to know the officials at the head of a Protestant -church body, either national or state? Did you ever know the persons -who distribute home-mission money after it is once collected? Did -you ever get a glimpse of the inside? Well, if so, then you know -how intensely human this situation is. You know how complex are the -forces that operate, how like politics are the powers behind the locked -doors. You know then that when you try to track this sinner, you can’t -find him. Nobody does the thing. Nobody does anything. Nobody is to -blame. The Christian leaders are not leading on such matters. They are -fighting the individual sins of the people. - -What would America think of a great Christian leader who should come -out and insist that Christian churches ought to love, respect, defer to -other Christian churches? What a stir in Christendom it would make for -a great man carrying his own church with him, let us say, to go up and -down the land preaching that membership in one Christian church should -thereby make us members in all Christian churches; preaching that we -should discount all the differences among Christian churches and love -all Christian churches for their likenesses? - -Look at this straw: - -In Canada an outstanding movement is nearing completion to unite -organically three great Protestant bodies, affecting more than three -quarters of a million of church members. The daily press recently in -explanation of the union, carried this item: - -“The Union had its origin in the conviction that many separate -churches of each denomination, especially in the rural districts, were -handicapped in limited membership and were unable to maintain properly -separate buildings and ministers. It is therefore a part of a tendency -in many other countries to submerge religious differences in an effort -at wider and more effective service.” - -This looks on the horizon like the peep of dawn of a new Christian -day--and what a dawn for the rural community that would be! - -But--lest we be too sanguine--that dawn has some climb to make yet. -Has not the Home Mission Council of the Federal Council of Churches -in America put into practice on the Western frontier for several -years principles of denominational courtesy? Have not the phrases of -their documents on “Overchurching,” “Underchurching,” and “Wasteful -Competition” seeped very generally throughout the settled portions -of the United States, as well as into the frontier? Have not the -Foreign Mission Boards of the various denominations for years gained -conspicuously the confidence of their laymen by the intelligent -distribution of territory among the missions of different church bodies -abroad? The fact is and must be reckoned with that all the words -and phrases and ideas and logic on this subject, pro and con, have -been bandied about until they are almost threadbare. The will to do, -however, is still very stubborn in old, established communities. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - - -“What is the difference between a state university and an ordinary -university?” - -A rather silly question, perhaps; but the answer that came back, -lightning-like, gave me the jolt of my life, and incidentally picked -out in my mind the pattern for the community church. Here is the -occasion and what took place: - -A reception for the distinguished regents of the University of -Wisconsin at the home of the president. In due time I found myself -approaching that awful reception line, terrifying, indeed, to me, a -new-comer. Suddenly I became aware that I was shaking hands with the -president, whose newness to the job of presiding over a university had -not entirely worn off. - -It was up to me to say something, and so, after the manner of a -pedagogue, I blurted out a question: - -“Mr. President, will you tell me the difference between a state -university and an ordinary university?” - -President Van Hise didn’t hesitate an instant with his answer. - -“I cannot speak for all state universities,” said he, “but this -university is run not for the students who happen to be here, but for -the persons who may never see the university--even to the last man, -woman, and child in the last community of the State.” - -I had become unconscious of the reception line, for I was startled -with an idea foreign to my bringing up, and I must make sure that I -perfectly understood. - -“Mr. President,” I interrupted, “do you mean to say that the -University of Wisconsin is not proud of turning out highly developed -personalities?” - -“Only as carriers,” President Van Hise quickly replied, in his -characteristic jerky manner; “carriers of ideas and attitudes even to -the isolated community and to the unpromising man. The students who are -here are here, as it were, by accident. But the university is run for -Wisconsin’s people at work.” - -I passed on down the line, and eventually out into a world strange to -me, where being a “carrier” of intellectual goods to the “isolated -community” and to the “last man” was an academic commonplace. - -Fourteen years of that day-by-day commonplace, however, never rubbed -off the beauty of its bloom for me; for here was a university running -at least neck and neck with church Christians in love for,--or duty -to, if you prefer it so,--the Gospel’s whomsoever. - -Having seen with my own eyes these last communities of a State -quickened into intellectual fervor through the devotion of university -men and women, do you think I do not know what would happen to the -spiritual life of these out-of-the-way communities if the supreme love -of devoted church men and women were brought to bear upon them? - - -_A Forecast Founded on Fact_ - -I will venture to forecast some of the things that would happen. -Every rural community would have a community church--a church for the -whomsoever, even to the last man, woman, and child in that community. -If topographically possible, every such church community would stretch -the bounds of its parish to include a thousand souls all told. In -communities of two thousand souls, there would be two churches--two -only, and both community churches. In communities of three thousand -souls, there would be three community churches, and three churches -only, every church, a community church; and no more churches than one -to one thousand of the community population; for it takes one thousand -of the population to maintain an effectual modern church; and every -church is to be a Christian community church as a safeguard against -paganism. But why am I so foolish as to foretell what would happen when -I can tell what is happening? - -There are to-day, we are told by those who keep informed on the -matter, a thousand community churches in the United States, of which -the greater part are in rural territory. In fact, it is reported that -new community churches are being organized at the rate, at present, -of six a month. To say that there is a community church movement -well-started is no exaggeration. Some States such as Massachusetts, -Vermont, Connecticut, Ohio, California, Colorado, Iowa, Illinois, are -outstanding in the movement. - -Of course, the community church is not yet standardized, but it is -shaping up. To affirm that there are three types, as some say, or five, -as others put it, is more or less arbitrary. Still, for the sake of -the man who understands better by types, I may say that some community -churches like to be known as having arrived at the community ideal by -“federation” of two or more denominational churches, the new church -preserving connection with a national church body. - -Other community churches pride themselves on being “union” churches, -each having originated from the organic union of two or more churches, -or having been established as a “union” church in a community -possessing no church, but containing families of various denominational -connections in the past. The union church once formed usually stands -alone, without any denominational affiliation. - -Then there is the regular “denominational” church, which either -just happens to be or has come purposely to be the only church in -the community; and which makes the boast of existing for the whole -community rather than for its particular denominational group. - -And there are other varieties, which could indeed be dignified into -types, if we were pushed to it. The important thing, however, is that -out of a general unrest and dissatisfaction with churches that aim -to keep breeding up within themselves a highly pedigreed group of -personalities which possess decidedly exclusive, if not aristocratic, -characteristics, have arisen overnight, as it were, churches which -admit to the inner circle all the pedigrees and aim at the democratic -ideal of acting in the realm of religion for the last man, woman, and -child in the community. - - -_Churches for the Whomsoever_ - -Here we have before our very eyes, then, a kind of a church which is -run, as President Van Hise said his university was run, not for a -select few within its walls, but for the whomsoever within its own -territory; a church that views every single member as a “carrier” of -the goods of life to the last man, rather than as a precious mechanism -in which should be lodged all the mysteries of a peculiar cult. - -Look over some of the stories of these churches which are confessedly -trying to find their way to a new expression of social religion -designed to prevent the wastes of competitive Christianity. - -Here are the high points in an Idaho community church: Rural, in a town -of 600 souls. Presbyterian by connection, but with members formerly -of sixteen different denominations. Membership, 400. Plant worth -$50,000, with eighteen separate class-rooms for Sunday-school use. -A community house, with gymnasium. Rest room for women and girls. A -week-day church school using one hour a week of school time. In summer, -a daily vacation Bible school. A Boy Scout troop. A Campfire Girls’ -organization. Potato growers and fruit men freely using the community -hall. High moral standards reflecting the unity of the people. - -Take another community church of farmers in Iowa, in the open -country: An architecturally commanding building, providing, like -a well-organized school-house, many separate rooms for religious -instruction. The church has deliberately packed into its conception -of “community church” the idea that, assuming Christianity to have -contact with every phase of living, the church has responsibility -for providing the auspices under which all social activities of the -community take place. What more natural, then, than that the Fourth -of July celebration should be around the most beautiful spot in the -community, the church? Farmers’ Institute in the church? Young people -having a place for good times at the church? A church committee looking -after the matter of bringing good families on to farms that are for -sale or rent in the community? - -Take a certain community church in Indiana. Here is the story of an -honest struggle on the part of four church pedigrees to burn their -bridges behind them, and, pooling their resources, to start in anew. -The peculiar traditions of each cult, however, cling desperately to -each group, until, after trying in vain to carry these psychological -contradictions along in an artificial unity, in a moment of supreme -devotion to the good of their community, they strip off their -trade-marks, forget their shibboleths, and step forward into religious -freedom. - -The community-church movement is not going to create, I surmise, new -sects, leaving a residuum of several more denominations. Rather it -is a real step towards the organic union of kindred church bodies on -the one hand, and so a reduction of sects; and on the other hand, a -step towards democratizing every church and making it a real community -church. - - -_The Rural Dilemma and the Way Out_ - -It will require only another thousand of these brave, venturesome -community churches to turn every select-bodied denomination to looking -itself over. This self-criticism will lead the great Protestant church -bodies, let us hope, to a church conscience in regard to destructive -church competition. Then it will be an easy step to coming to terms -with one another in any locality, so as to give the community a chance -to have a community church. - -The community church, if we can have any faith in mankind, is sure -to come along strong. If high officials become obstructionists, they -will be swept away; for the people, when they once clearly see, will -have their way in churches and religion as in the long run they do in -government and politics. - -The sooner the great Protestant bodies confess their sins of -competition and put their houses in order, the sooner the new day will -come for the remote community and the last man. - -Some of us know what it is to be a devotee of a great church sect. The -absolute rightness of our cult has been no more questionable than our -own existence. When our sect was in parallel columns with any other -religious sect, we did not, could not yield right of way. - -But when we are all consciously confronted with the problem of -working out the religious life of 30,000,000 of isolated farm people, -we wake up to the fact that we occupy a position where cult pride, -cult individualism, and cult exclusiveness break down. Then we find -ourselves in a dilemma; we must leave the farmers to rot, a thing which -is unquestionably abhorrent to our cult; or we must modify our cult, a -thing which on the surface seems a sacrilege to do. - -But there is a way out of every dilemma; generally, however at the cost -of a bit of human pride. The community church shows the various noble -church cults one way out of the rural church dilemma. - -Read these bold words from a group of fifty young Methodist rural -workers penned to bishops: - -“To the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church: We the undersigned -members of the Methodist Episcopal Church appeal to you to give -prayerful consideration to the following suggestions: - -1. That the bishops, district superintendents, and other administrative -officers of our denomination cordially coöperate with the leaders -of other denominations in an effort to so organize rural church -geographical units that not more than one Protestant church to every -one thousand population shall prevail as a standard. - -2. That service to the community rather than to the denomination be the -basis on which ministers shall be trained, appointed, and promoted. - -3. That the Methodist Episcopal Church take the lead in the -give-and-take method with other denominations, even to the extent -of encouraging the discontinuance of small, struggling, competing -Methodist churches in the interest of rural Christian service to the -communities involved. - -4. That zeal for service to the entire community and a sympathetic -consideration for those whose background and training are non-Methodist -shall characterize the efforts of the Methodist Episcopal Church -wherever it alone occupies a rural field. - -5. That the conference membership of a Methodist Episcopal minister -shall not be jeopardized by appointment as pastor of a federated or -undenominational church where such a church is required for the largest -service to the community.” - -Theological students and college students are not to be outdone by -their elders in bravery. Read the following document for circulation -among the officials of the various church bodies--a document which -sounds like the “first call” for the rural community church: - -“We the rural college student delegates at the American Country -Life Association Student Conference believe that the minister who -serves in a church which has no right to exist loses respect for -his profession and can not do outstanding work; we believe that our -denominational boards which appropriate money we give to keep churches -going in overchurched communities and which send leadership into such -communities are only making people feel that the ideals of Christianity -are no higher than those of pagan religions. We would apply the -principles and teachings of Jesus Christ. Therefore we recommend: - -1. That students preparing to enter the rural ministry refuse to serve -charges in overchurched communities. - -2. That we, as rural students, do all in our power in our communities -and in places of leadership that we may attain to prevent -denominational church boards from pouring money and leadership into -communities, which is to be used to perpetuate denominational strife -that is destroying the religious life of our communities. - -3. That we pledge ourselves to endeavor to substitute the principles -and teachings of Jesus Christ for narrow denominational creeds and -doctrines. In view of this, we shall try to obtain an atmosphere and -physical equipment of rural churches, as well as church services -themselves, that shall be designed to meet the physical, social, -mental, and spiritual needs of the people who worship there, regardless -of their denominations.” - -The press carries the story that down in Georgia five hundred farmers -last season dedicated an acre of land apiece, with all it grew, to the -Lord. These pieces of land are spoken of generally in Georgia as the -“Lord’s Acres,” and the “Lord’s Acre Plan” is hailed as a hundred per -cent. way to finance the country church. - -The story goes on to say: - -“Farmers in the South are firmly convinced that the Lord’s Acre yields -better crops than surrounding land, and that the entire farm of the one -giving the acre is more productive than those of his neighbors.” - - -_The Community Church as a Democracy_ - -The community church strikes me as a Lord’s Acre in rural Christendom -bearing a crop dedicated to God. And, if I read the returns aright, -the comparative yield justifies the belief. It is a church of the -people--a democracy in very truth. Any subtle influence that would tend -to wash in upon this democracy and wear it down to a dominating set of -people or to a group of negligible folk or to a loose aggregation of -nondescripts must be walled off with reinforced concrete. - -A single type of religious temperament will not govern the range and -character of the community church. A constant sort of ideals that -appeals only to the seraphic souls or to other minds only in moments -of exalted pitch will, by a natural process of elimination, soon -reduce the church to a temperamental sect. No, the church is made up -of all temperaments the matter-of-fact, active, and practical; the -poetic, sentimental, imaginative; the strenuous; the easy-going; the -enthusiastic; the petty; the anxious; the generous, self-denying; the -jolly, optimistic; the gloomy, conservative; the militant, crusading; -the important; the retiring. Their interests, too--the interests of the -whole church are as broad and various as human nature. - -A cross-section of Christianity will reveal a ten-thousand fold -variegation of human streak and human color wherever religion has -filtered into actual life. This meeting-ground of all the higher -interests of the community will, therefore, be home for each interest. -As no single type of temperament should repulse the others and shrink -the church, so no single activity of the church should monopolize -the focus of attention. The mission interest, the Bible interest, -the educational interest, the interests social, musical, ceremonial, -disciplinary, the evangelistic interest, the civic and industrial -interest, the financial interest, the idealistic interest, both -personal and social--all these and the rest will have good footing in -the community church. - -A church which should undertake to be a democracy in fact would find -that there is only one way of “maintaining interest” enough actually to -keep bringing the people together. This way is sounding God’s summons -to keep going the redemption of its community at every point. The -summons to definite undertakings to improve community life is like the -summons to a pioneer homesteader to make a home fit for his family. He -gears his hands to ax and saw, to plow and hammer, and he knows that -he can change the wilderness. - -Besides stereotyped church procedure, a steady look at living -conditions in the community, with the determined expectation of -changing these conditions for the better; a look for the moral clues -to whole wretched situations; a look to disentangle from the chaotic -mass single, great, unmistakeable moral issues--these steady looks, -under God’s summons, must be given anew in every generation to the -kaleidoscopic facts of human life. - -The church that shall go into the business of becoming self-conscious -and of realizing its democracy will hear God’s summons to community -redemption and begin to re-scale the map of church importance and -usefulness in the community on heroic lines. - - * * * * * - - - - -Transcriber’s note - - -Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. -Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized where appropriate. - -Other spelling has also been retained as originally published except -for the corrections below. - - Page 127: “pinked out in my mind the” “picked out in my mind the” - Page 144: “which appopriate money we” “which appropriate money we” - - - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74857 *** diff --git a/old/74857-h/74857-h.htm b/old/74857-h/74857-h.htm deleted file mode 100644 index 122de12..0000000 --- a/old/74857-h/74857-h.htm +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3721 +0,0 @@ -<!DOCTYPE html> -<html lang="en"> -<head> - <meta charset="UTF-8"> - <title> - Empty Churches | Project Gutenberg - </title> - <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover"> - <style> - -body { - margin-left: 10%; - margin-right: 10%; -} - - h1,h2 { - text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ - clear: both; -} - -p { - margin-top: .51em; - text-align: justify; - margin-bottom: .49em; -} - - -hr { - width: 33%; - margin-top: 2em; - margin-bottom: 2em; - margin-left: 33.5%; - margin-right: 33.5%; - clear: both; -} - -hr.chap {width: 65%; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;} -@media print { hr.chap {display: none; visibility: hidden;} } - -div.chapter {page-break-before: always;} -h2.nobreak {page-break-before: avoid;} - -table { - margin-left: auto; - margin-right: auto; -} -table.autotable { border-collapse: collapse; } -table.autotable td { padding: 0.25em; } - -.tdl {text-align: left;} -.tdr {text-align: right;} - -.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */ - /* visibility: hidden; */ - position: absolute; - left: 92%; - font-size: small; - text-align: right; - font-style: normal; - font-weight: normal; - font-variant: normal; - text-indent: 0; -} /* page numbers */ - -.blockquot { - margin-left: 5%; - margin-right: 10%; -} - -.center {text-align: center;} - -.smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} - -/* Images */ - -img { - max-width: 100%; - height: auto; -} -img.w100 {width: 100%;} - - -.figcenter { - margin: auto; - text-align: center; - page-break-inside: avoid; - max-width: 100%; -} - - -/* Poetry */ -/* uncomment the next line for centered poetry */ -.poetry-container {display: flex; justify-content: center;} -.poetry-container {text-align: center;} -.poetry {text-align: left; margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%;} -.poetry .stanza {margin: 1em auto;} -.poetry .verse {text-indent: -3em; padding-left: 3em;} - -/* Poetry indents */ -.poetry .indent0 {text-indent: -3em;} -.poetry .indent2 {text-indent: -2em;} - -.author { - text-align: right; - margin-right: 20% - } - -.x-ebookmaker body {margin: 0;} -.x-ebookmaker-drop {color: inherit;} - -.ph2, .ph3, .ph4 { text-align: center; text-indent: 0em; font-weight: bold; } -.ph2 { font-size: x-large; margin: .75em auto; } -.ph3 { font-size: large; margin: .83em auto; } -.ph4 { font-size: medium; margin: 1.12em auto; } - -hr.tiny {width: 10%; margin-left: 45%; margin-right: 45%;} - -.tnote {border: dashed 1px; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; -padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em; padding-left: .5em; -padding-right: .5em;} - -.indent { - margin-left: 15em; -} -.illowp100 {width: 100%;} - - - </style> -</head> -<body> -<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74857 ***</div> - - -<p class="ph3">EMPTY CHURCHES</p> - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p class="indent"><i>By the Same Author</i><br> -<br> -<span class="smcap">Rural Life</span><br> -<span class="smcap">Rural Social Problems</span><br> -</p> -</div> -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - - -<div class="chapter"> -<h1> -EMPTY CHURCHES</h1> - -<p class="ph2"><i>THE RURAL-URBAN DILEMMA</i><br> -</p> -<p class="ph4">BY</p> - -<p class="ph2">CHARLES JOSIAH GALPIN</p> -<p class="ph4"> -IN CHARGE OF THE DIVISION OF FARM POPULATION AND RURAL LIFE,<br> -BUREAU OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS,<br> -UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE.<br> -</p> -<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="ititle_decor" style="width: 9.375em;"> - <img class="w100" src="images/ititle_decor.jpg" alt=""> -</figure> - -<p class="ph2">THE CENTURY CO.</p> - -<p class="ph3"><i>New York & London</i><br> -</p> -</div> -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - - -<div class="chapter"> -<p class="ph4"> -<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1925, by<br> -The Century Co.</span><br> -<br> -PRINTED IN U. S. A.<br> -</p> -</div> -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - - -<div class="chapter"> -<p class="center"> -<i>In Memory of</i><br> -<span class="smcap">My Father and Mother</span><br> -<i>Who Spent Their Lives<br> -In Loving Ministration in<br> -Country Parishes</i><br> -</p> -</div> - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</span></p> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="PREFACE">PREFACE</h2> -</div> - - -<p>This little book invites you to read it -at a single sitting. If read later, a section -at a time, in the light of the whole -story, it will give you a better account -of itself. It is, I frankly acknowledge, -written out of emotion. It does not -therefore, I fear, contain all the words -it implies—half the time falling into -symbols and incidents to force a meaning; -half the time taking for granted -that you do not care to open or close -every side gate along the way.</p> - -<p>The view of a layman, as this easily -betrays itself to be, may prove something -of a shock to the rank and file of -the clergy; but it will serve, at least, to -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</span>show that a section of laymen take religion -more seriously after all than they -do economics, which forms their daily -adventure. Deep in our hearts, many -of us know that business is the great -masculine sport of the age; and in comparison, -the rôle of the priest and pastor -and the function of the church lie in -the far different realm of the heroic. -If I seem in this essay to expect too -much of the church and too much -of the preacher, my only apology -is my inability to read into the Four -Gospels, that stand on my desk along -with the other tools of life and work, a -philosophy of ease or of complacent -<i>laissez faire</i>.</p> - -<p>Although a confirmed lover of the -country, the farm, the farmer and his -children, I am none the less a firm believer -in the city—its necessity, function, -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</span>and destiny. Rural social welfare, -as I see it, is of utmost concern to -the American city. This is why empty -churches along the countryside bring -tragedy to city and country alike. This -is why ecclesiastical statesmen should go -to the country and see with their own -eyes the havoc wrought upon the farmer’s -family by competitive religion -among Protestants.</p> - -<p>And this is all the little book sets out -to do—to take everybody to the rural -communities with wide-open eyes, to see -the empty churches, the children without -God, the farm tenants without religion, -the parsons on the run for the city, -and the beginnings of a new type of -rural church.</p> - -<p>I wish gratefully to acknowledge my -indebtedness in this essay to the staff of -the Institute of Social and Religious -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</span>Research, New York City, upon whose -authoritative statements I have much -relied. To the Curtis Publishing Company, -Philadelphia, I desire to express -appreciation for their kindness in allowing -me to reproduce here materials -which have appeared in “The Country -Gentleman” during the past year.</p> - -<p class="author"> -<span class="smcap">C. J. Galpin.</span><br> -</p> - -<p>March, 1925.</p> - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span></p> -<p class="ph3">EMPTY CHURCHES</p> -</div> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span></p> -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span></p> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="EMPTY_CHURCHES">EMPTY CHURCHES</h2> -</div> - - -<hr class="tiny"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</h2> -</div> - - -<p>Recently, in a cross-roads -country church, a minister of the -Gospel, underpaid, somewhat shabby, -but eager and inspired, a man with a -message to give, stood before his congregation -to present that message. The -flame of inspiration in his haggard -young face flickered and died as he -looked down at the scanty congregation -assembled before him to hear the -Word of God. At a glance he counted -his handful of hearers. Six.</p> - -<p>Through a window on one side of -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span>the little church, he could see two other -meeting-houses nestling in the curve of -the road. Through a window on the -other side, he looked out at a third—four -country churches of four Christian -denominations, almost identical in doctrine, -there within two stone’s-throws -of one another.</p> - -<p>In three of these churches, including -his own, he knew that the members of -the congregation might be counted -upon the fingers of each pastor’s two -hands. The third church was closed -that day; its flock could afford only an -occasional shepherd.</p> - -<p>In all four of those churches put together, -not one fair-sized congregation. -In all four, not one pastor paid a salary -large enough to enable him to live on his -income as a minister. In all four, men -and women taxed by religion beyond -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span>their ability to pay, yet unable to support -their church without outside aid.</p> - - -<p><i>Jealous Denominations</i></p> - -<p>The young minister thought with pain -of other sections of the country -through which he had traveled all day -without seeing one church of any denomination. -He knew that an appalling -percentage of farm communities -throughout the United States were entirely -without churches, that thousands -of children, hundreds of their elders, had -never listened to the preaching of the -Gospel. Yet here there were four -churches at the country cross-roads!</p> - -<p>That afternoon that young pastor -wrote me a letter, wrote it in pain and -bitterness, but also in hope, in earnest -desire to get the facts before the -nation:</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span></p> -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>I saw in the paper the other day some -mention of the chief rural problems of the -United States. May I call your attention -to what ministers in every country district -regard as the stiffest problem known to them -and to their people? I refer to the problem -of the competitive religion, which affects not -only pastors, but the entire rural population, -financially and spiritually, as well. -The spiritual rivalry set in motion by well-meaning -home-mission boards and zealous -and jealous denominations is undermining -the present and the future welfare of the -country church by ignoring the law of -supply and demand. If you can suggest -any solution for this great problem, we shall -all be grateful.</p> -</div> - -<p>The case was in no way overstated -by this young man. It is quite true -that there are few, if any, greater rural -problems to-day than the problem of -the country church. It is undeniable -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span>that any honest student of conditions -in rural churches is confronted by staggering -and depressing statistics of -overchurching and underattendance -in some sections, and of entire lack of -attendance due to no churching at all -in others.</p> - -<p>Any map that showed the present -rural church distribution of the -United States would be alarmingly -reminiscent of a map of a country with -large areas of sterile famine-land. -Nine persons out of every hundred in -rural America can not get to church because -there is no church for them to -attend. This means that one seventh -of all the rural communities of the -United States are entirely without -Protestant churches. Pathetic reports -of the spiritual hunger of these land dwellers, -living in a Christian nation -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span>yet entirely shut off from Christian -organization of every kind, come from -these communities.</p> - -<p>“No Protestant sermon has ever -been preached in this locality,” is one -S O S sent out from a neighborhood -of two hundred persons. “Not a child -in this district has ever attended -Sunday-school,” deprecates another -community of approximately the same -size. “This back-to-the-land movement -is fine, but why should loyal -land dwellers have to condemn their -children to heathenry?” demands a -distracted mother, in a remote section of -a Western State. “My children are -growing up to be little savages, as far -as religion is concerned. They have -never been inside a church in their lives, -and they don’t know what Sunday-school -means.”</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span></p> -<p>Only one fifth of the rural population -goes to church.</p> - -<p>Two fifths of the rural churches of -the country are standing still or losing -ground.</p> - -<p>A quarter of all rural churches -have no Sunday-school.</p> - -<p>One fifth of all rural churches are -kept alive by home-mission aid. Of -these subsidized churches, a large -number are in active competition -with churches of very similar doctrines.</p> - -<p>Seven out of every ten rural -churches have only a fraction of a -pastor apiece.</p> - -<p>One third of all rural pastors receive -so low a salary that they can -live only by working at some other -occupation.</p> - -<p>One half of the rural churches of -the country make an annual gain in -membership of as much as 10 per -cent.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span></p> -<p>In striking contrast to this churchless -seventh of the country, are the -other six sevenths of rural America, -many of them so overchurched that -they are crying out for relief from the -burdens the churches are laying upon -them. There are ten times as many -churches for every thousand persons in -some of the rural districts of the -United States as there are in New -York City. Yet the percentage of -attendance for every thousand persons -is slightly lower in these rural sections -than it is even in New York. Obviously, -such a showing indicates a -startling lack of system in the distribution -of rural churches, a woeful waste -of the religious potentialities of the -country.</p> - -<p>Recently, a thorough survey of the -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span>rural church problem of the United -States was made for the first time in -the history of the country, under the -direction of H. N. Morse and Edmund -de S. Brunner, of the Institute of -Social and Religious Research, of New -York. Some of the statistics obtained -by them are presented in the foregoing -paragraphs.</p> - -<p>These facts, of course, offer a severe -shock to those who have the little white -church of the countryside enshrined in -memory along with the little red school-house. -We have fallen into the rut of -taking it for granted that our country -churches not only keep pace with the -best religious life of the nation, but even -stay a step or two in advance, if not -in theology, at least in interest in godly -things and in piety. We have come to -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>think of country folk as the true -church-goers of the United States. To -this sentimental point of view the facts -stated offer a true affront.</p> - - -<p><i>Fewer Church-goers</i></p> - -<p>There are to-day approximately -101,000 rural churches in the United -States. A long time ago, when there -were only a hundred such churches, -virtually the entire country population -attended them. Some time later, when -there were a thousand churches of the -kind, the average of attendance was -still exceedingly high. But of recent -years the percentage of rural church-goers -has almost seemed to be in an -inverse ratio to the increase in churches. -One out of every five is not a showing -that would have brought joy to the -Puritan Fathers. What is the reason -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>for, this precarious situation in the -rural churches of our nation? Does it -indicate that our country population -is made up of a less God-fearing folk -than in former years? Does it demonstrate -that religion is less near to the -hearts of the farm workers of the -United States than is true of its city -dwellers? Or are these conditions the -logical outgrowth of a faulty system, -the inevitable result of a church distribution -spiritually and economically -unsound?</p> - -<p>More than one thing must be taken -into consideration in any fair-minded -attempt to answer these questions. -For instance, there is the fact that during -the past few years the number of -tenant-farmers in the United States -has steadily increased, until now -thirty eight per cent. of the farms are -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>tenant operated, most often on the basis -of the one-year lease. Any fact that -tends to make the farmer more or less -a transient in the community naturally -deters him from forming social -or religious relationships.</p> - -<p>Another reason frequently given for -the low average of rural church attendance -is that so high a percentage—nearly -30 per cent.—of the nation’s -land workers are new Americans, the -foreign-born, or the children of the -foreign-born. There are States, such -as North Dakota, where nearly every -other farmer belongs to other than -American nativity, and whole sections -of the country, as in the Middle West, -where foreigners are in excess of two -fifths of the population. It is estimated -that at the present time more -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>than fifty per cent. of these people -are unministered to by any church, -Catholic or Protestant. Where anything -like an earnest and comprehensive -attempt has been made by churches -to be of aid to them, as among the -Mexicans of California, it has been -marked by astonishing results. Then -why have the churches done practically -nothing for the foreign-born in rural -sections? If the new American can -make good on the land, is it too much -to ask the church to make good with the -new American?</p> - -<p>When I hear it said that no one is -really interested in religion any more, -I cannot help thinking of an elderly -Yankee farmer in the State of Vermont, -one J. C. Coolidge, father of -our President, a man who talks little -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span>about religion, but who for years has -given virtually all his leisure time, and -a considerable slice of time not leisure at -all, to keeping alive the little white -church near his farm at Plymouth -Notch. He hauls the wood from his -own land that the congregation of that -little church may listen in comfort to -the Word of God; he even, I am told, -does the janitor work himself, since -the church has no funds for a janitor. -There is nothing especially remarkable -in this. There are thousands of such -men all over our country, men to whom -the church is a thing to make sacrifices -for, to keep alive at whatever -cost.</p> - -<p>But in many districts it really seems -that the fewer churches a county is -able to afford, the more it is apt to -have. Out of the 211 churches financially -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>aided by home-missions societies -in several counties where intensive -studies were made by the Institute of -Social and Religious Research, I am -told that it was found that 149 of these -churches could have been dispensed -with without essential loss to anyone. -All but thirty-four were competitive.</p> - - -<p><i>Untrained Country Preachers</i></p> - -<p>Another grave charge is made against -the church to-day in our country districts. -Farmers feel that they are -neglected by the ministers of their -churches.</p> - -<p>It is also charged that many rural -pastors lack both adequate training -and ability for their high calling. The -real marvel is that so many of these -men are of the high type they are.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span></p> -<p>It has to be admitted that there is -ground for the charge of incompetency -among some of the rural pastors of -the United States. These men, it is -true, are most inadequately prepared -for their work. How are they to afford -more training for a calling which -will never pay them any returns upon -it? That these men can develop into -able preachers has been demonstrated -by those who have had the opportunity -to complete their courses in the summer -school for ministers, inaugurated, -I believe, by the Presbyterian Board -and now conducted by several denominations. -But most of them do not -have this chance.</p> - -<p>It is competitive religion that is -largely responsible for these two dangerous -factors in rural religious life—the -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>non-resident pastor, too occupied -to be a true spiritual shepherd; and the -incompetent pastor, too incapable to -be a leader of his people.</p> - -<p>But Christianity will not vanish -from our country districts. Nowhere -is there better soil for the seeds of true -religion than in the sturdy soul of -rural America.</p> - -<p>It is not so much <i>isms</i> or <i>ologies</i> -that the rural population wants as it -is religious facilities for themselves and -for their children. Some time ago, -when a study of fifteen Western States -was made by the Home Mission -Council, it mentioned the following -fact:</p> - -<p>“The general feeling manifested by -the returns shows little care for denominationalism. -What these people want -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span>is some one to present Bible facts in an -acceptable manner.”</p> - - -<p><i>The Call Can Be Met</i></p> - -<p>This is as true to-day as it was when -it was written ten years ago. Sunday-schools -for their children; an adequate -number of churches, not fewer than -will meet their needs or more than they -can support; usable churches, open the -year round, with able ministers in -charge—these are the things the population -of our rural districts wants.</p> - -<p>How are they to get them? By the -installation of system into the religious -life of the country sections. There -are enough churches in the United -States to-day, if they were distributed -on the basis of a real need rather than -on the grounds of competitive religion, -to reach the remotest sections of our -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>country. The money now expended -on nonproductive churches would purchase -real vitality for essential churches -all through rural America.</p> - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span></p> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</h2> -</div> - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> - <div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent0">“<i>Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,</i></div> - <div class="verse indent0"><i>When wealth accumulates, and men decay.</i>”</div> - </div> -</div> -</div> - -<p class="author"> -<span class="smcap">Goldsmith.</span><br> -</p> - - -<p>Regular men and women long -for children as they long for good -luck, long life, and sweet happiness. -But they do not want just children, -any kind whatever so that they be -children. No indeed! It is always -a whole, healthy child, a bright, intelligent -child, a loving, obedient child, a -beautiful, virtuous child, that lives -warm in their dreams. And a child -with such characteristics costs more -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span>than many men and women can pay; -for a well-bred child, like a well-bred -colt, is the product of many favoring -tides of good fortune.</p> - - -<p><i>Farms, The Place of Children</i></p> - -<p>So it is that the Johns and Marys who -leave the farm and its open spaces for -city life give up having children of -their own,—often without knowing -it when they leave the country, to -be sure,—and find themselves later -doomed to work out human contentment -in some other way; for the high -cost of city space, of just sufficient -elbow-room for a child to grow in and -acquire the human characteristics desired, -is almost as prohibitive as if a -law were on the statute-books forbidding -the rearing of children in city -blocks. While my critic is biting his -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>thumb at this “exaggeration,” gravely -asserting that he knows there are many -families of children in our American -cities, I have caught his eye and will -hold it long enough to tell him a thing -disclosed by the last United States -Census report, viz., among the thirty -millions of farm people, there are -4,000,000 more children under twenty-one -years of age than there are among -any thirty millions of city people. -And this bald fact virtually declares -the truth I am uttering—that the -country contains the children of the -nation, that the farm is the natural -rearing-ground of well-bred children, -and that the city core—the stamping-ground -of business and adults—abhors -children as “nature abhors a vacuum.”</p> - -<p>My story will not reach home, however, -unless one pauses a moment to let -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>this census fact soak in. Here is an -excess of children living on our farms -that would make a small nation,—bigger -than Switzerland, bigger than -Chili, than Norway, than famous little -agricultural Denmark.</p> - - -<p><i>Cities Get Youth from Farms</i></p> - -<p>And what will become of this excess -of children? What else than this? -The farms will manage to feed them, -clothe them, educate them until they -come of age, when, possessed of the -strong right arm, they will turn their -backs on the farm and farming, and -go to recruit the nerve-fagged industry -of cities.</p> - -<p>The farms feed industry, professional -service, and city life with muscle, -intellect, and imagination. This is -the romance, and there is not a word in -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>it of wheat, corn, cotton, or cattle. -This every-day function of the farm, -often spoken of lightly, almost as if -it were a poetic fiction, is the solid stratum -of fact upon which the plot of my -story rests. The annual editorial -blast, “Keep the boy on the farm,” -never concerns this slowly moving -stream of young adults cityward, for -these are a surplus, an excess. And -they must go, as sure as fate. A legion -of editorials could not dam back this -flow.</p> - -<p>We are not without some definite -information, moreover, as to how this -surplus of farm population works its -way to the cities of the nation; for a -unique study has been made by the -United States Department of Agriculture—of -the movement of 3000 -young people from a thousand farms -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>in one community—over a period of one -hundred years—a community where -(and this fits into my story) the God of -the Puritans has been known by the -children from the days of the first log -cabins. We know just which farms -sent their surplus crop of young folk -away. We know exactly where they -went in the United States. And, -furthermore, we know what vocations -they recruited, and what achievements -in these vocations they made. In a -nutshell, we know in some measure -what the contribution of human force -and influence was from these thousand -farms, farm by farm, to the upbuilding -of the cities of the nation. The unfolding -picture of this farm community’s -impact upon the nation’s life during -the century just passed is precisely -the thing many persons have looked for -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>to put national meaning into the daily -disappearance from the farms of the -surplus of young adults which every -few years amounts to a strong small -nation poured into city industry.</p> - -<p>I cannot pass this remarkable study -by without naming some of the men -who as “exportable surplus” left the old -farmstead to work out careers in cities. -I will name only those whom you know, -and know to honor. You remember -Governor George Peck of Wisconsin. -You knew him as the <i>Peck</i> of “Peck’s -Bad Boy.” Farm number 555 among -these thousand farms gave Governor -Peck to Wisconsin. Governor Reuben -Wood of Ohio came from farm number -119. Governor Cushman Davis, -of Minnesota, afterward United States -Senator, was the product of farm number -556, just as much as the wheat -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span>from that farm was a product and went -into national trade. Farm number 618 -gave Charles Finney to American -Christendom and to Oberlin College -as its honored president. Farm number -701 raised Charles N. Crittenton, -gave him to the wholesale drug business -in New York City, in which he accumulated -wealth with which he put -into operation his ideal for friendless -girls. The Florence Crittenton Rescue -Homes for girls in seventy-two -cities of the United States tells his -story. One of the little hamlets in the -community produced Daniel Burnham, -America’s leading architect, at home -equally in Chicago, New York, or -Rome, Italy.</p> - -<p>But these brighter lights of the exodus -do not by any means convey what -is perhaps after all the greater influence -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>and might of the majority of -the human surplus who went forth and -found their places and played their -rôles as less widely known personalities -in enterprises of banking, manufacture, -teaching, or merchandizing, where -they helped weave the fabric of -America and its institutions as we -know them in every-day life.</p> - -<p>The force of this plain story of the -human product of good farms, in a -community where God was known, -lies not in what might be considered the -exceptional character of the community, -but rather in the fact that the story -of this particular community of farms -is the story, in one respect or another, -of all American farm communities. -This study convinces both men of the -farms and men of the cities,—as it sets -their memories to work about the migrants -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>from the land whom they have -known—that as the farming communities -wax or wane, so wax or wane the -cities and the nation.</p> - - -<p><i>Many Children Virtual Pagans</i></p> - -<p>And here an unsuspected villain enters -my story. Do not laugh in your -sleeve when you discover that the villain -is a fact, merely a fact; but, by the by, -a very stubborn and blistering fact. -Of the fifteen millions of farm children—children -under twenty-one years -of age,—more than four millions are -virtual pagans, children without knowledge -of God. If, perchance, they -know the words to curse with, they do -not know the Word to live by. This -saddening fact is the solemn disclosure -of the recent study, already -mentioned, made by the Social and Religious -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>Institute of New York City.</p> - -<p>A survey of 179 counties in the -United States, representatively selected, -enables the Institute with confidence -to assert that “1,600,000 farm -children live in communities where -there is no church or Sunday-school -of any denomination,” and “probably -2,750,000 more who do not go to any -Sunday-school, either because the -church to which their parents belong -does not have any, or because they do -not care to connect themselves with such -an organization.”</p> - -<p>One does not get the real inwardness -of this fact until one appreciates that -these 1,600,000 of pagan children are -not scattered evenly, or more or less -evenly, among the other millions of -children who are in contact with the -Bible, but are in a great measure homed -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>in bibleless, godless communities. The -nation might possibly assimilate a million -bibleless children if they were -brought up among several millions of -children who know the concepts of -religion; but absorbing godless children -in great numbers from whole godless -groups is a bird of a different -feather. What is still more disconcerting, -the trend, we are led to suppose, -is not from bad to better, but -from bad to worse.</p> - -<p>“There is no national passion for -seeking out the godless community -and setting the Bible there,” we hear -on every hand.</p> - -<p>“The promoters of Bible study are -too apologetic to business, to education, -to pleasure, even, and go not about -their tasks as those who have a commission -from the nation,” many say.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span></p> -<p>But these bare statements fail, perhaps, -to get hold of us. We must have -particulars and the pulse of the thing. -And so I wish to take a page out -of my own experience and let you -read it.</p> - - -<p><i>Trapped in a Godless Community</i></p> - -<p>My duties, a while back, took me into -the clover-bearing hills of a promising -county in a dairy State. I stayed the -night with a farmer’s family, enjoying -the hospitality and confidences of the -home. Never shall I forget two episodes -of the evening.</p> - -<p>The milking was finally over—twelve -mighty good cows. I had been allowed -to milk three, taking the mother’s place -on her favorite milking-stool. Certain -cows were “tender” and responded -kindly to her gentler touch.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span></p> -<p>The house was on a side hill sloping -steeply to the road, and across the road -was a thinly timbered twenty-acre lot. -The warm milk had been poured into -ten-gallon cans and carried up to the -house, where stood, in a neat little -milk-house, a cream separator. When -all was ready, the separator began to -sing, the cream came trickling out, the -skim-milk poured into a ten-gallon -can, as the gaunt six-foot-three, -narrow-shouldered farmer turned the -crank. At the first whirring tune-up -of the separator, I hear a scurrying -of feet in the timber lot below, and -soon a regiment of hogs and pigs were -at the fence, standing with hind feet -in the long trough, front feet over the -top rail of the fence, black heads in a -row, beady little eyes peering up the -hill, open mouths giving vent to a long-drawn -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>squeal of jubilant petition. As -the whir of the separator grew into a -liquid hum, the squealing chorus rose -to heaven, filling the valley, investing -the farm, like a piece of symbolism, -with the imperious demands of animals -and crops upon the total energies of -the family. Finally the last drop of -milk went through the separator. -Then the father put his hands to two -handles of two ten-gallon cans of skim-milk; -one son grasped the other handle -of one can; another son caught hold -of the handle of the second can; while -each son in his remaining hand held a -pail of the milk. Then they three, -with two cans and two brimming pails, -took up their stately march abreast -down the hill to the squealing chorus -at the trough. It looked for all the -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>world like some priestly ritual. The -milk was poured into the trough. The -pigs ceased to chant and began to -suck, guzzle, push, and grunt. So the -day’s work was over, and we sought -the house. Darkness fell over the hill -and valley and the filled pigs lay down -to sleep; while the farmer gathered his -family about him, took up his Bible -and read the Scriptures, even as did -the cotter, whom Burns, the farmer -Scot, made us know:</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> - <div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent0">The priest-like father reads the sacred page,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How Abram was the friend of God on high;</div> - <div class="verse indent0">Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With Amalek’s ungracious progeny;</div> - <div class="verse indent0">Or how the royal bard did groaning lie</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Beneath the stroke of Heaven’s avenging ire;</div> - <div class="verse indent0">Or Job’s pathetic plaint and wailing cry;</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span></p> - <div class="verse indent2">Or rapt Isaiah’s wild, seraphic fire;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre.</div> - </div> -</div> -</div> - -<p>Conversation in the morning -brought out the fact that this hillside -home was virtually the only one, in -this clover community, struggling to -bring up its children in the knowledge -of God. No church, no Sunday-school, -no parochial school, no Bible -class. The gaunt father, gathering -emotion as he overheard his own story, -said:</p> - -<p>“I have only one problem now. In -twelve years my cows and hogs have -paid for themselves, paid for my farm, -built my barn and house. The one -problem is not money any longer, but -it is my boys and girls. They are just -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>now at the point where the home can -no longer hold them, and they will, I -fear, sink into the mire of this godless -community.”</p> - -<p>“What do you mean, ‘mire’?” I inquired.</p> - -<p>“Well, it is hard to put into words,” -he continued. “Perhaps this will give -you some idea: since I have been here, -now twelve years, not a wedding has -taken place anywhere hereabouts that -has not been forced. And this is not -the worst of it.”</p> - -<p>“Why don’t you start a Sunday-school?” -I urged.</p> - -<p>“Too late!” he sighed. “My children -are almost beyond me. I was, I -fear, too busy with my cows and pigs, -and the children just grew up before -I knew it.”</p> - -<p>“What will you do?” I could not -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span>refrain from asking, more to myself -than to him, in my own perplexity, as -I tried to share in the problem.</p> - -<p>“The only thing I can do,” said he, -as if the conversation had strengthened -a previous resolution half-heartedly -entertained, “is to yield to my wife’s -judgment; sell the farm, go to some -safe community where there is a -church, Sunday-school, and a high -school. We people here in this -community made our great mistake in -starting out wrong. We made a -religion of our pure-bred hogs and -cattle, and let our boys and girls go to -the dogs.”</p> - -<p>This tale of children, who turned -out to have been unwittingly sidetracked -by cows and hogs, recalled my -own experience in breaking some new -land in the Skims at a period in my -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>life when the doctor had said: “What -you need is to get close to the land. -Crawl around on the soil a year or two -and you will learn over again how to -sleep.”</p> - -<p>Well, with my old horse The Cid -and a mail-order one-horse plow, I -went through the motions of plowing -that pine cut-over from which the pines -had been skimmed off like cream from -a milk-pan. Surveying the scratched -and torn field, somewhat bruised and -bleeding, I will declare it was, I said -to myself:</p> - -<p>“It doesn’t look really plowed; but -it will be all right when I get it dragged.”</p> - -<p>Then The Cid did his very best at -dragging. Dutifully—with an inner -chuckle, I am sure, at my green -expectations, for he was a seasoned -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>old Skims horse himself—he plodded -along and over the field. At last I -stood sweating and weary, looking it -over, and was obliged to own up:</p> - -<p>“It doesn’t look dragged; but it will -be all right when I get it cultivated.”</p> - -<p>I went through the form of marking -and planting, and though I couldn’t -see the rows very well, I quieted my -discontent by saying to myself, “It will -be all right when I get it hoed.”</p> - -<p>But when the corn came up, it was -accompanied by such a community of -weeds, briers, grass, and small bushes, -that I couldn’t cultivate because I -couldn’t see the corn.</p> - -<p>After I had in much perplexity -stared at the cultivator and then at -the field, I looked that piece of work -square in the face and averred:</p> - -<p>“If I ever plow again, I am not -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>going to kid myself into thinking that -the cultivator will straighten out the -sins of the plow.”</p> - -<p>This raw-boned farmer and his wife, -possessed of the fairest intentions in -the world for their children, had -become trapped in a godless community -before they were aware of it; all -because the seed-bed of human life had -not been plowed deep with social -religion at the very outset. Is this -community a fair example of bibleless -country groups? I believe it is. I -am sorry to admit it, but I believe it is -a fair type.</p> - - -<p><i>When the Bible Has No Interpreter</i></p> - -<p>If a nation can not build civilization -securely without a knowledge of history, -neither can children build character -without a knowledge of those men -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>and women of history who have essayed -to know God. The Bible is the -story of such persons. It is biography. -It is lives of those in whom the -soul of man in his search for God has -risen to its highest levels. There is no -substitute for this Bible biography,—except, -if you please, another Bible.</p> - -<p>And perhaps, in point of Bible -illiteracy, next to the community which -has no Bible in it, lies the community -in which, though there is a Bible, the -leaders in teaching the Bible, or rather -in explaining the Bible to the children, -are themselves grossly ignorant, if not -demoralized. The Bible is a book of -many stories, of a host of incidents, of -innumerable ideas. Selection is vital. -To select from the Bible and hand on -its meaning in grave ignorance is to -run the risk that all ignorance runs. -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>Here is where many a rural community -suffers, when it is commonly thought -to be provided with a knowledge of -God.</p> - -<p>It fell to my lot recently to visit a -small rural community of twenty-five -families of this type. Only three of -the families were totally without -church connections, or at least church -traditions. One church building has -fallen in. One lies torn down. The -third, still standing, is rotting. It is -supposed to be “haunted.” Splits disorganized -and discouraged the people. -A fourth rude church structure has -come, but splitting up from within has -begun. Ignorance of a crass sort -rules. The Bible has had no well-balanced -soul to interpret its wonderful -truths.</p> - -<p>The family histories of this settlement -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>run—to speak very grimly -indeed—like an anthology of despair -and depravity. Listen:</p> - -<p>“She drowned her babies regularly -in the creek.”</p> - -<p>“He was said to be the father of his -own daughter’s first child.”</p> - -<p>“This woman was subnormal and -has three illegitimate children.”</p> - -<p>“This other woman is a menace to -every man in the community.”</p> - -<p>“He committed suicide.”</p> - -<p>“She poured kerosene on the cat and -set fire to it.”</p> - -<p>“Boil nails in water to find out if -person for which water is named committed -a crime. If nails crackle and -knock against the pan, then person -named is guilty.”</p> - -<p>“A person dies hard on feathers. -We took mother’s bed out from under -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>her three times when we thought she -was dying.”</p> - -<p>“Our children don’t need to go to -school to learn to read. The Spirit -teaches them to read.”</p> - -<p>The people of these families looked, -in the face, like people you meet in -any fair group of folks; but their -minds, their deeds, their hopes, their -fears! There’s the rub. Is this -group of twenty-five families typical -of country communities where the -Bible is fought over by blind leaders -of the blind? I am afraid it is. I -admit it with shame, but I admit it. -The Bible,—as if it were a plow found -by persons who knew not its use, but -who scrapped hard for its possession as -an ornament of their dooryards,—the -life-giving Bible in these hands is still -a closed book and a locked-up treasure.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span></p> - -<p><i>Pedigreed Austerity Better Than -Ignorance</i></p> - -<p>Human life at its best is no mere accident -which may happen anywhere -under any conditions. The best has -its pedigree. It is the result of infinite -pains with children as with crops and -animals. Even the austere, narrow-gaged -leadership having a pedigree is -far better than this ignorant, illiterate -type.</p> - -<p>I remember well as a lad how my -father, a country minister, collegebred -and trained in the theological school of -his particular denominational stripe, -stood rock-like in his parish for -temperance. It was a grape country, -with several wine distilleries. My -father taught abstention from wine-drinking -and preached against the -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>distilleries. One church pillar was in -the wine business and furnished the -sacramental wine. My father finally -carried his logic to the point where he -made announcement:</p> - -<p>“Next Sunday at the Communion -we shall not use fermented wine.”</p> - -<p>Sunday came. A larger congregation -than usual assembled. There -was a tenseness of silent emotion in the -stiff Sunday-dressed village and -farmer folk, which I can feel yet, after -forty years.</p> - -<p>The communion-table was set. I -see my father now, as he picked up the -flagon of wine and poured into the -chalice. He paused—on his face a -sudden look of bewilderment. Then -slowly he poured the chalice of wine -back into the flagon, strode to the door, -and emptied the contents on the -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>ground. Quietly resuming the ceremony -he said:</p> - -<p>“We will commune without wine to-day.”</p> - -<p>The distiller had done his dirty work -and put one over on the country -parson. But the parson, although he -caused a sense of consternation to -creep over the church folk,—akin to -the horror in the multitude when -<i>Count Antonio</i>, in Anthony Hope’s -tonic story, laid hands on the Sacred -Bones in midstream,—by this daring -act helped plug the bung-holes and -spike the spigots in the cellars of that -county. And the whole countryside, -be it said, responded to the resolute will -of my father to make God known to a -community steeped in wine.</p> - -<p>My father probably shared the -narrow-mindedness of his particular -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>pedigree, but he certainly hewed to the -line like a prophet of old. His crop -of young converts came usually in -winter; but the snow and ice had no -deterring chill for him. He never -thought of postponing the baptismal -rite till summer. He had a large hole -cut through in the little river near by, -for water helped mightily in his system -of doctrine. He didn’t spare me -either. At eleven years of age, he led -me, as he did my country playmates, -out of the sleigh, down the snowbank, -into this ice-water. There was no -softening of the ideals of life in that -parish, I can tell you. And the God -of Daniel was known and acknowledged -there in fear and trembling.</p> - -<p>When, in after years it fell to my -fortune to live on the Skims and to woo -sleep with logging, stumping, and -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>“scratching” the land, I saw what a -real Sunday-school would do even in -a submarginal community for the -children of the pine cut-over. There -was the farmer widow woman with the -man’s hands. What would have been -her chances of rearing her seven -children to usefulness and self-respect -without that weekly community-school -under good leadership?</p> - -<p>I hear again her breezy, cheery call -to her brood as she drives up to the -little church.</p> - -<p>“Pile out.”</p> - -<p>“Pile in,” when Sunday-school is -over.</p> - -<p>A slap of the lines, and a piece of -rural America goes back to its cabin, -minds sprayed with race lore. A -mighty wholesome sight in a community -of tools with broken handles, of -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span>harnesses toggled with hay-wire, of -fortunes “busted”, of the blind, and of -those who could not sleep.</p> - -<p>There was the old retired farmer, -Scotch McDugle, too, eighty years old. -He would come over from next door -of an evening and swap Skims stories -for a cheery welcome and a listening -ear. It would be midwinter. The -sheet-iron stove showed red.</p> - -<p>“Come in, Mr. McDugle,” my wife -would say. “Take off your hat and -mittens.”</p> - -<p>“Oh, no, no,” he would reply, “just -stepped in to say ‘howdy.’ Can’t stay -a minute.”</p> - -<p>Then McDugle would settle down -for the evening close to the red-hot -stove, mittens drawn tight, Scotch cap -pulled close down over his ears. As -he got limbered in memory, he would -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>go through a set of queer antics with -his lips and tongue—little dry, staccato -sputters. He reminded me in this of a -courtly neurasthene I once met who -said, as he went through similar tongue -motions, “I beg your pardon, but I -have a hair on the tip of my tongue -which I seem never able to get off.”</p> - -<p>Farmer McDugle’s favorite theme -was the making of great American -men out of “hard knocks” and “a good -pinch of God.” He reveled in -Lincoln, whom he had known; and -he never got tired of weaving the people -he knew in with the race-heroes of -all time.</p> - -<p>As I think of McDugle and his ilk -in these later days, I can not help -suspecting that bleak little Scotland -and God in the life, despite the stain -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>of the “wee drap o’rye,” account for -many of America’s man-making rural -communities.</p> - - -<p><i>When Catholic and Protestant Agree</i></p> - -<p>The chairman of the Board of -Directors of the National Catholic -Rural Life Conference, in a call -published (in the April 1924 number -of “St. Isadore’s Plow”) for the -second annual Catholic Rural Life -Conference, says:</p> - -<p>“We have two distinct entities of -population, and, we might say, of -civilization in the United States—the -urban and the rural. The church is -decidedly urban. So far as the Church -is concerned, the country towns and -villages are still ‘pagani.’”</p> - -<p>Thus you see Protestant and -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>Catholic agree in seeing the menace of -rural paganism within the borders of -Christian America.</p> - -<p>This is not the moment to settle the -blame for this condition on any persons -or sects. It is rather the time for -a statesmanlike move to meet the -menace. Bible instruction of worth, -dignity, intelligence, in every community, -made accessible to the last child, -is an aim which alone can meet the -case. But this is an herculean stunt, -and requires some of the same sweep -of coöperative, universal momentum -as drove out yellow fever, malaria, and -is fighting pellagra, hook-worm, and -tuberculosis. Bible illiteracy ranks as -a problem with book illiteracy; and as -great a unanimity is required to root it -out as to eradicate book illiteracy. A -hundred different religious bodies in -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>the United States have striven more -or less fitfully in the past with this -problem. But far more is needed than -the hundred-headed effort. When, in -the late war, the Allies came to their -senses and found that their struggle -was not a rope-pull nor a barbecue, -but a life-or-death struggle, they -elected Foch to give universality of -will to the cause of defense.</p> - -<p>The children of rural America -deserve by good rights a Foch to lead -the forces of Bible literacy against a -creeping, godless paganism. I have -refrained from presenting the religious -case for this crusade. The menace is -so great that the social appeal should -be sufficient—and should reach every -intelligent lover of America, be he -fundamentalist, modernist, ethicist, or -just plain man.</p> - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span></p> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</h2> -</div> - - -<p>William James, the Harvard -psychologist, used to -say in his class-room: “I must -fight the devil and his wiles, for -God needs me. I may help save the -day.”</p> - -<p>In the same room, the next hour, -Josiah Royce, the philosopher, would -say, “I must set my heel on Satan’s -neck, for God’s victorious spirit is in -me.”</p> - -<p>Whichever of these two schools of -moral action one belongs to, one is -bound, you see, to fight the devil and -his guile; and in country life this is no -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>joke, for as it turns out, the devil -waved a mighty wicked wand over the -American farm tenant when he jockeyed -him on to the land into the shoes -of the departing farm owner. It was -a devilish, cunning trick to decoy the -owner, body and soul, into town and -into the town church—away from the -little country church of his fathers. It -was, however, the meanest lick of -Satan against the peace of the tenant -to bewitch him into flitting from farm -to farm and from community to -community. And now the situation -has come to such a pass that, unless -the American church has the grace and -backbone and subtlety to outgeneral -the devil in his game, the devil wins; -for in matters of religion, the landless -man is between the devil and the deep -sea.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span></p> - -<p>“<i>Churches Detour—Tenants Ahead</i>”</p> - -<p>It is old stuff, in a way, this cheerless -story of farm tenants and religion. -Pick up, as I have done, either at -random or quite methodically, booklets, -chapters, articles, or pamphlets -dealing at first hand with the farm -tenant, and the tale of his religious -handicap runs drearily, hopelessly to -the same sad end. For example, take -this rather mild statement from a -member of Roosevelt’s Country Life -Commission:</p> - -<p>“The farm owner who has moved to -town and is renting his land cannot be -expected to be a real, vital force in -the rural church. Nor can the tenant -who has a one-year lease, or whose -tenure is uncertain, be expected to -cultivate the Christian graces by -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>intimate fellowship with his neighbors -and associates; in other words, to take -root in the community and become a -part of it.”</p> - -<p>“Why, then,” it will be asked, “try -to dress up the outworn subject -again?”</p> - -<p>The plain answer, without any -apology, is simply this: The farm-tenant -case, as a phase of religion in -eclipse, has not yet cast an image on -the American mind. The American -church,—and I class together all the -Christian bodies in this sweeping term,—the -Christian conscience of the -American church has apparently reversed -itself and “passed by on the -other side” of this bedeviled situation. -Now such an attitude, such collective -behavior, is ruthless, well nigh unforgivable, -and in fact incomprehensible. -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>Words must continue to be spoken -until the church ceases to detour -around the tenant.</p> - - -<p><i>The Flood of Tenancy Unabated</i></p> - -<p>And first of all, in order to see the -gravity of the case as it stands, one -must sense the resistless character of -the sweeping flow of tenancy itself. -Decade by decade the flood has risen. -In 1880, 25.6 per cent. of the farms in -the United States were tenant farms; -in 1890, 28.4 per cent.; in 1900, 35.3 -per cent.; in 1910, 37.0 per cent.; in -1920, 38.1 per cent.</p> - -<p>If one looks a little closer at the -regions where the flood is highest—almost -over the dikes, so to speak—the -truth strikes home a little stronger. In -the east South-central States, containing -Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span>Mississippi, the percentage in 1880 -was 35.2; in 1890, 38.6; in 1900, 49.1; -in 1910, 52.8; in 1920, 49.6. In the -west south-central area, containing Arkansas, -Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, -the percentage in 1880 was 35.2; in -1890, 38.6; in 1900, 49.1; in 1910, 52.8; -in 1920, 53.2. In the west north-central -area, containing, as a very vital -part of American agriculture, Minnesota, -Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, -South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, the -percentage in 1880 was 20.5; in 1890, -24.0; in 1900, 28.6; in 1910, 30.0; in -1920, 34.1.</p> - -<p>When the United States Census -Report for 1920 came out and was -scanned, it was discovered by every one -that in the decade between 1910 and -1920 the flood of tenant farms had in -number gone down in some States a -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span>little, as in Alabama and Mississippi, a -fact which brought a decline in the east -south-central area from 52.8 per cent. -in 1910 to 49.6 per cent. in 1920. But -lest the friends of agriculture in -America should be put under ether by -this disclosure, Dr. C. L. Stewart, now -professor in the University of Illinois, -while a member of the United States -Department of Agriculture, in a statement -entitled, “The Persistent Increase -of Tenant Farming,” called -attention to the fact that the bare number -of tenant farms is a less accurate -index of the sweep and meaning of -tenancy than the acreage involved and -the value of that acreage:</p> - -<p>“When measured on the basis of -acreage and value, the number of -rented acres per thousand and the number -of dollar’s worth of rented land per -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span>thousand was not only higher (in 1910 -and 1920) than that shown on the preceding -basis (number of rented farms), -but has been growing at much faster -rates during both of the decades since -1900, especially during the decade just -ended.... In the light of this analysis, -the tide of tenancy is shown by the -latest census to have continued with -little or no abatement.”</p> - -<p>In sober truth, this flood-tide of tenancy -is no mere passing phenomenon -in the adolescent experience of America, -but is a settled characteristic now -being wrought into the texture of -American life. As a social and economic -force, tenancy is here to stay. -Statesmen may well build their dikes -higher against it; but American religious -leaders—the makers of ecclesiastical -policy—must from now on -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span>gravely take farm tenancy into their -reckoning, or assume spiritual responsibility -for its continued religionless -character.</p> - - -<p><i>Locating the Devil’s Quarry</i></p> - -<p>Let us draw a bit closer to these tenant -folks and look them in the eyes. There -they are, in round numbers two and a -half millions of tenant operators; or, -perhaps, better reckoned for our purpose -as twelve millions of people, -counting all persons in the tenant families -both old and young. But, as almost -everybody knows, there are a few -vast differences among tenants, and we -must sift a little and sort out the group -that the devil is laying his finger on -and claiming as his own.</p> - -<p>A tenant who is a son or daughter -of the landlord, or otherwise related to -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span>the landlord by blood or marriage, is -without question not only a privileged -person and his family a privileged -family among tenants, but, what is more -to the point, living on family lands as -he most generally does, the “related -tenant” is so often an owner in prospect -with a deed “in escrow” as the -law would put it, that while nominally -a tenant, he is an owner in thin -disguise, and virtually has in the community -the status of an owner. The -census does not declare what percentage -of the twelve millions of tenant -folk belongs to this favored class; but -whatever the percentage is, it is obviously -decreasing with the decreasing -percentage of owner-operating families. -Representative studies made by -the United States Department of Agriculture -indicate that 23 per cent. of -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span>the tenant population belongs at present -to this group. If we accept this -estimate, then, in 1920, there were -2,760,000 persons in the families of -“related tenants.”</p> - -<p>To protect my story against the will -to exaggerate the landless element, -let us call the total number of “related -tenants” three millions; and then let -us deduct this whole group from the -twelve millions of tenant folks. This -leaves nine millions of tenants unprivileged -by birth or marriage in respect -to land.</p> - -<p>Lest any one should feel, furthermore, -that I am trying to make, under -cover, a case of the colored tenant,—whose -situation is confessedly special -and should not, for obvious reasons, be -confused with that of white tenants,—let -us sift and sort again and take out -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>three and a half millions of colored tenant -folk, old and young. The residuum -is five and a half millions of white -tenants. This is the group that has -swelled in numbers during the past -four decades. This is the group that is -all the time spreading over more and -more acres, all the time creeping on to -more and more valuable land. This -group of landless men, women, and -children (I do not mean to say that this -is the only landless group of white -farm people, for the agricultural-labor -class makes another story), occupying -more and more the strategic positions -in agriculture and country life, contains -the devil’s quarry.</p> - - -<p><i>Tenants On the Go</i></p> - -<p>We must add one more particularly -distressing feature to our general picture. -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>In December and January in -the South, or in March in the North, -there is a great stir among these tenants, -for moving-time has come. During -the year between December 1, -1921, and December 1, 1922, according -to a statement put out by the U. S. -Department of Agriculture, entitled, -“Farm Occupancy, Ownership, and -Tenancy, 1922,” “nearly 663,000 shifts -on farms exchanging tenants” occurred -of which “nearly 250,000 tenants -were indicated to have either discontinued -farming for some other -occupation or moved out of their communities.”</p> - -<p>In this exodus, poverty tags along, -poverty carrying in her apron all the -witch’s ills—hard luck, dimmed lights -of the mind, illness, inferiority written -in behavior, stolid despair, indifference -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span>to improvement, insensibility to -refinements. In the South, poverty -hangs on to the coat-tails of the “Cropper”—him -of the lowest estate of the -tenant. In 1920, according to the -United States Census Report, there -were 227,378 white croppers, more than -one million white cropper folk.</p> - -<p>Behold a host, comparable with the -host of Israel on the way to Canaan. -The roads are filled with teams, with -jags of household belongings, with led -or driven cattle, horses and mules, with -loads of women and children. A small -nation is folding its tents and moving -on ere its tents have fairly got pitched. -White tenants alone,—and mind you, -out of the group of five and a half millions -of landless people,—an army of -1,375,000 souls; and of these, more -than a half a million going across the -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span>border of the community into a strange -land for another short sojourn. This -is the picture you will see every year—over -a quarter of all tenants moving, -and ten per cent. of all tenants moving -into strange associations among -strange people.</p> - - -<p><i>Outcasts From the Church</i></p> - -<p>In their recent study, “The Town and -Country Church,” Dr. H. N. Morse -and Dr. de S. Brunner, of the Institute -of Social and Religious Research, have -this convincing word to say about the -church and the farm tenant:</p> - -<p>“The church in the country areas is -not, generally speaking, the church of -the landless man. In a study of all -the churches in 179 counties, located in -44 States, the situation, which we believe -is reliably representative of conditions -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span>in the United States as a whole, -is this: The percentage of farm owners -who are members of churches in the -South is 59.5, while of tenants who -are members the percentage is 33.5; in -the Southwest, of owners, 26.2, while -of tenants, 9.2; in the Northwest, of -owners, 16.4, while of tenants, 7.4; in -the Middle West, of owners, 47.9, while -of tenants, 20.3; in the Prairie, of owners, -55.6, while of tenants, 15.8.”</p> - -<p>These two authorities on the farmer’s -church, draw from their study -of the high and low tenancy areas in -175 counties this further conclusion: -“The larger the proportion of farm -tenants in an area, the more conspicuously -unreached by the church is the -landless man.” Here are their figures, -see for yourself:</p> - -<p>“In counties where tenancy runs -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>from 0 to 10 per cent., the percentage -of farm owners who are church members -is 13.7, while the percentage of -tenants who are church members is -12.4; where tenancy runs from 11 to 25 -per cent., the percentage of owners as -church members, is 26.8, while of tenants, -19.8; where tenancy runs from 26 -to 50 per cent., the percentage of -owners is 48.2, while of tenants, 23.6; -where tenancy runs over 50 per cent., -the percentage of owners who are -church members is 63.6, while the percentage -of tenants who are church -members is 23.9.”</p> - -<p>When we look into this statement, -it is plain that in the low tenancy areas -the “related tenants” on “family lands” -bulk large, and they rank, as we know, -with owners themselves; but when we -get into the high tenancy areas, we -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>strike the core of tenants unrelated to -the landlord. Here is the mass of -our 5,500,000 landless tenant folk, and -here is where the church has weakened -and fallen down. Five millions of -these white landless tenants are in the -high tenancy areas. And applying -this church study to our problem, while -the church reaches 55 per cent. of -the owners in these areas it reaches -only 24 per cent. of the tenants. -That is, 1,200,000 of these landless -tenants only are inside the circle of -direct religious influence, and 3,800,000 -are outside. If these 5,000,000 -persons had been owners of land, or inheritors -of land in waiting, the church -would have reached 2,750,000 of them -instead of 1,200,000; in other words -here are 1,550,000 tenant people who -are outcasts from the church simply because -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span>they are landless folk. And -these outcasts—these religionless pariahs—are -on the increase from year to -year as tenancy increases its hold upon -the nation.</p> - -<p><i>One Hundred Per Cent. Material -for Religion</i></p> - -<p>It surely will not be misunderstood -if a layman should call to mind that the -genius of Christianity is its perennial -Gospel—just good news—to the poor, -the broken in life’s struggle. If a fitter -multitude than these tenants for -the good tidings of the Christ can be -found on the face of the earth, I would -like to learn of them. The ordinary -life of these outcasts, these wanderers -from spot to spot seeking the sun that -refuses to shine, has precisely all of -those breakdowns which the Christian -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>religion promises to repair—poverty, -invalidism, death, sin. It seems to me -that these pariahs are just naturally -made to order for the kind of religion -that the American church has to offer; -but as I see it, and I have looked this -thing in the face from angle after -angle, they haven’t got a ghost of a -show at it the way the church system -of the country at present works out. -Speaking straight from the shoulder, -the devil wins, unless—And where is -the person who will rise and name the -great “unless” that can fix this church -system up and set the heel of the -church on Satan’s neck?</p> - -<p>The history of the church, running -back through the centuries, is, as I read -it, dotted with awakenings, with the -rise of a thought, of a hope-dream, -with the rise of a man who out of the -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>very fog and blackness of popular -waywardness, wantonness, unbelief, -depravity, has stood up and successfully -denied that human life must be -all to the strong and that the poor must -live unillumined. This has been the -type of man who has lit the torch of -love and solicitude and faith in the -world that has lighted the race generation -after generation. Is this not the -time in the life of the American church -and this the occasion in America for -such a man to arise and call a halt upon -the detour of the church around the -farm tenant?</p> - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span></p> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</h2> -</div> - - -<p>“Hireling!” A sour epithet to -hand a preacher; but the word is -not mine. Look at it, if you will, in its -original setting and judge for yourself:</p> - -<p>“I am the good shepherd; the good -shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. -But he that is an hireling, and not the -shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, -seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the -sheep, and fleeth.... The hireling -fleeth, because he is an hireling, and -careth not for the sheep.”</p> - -<p>So spake the Man of Sorrows, who, -as he went about preaching the Gospel -of the Kingdom, spake as never man -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span>spake. And nineteen centuries of unbroken -Christian usage look down upon -“pastor and flock” as an almost perfect -characterization of preacher and parish. -Passing quickly through the -gateway leading up to the porch of my -tale, let me in a few words taken from -“Town and Country Church in the -United States,” set before you the -pastor-and-flock-hard-luck story in rural -America:</p> - -<p>“The total number of communities -within the town (town refers to places -of 5,000 people or less) and country -area is 73,230.”</p> - -<p>“There are 33,808 communities, or -42 per cent. of the total number, that -have churches, but do not have within -them any resident pastors.”</p> - -<p>“It would require 34,181 more ministers -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span>giving their full time to the work -of the ministry to provide one for each -community, if they were evenly distributed.”</p> - -<p>“The great advantage of the town -over the village, and of both town and -village over the country, in the matter -of resident pastors, is a characteristic -of all regions and of virtually all counties. -Thus, while 78 out of every 100 -town churches have resident pastors, -and 60 out of every 100 village -churches, only 17 out of every 100 -country churches have them, and less -than 5 out of every 100 country -churches have full-time resident pastors.”</p> - -<p>In a nutshell, this is the inglorious -fact: 30,000 flocks in rural America -have no shepherds. Thirty thousand -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>rural flocks are open to the wolf—because -(for it so appears) American -preachers care not for country sheep.</p> - - -<p><i>Sentenced to Purgatory</i></p> - -<p>An eminent rural-life leader a few -weeks ago came back from a country-life -conference of rural ministers, reporting -that these ministers had a saying -among them, “A country charge -(pastorate) is a sentence to purgatory.”</p> - -<p>This report sounds like a piece of -clerical humor; grim, maybe, but harmless -and meaning nothing. Would -to God this were true! Then perhaps -the picture of these 30,000 shepherdless -flocks might turn out to be only a -nightmare. I tried to shake the thing -out of my mind; but immediately the -long line of my ministerial acquaintances -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>passed unwillingly before me; -and I solemnly affirm that, with a few -princely exceptions, these men after -being plunged into their ministry, -coming up for air, as it were, faced toward -the city parish as flowers turn -toward the light; from the country, -they struck out for the village; from -the village, they struck out for the -town; from the town, they struck out -for the city; from the city, they struck -out for the metropolis.</p> - - -<p><i>The Preacher’s Flight</i></p> - -<p>The more I struggled to free myself -from a conclusion on this matter, -the deeper into conviction I sank. I -recalled, much against my inclination, -a bad half-hour several years ago at -the headquarters of one of the great -religious bodies of America. The occasion -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>was the meeting of the National -Social Service Commission of that denomination. -I had just finished reading -a report, which expressed the idea -that we might look forward to the day -when country parishes would be put -up in packages containing people -enough supporting one church, so that -churches in the country would be as -powerful, ministers in the country -would be as influential, as city churches, -on the one hand, and city ministers -on the other. A captain of city industry -was a member of the commission. -During my paper, hands in pockets, -he paced the floor up and down—somewhat -to my discomfiture as I recall. -When I concluded reading, he broke -out with:</p> - -<p>“Bosh! All bosh! The country -church will always be of little account. -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span>It gets culls for ministers—it always -has; it always will. Just as I left the -farm for the city to improve my lot, -so every country minister who can will -leave the country parish for the city -parish to improve his lot.”</p> - -<p>That I suffered a shock as if by -lightning may easily be imagined. -The steel-blue tone of this man did -something to my heart; did something -to my faith in human nature hard to define. -This captain of industry—and -I suspect that this is what did the damage—never -seemed to question the -legitimacy of the preacher’s flight. -Representing, as he did, the leading -laymen of his denomination, quietly -accepting the exodus of country -preachers as perfectly normal—because -running true to the economics -of good business instinct—he appalled -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>me with his cynicism. And it took me -many a month, I confess, to get back -my belief in humankind. But it came -back, and came back strong in the following -manner:</p> - - -<p><i>Around the Glover’s Cot</i></p> - -<p>By accident, one summer, I made a -find; in one of the 30,000 pastorless -parishes, a man lying prone on a cot; -the cot standing on a stone-boat; the -stone-boat lying close to a deep pool -in the bend of a little river, in the shade -of a great elm-tree; the man all alone, -flat on his back, silently whipping the -trout-pool with his fly. I came to believe -in this helpless fisherman, and -again all things good and beautiful -seemed possible. I got the story from -his sister, but can give only hints of -it here.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span></p> -<p>As a boy on the farm he had made -up his mind to get an education. At -sixteen he was looking forward impatiently -to beginning his courses of -study, when one day in the woods a -tree which the men folks were cutting -down fell on him and broke his back. -He never walked again, nor, in fact, -ever again sat up. Doomed to lie on -his back, all his hopes blighted, he -asked for something to do with his -hands. They gave him needle and -thread, shears and a piece of buckskin. -He made a pair of clumsy buckskin -gloves. He made a less clumsy pair. -He made pair after pair, better and -still better. Then dozens of pairs, until -his skill built up a small business. -But his ambition mounted with success, -and he asked whether he couldn’t -study something.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span></p> -<p>“Can’t I study law?” he pleaded.</p> - -<p>They got him law-books. He read -law, he made buckskin gloves; he made -gloves, he read law. He was admitted -to the bar. He became justice-of-the-peace -in his backwoods settlement. -Men got to coming for miles to the -glover’s cot to tell their troubles and -look into his deep eyes, hear his counsel, -and feel his glad hand. He was a real -peacemaker under the guise of a lawyer. -His ethics backed up to and -rested upon the Sermon on the Mount. -He bought land, hired it tilled, built -himself a better house, and settled into -the character of a country squire. He -was of the little church flock, and the -rest of the flock came to set great store -by his good sense, his wholesome cheer, -indomitable activity, and, withal, his -straight reliance on God. In fact, the -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>helpless glover’s dwelling was the -meeting-place for the flock about as -often as the church building; for everybody -said, “We get new strength to -keep a-going when we meet around -the cot.”</p> - - -<p><i>The Modern Wolf a Playful Cub?</i></p> - -<p>See how I got back my faith? The -prone fisherman on his stone-boat was -a godsend to me. I saw that personal -life is so rich that no one can be broken -in body to the point where, in case he -“layeth down his life for the sheep,” he -will be making a mean gift. I half suspect -that God raises up out of the -ground, as it were, in many of these -pastorless communities a proxy for the -parson that, beholding the wolf, leaveth -the sheep and fleeth to the city—a -proxy, like the glover-lawyer, who is no -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span>quitter. And in some parishes where -the preacher still sticks (his face set, -however, toward the city) I fancy a -man or a woman or a child can be found -who is naïvely scaring off the wolf.</p> - -<p>Norris Shepardson was such a man. -Farmer, poet, refined spirit, he went -about his work making everybody -believe that a new day is fresh from -God. Ambrose Brimmer, a member of -the community, didn’t happen to be -much of a churchman, and his Sunday -haymaking teased the parson mightily. -I remember well one perfect trout -day, when Ambrose was showing me the -holes in a stream strange to my -rod, that we got to talking about -preachers.</p> - -<p>“I don’t care a damn if the parson -does see me haying on Sunday,” said -Ambrose; “but if I get a sight of -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span>Norris Shepardson driving up the -road, I skedaddle and hide, you bet! -You know Norris Shepardson. Well, -Norris Shepardson is a Christian and -no quack.”</p> - -<p>And Ambrose was right. Norris -Shepardson was a Christian from his -eyelashes to his finger-tips; and his -sweet belief in you put you straightway -under obligation to goodness when he -cast a glance your way.</p> - -<p>It is probably true that I have been -something of a modern-life fan. But -when I try to think of the Master’s -parables of the shepherd, the sheep, and -the wolf, and of the one sheep that was -lost while the ninety and nine were -safe in the fold, I confess that I am -troubled about my modern-life philosophy.</p> - -<p>Are modern sheep any the less in -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span>need of a downright shepherd because -they are modern?</p> - -<p>Isn’t there a wolf any longer in times -that are modern? Or may he perhaps -be just a playful cub? Or possibly, -by this time, a toothless, plain, doddering -beastling?</p> - -<p>Has the age of lofty heroism in religion—the -age of sheer contempt of -some of the traditional goods of life—clean -passed away? And does economics -furnish the better clue in -modern days to those who are called of -God to preach?</p> - -<p>Do we need any 30,000 more -preachers in the country trenches? -Do we need any shock troops at all? -Isn’t it perfectly orthodox pacifism in -these days for all the picked soldiers -in the war on the devil to fall back into -comfortable winter quarters?</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span></p> - -<p><i>Side-stepping the Law of Hire</i></p> - -<p>I try to find my answer to these -troubling queries in a glance down the -centuries. There are the barefoot -Black Friars of Dominic and the Gray -Friars of Francis of Assisi (him who -took poverty for his bride) in the -thirteenth century. They gloried in -mean clothes, mean shelter, mean food, -as they ministered out of their own -poverty to the poor, the overlooked, -the no-accounts (in cities, then, -because the troop of comfortable -parsons were fattening in the popular -country districts).</p> - -<p>There are the visionaries and enthusiasts: -John Bunyan in the seventeenth -century; John and Charles -Wesley in the eighteenth. In the very -face of the plentiful, complacent -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span>clergy, they fought the wolf as if they -had been apostles living in the first -century.</p> - -<p>There is Jean Frederick Oberlin, in -the early part of the nineteenth -century, who protested, “I do not wish -to labor in some comfortable pastoral -charge where I can be at ease. I want -a work to do which no one else wishes -to do, and which will not be done unless -I do it.”</p> - -<p>Oberlin had just won his degree of -Doctor of Philosophy at the University -of Strasburg, at a time when -Strasburg was a city of France. His -“call” to pastoral duty came all of a -sudden with the wind of a February -evening rushing in at the door as a -stranger stepped into the bare room. -Struck with the poverty of the place, -Pastor Stuber introduced himself. -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span>Beard’s translation from the French -presents us with the picture:</p> - -<p>“I have learned about you, Herr -Oberlin. Your name has been mentioned -to me as one who does not follow -the beaten paths of ministerial -candidates. You have studied surgery -and medicine. You have a knowledge -of botany and herbs. Is this not -so?”</p> - -<p>“In my leisure hours I have paid -some attention to botany, to blood-letting, -and the experiences of the -anatomical room,” replied Oberlin.</p> - -<p>“Will you be kind enough to explain -to me what this little pan means that -I see here by your lamp?” asked -Stuber.</p> - -<p>A deep blush ran over Oberlin’s -face. “Pardon the cooking, Herr -Pastor. I take my dinner with my -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span>parents, and I bring away some bread -which my mother gives me. At eight -o’clock I put this little pan over my -lamp, place my bread in it, with a -little water and salt. Then I go on -with my studies.”</p> - -<p>“You are my man!” exclaimed -Stuber, rising from his chair. “You -live on the diet of Lacedæmon. Yes, -you are my man. I see you do not -understand me; but I have got my -man, and I shall not let you go. I -want you for the pastorship of -Waldbach in the Ban-de-la-Roche. -There a hundred poor and wretched -families in want of the bread of life; -four or five hundred to shepherd and to -save, poor, wretched, friendless.”</p> - -<p>Oberlin’s heart was in a tumult. -This was just the field of labor he had -wished. But what of the difficulties?</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span></p> -<p>“The parish must be in a very cold -region,” suggested Oberlin.</p> - -<p>“My dear Oberlin, I do not wish to -exaggerate anything. Six months of -winter; at times the cold of the Baltic; -sometimes a wind like ice comes down -from the mountain-tops above; the sick -and dying are to be visited in remote, -wild, solitary places in the forests.”</p> - -<p>“And the parishioners, are they well -disposed?” inquired Oberlin.</p> - -<p>“Not too much so, not too much. -They are frightfully ignorant and untractable, -and proud of their ignorance. -It is an iron-headed people, a -population of Cyclops.”</p> - -<p>Oberlin was taking in the situation. -He slowly lifted his large blue eyes -and asked: “You say most of the -parishioners are extremely poor? Are -there resources to aid the poor?”</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span></p> -<p>“The parishioners have nothing. -Four districts even poorer than the -mother parish are to be served. Not -a single practicable road. Deep mud-holes -among the cabins. The people, -abandoned to indifference, have not the -least concern to meliorate their condition.”</p> - -<p>“Every one of your words has -knocked at the door of my heart like -the blows of a hammer,” said Oberlin. -And it was settled that Oberlin -would go to the mountains; and on -March 30, 1767, in his twenty-seventh -year, Oberlin arrived at -Waldbach.</p> - -<p>No single piece of literature equals -the story of Jean Frederick Oberlin’s -pastorate in the Ban-de-la-Roche as an -interpretation of a country minister’s -social, economic, and religious relation -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span>to his parish. Overture after overture -came to him during the years to give -up his laborious cares in the hills and -take charge of a church where cultured -life would bring with it superior advantages, -greater recognized honor, -and a satisfactory salary. His answer -was the same to all:</p> - -<p>“No, I will never leave this flock. -God has confided this flock to me. -Why should I abandon it?”</p> - -<p>And in that out-of-the-way parish -he played the shepherd and the man for -nigh on to sixty years. Like the -Venerable Bede in the eighth century, -he died with the shepherd’s crook in his -hand.</p> - - -<p><i>Preachers’ Alibis Pass Inspection</i></p> - -<p>Now tell me, was Oberlin—remember -he is only a hundred years away from -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span>our time—temperamental and absurdly -heroic? Was the nineteenth-century -wolf any less tender with the -nineteenth-century flock than the first-century -wolf with the first-century -flock? Is the modern “world-the-flesh-and-the-devil” -just a bugaboo to -frighten children? Is modern sin a -whiter stain on the soul and more easily -washed out than in any previous century? -It would take a braver man -than I am to champion modern life to -such lengths.</p> - -<p>These 30,000 runaway American -preachers,—they all have good reasons -for running. As alibis go, they are -perfect—humanly speaking. I have -often heard the recital: “Easier life -for the wife,” “education for the children,” -“an American standard of living,” -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span>“congenial parish,” “books,” -“travel,” “art,” “greater opportunity -for service.”</p> - -<p>Just such reasons as bankers, clerks, -teachers, merchants give for their -economic movements—to better themselves, -following the law of hire. And -nobody protests; for nobody is in a -position to protest, as the law of hire -seems to regulate the life of all. The -protest—the only great protest—comes -everlastingly up from the first -century:</p> - -<p>“A certain scribe came, and said unto -Him, Master, I will follow Thee -whithersoever Thou goest. And Jesus -saith unto him, The foxes have -holes, and the birds of the air have -nests; but the Son of man hath not -where to lay his head.”</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span></p> - -<p><i>The Plight of Him Who Stays</i></p> - -<p>The preacher that sticks by the -farm community takes pot-luck with -the farmer himself; and the socio-economic -plight of the farmer has had -front-page head-lines since the time of -President Theodore Roosevelt. To-day, -in the time of President Calvin -Coolidge, those head-lines have become -bigger and blacker. The farmer’s dollar, -meanwhile, has become small and -weak. His taxes have risen overnight -like a spring freshet. His debts stare -him in the face. His children are forsaking -him for the high wages and high -life of the city. He cannot pay the -wages of labor in competition with -automobile factories.</p> - -<p>The farmer’s social system in America -has broken down under the strain of -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span>new forces. He needs the social help -of men and women who will share his -life, his privations, his hopes and fears. -But they are to be men and women -who see the farmer’s plight and, giving -themselves to the task, struggle to organize -a modern rural social system. -It is fruitless here to recite the tale -of an underpaid country clergy, with -its sequel of a socially visionless, untrained -set of honest parsons; fruitless -to point out how denominational -strife has cut down the preacher’s salary -to less than a living wage. True, -the country parson has his poverty, -and needs not to take any extra “vow of -poverty.” This sort of thing will go -on and on until there is a right-about -on the part of those preachers who flee -the country as if it were the plague. -Strong men of social vision, men who -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</span>have come to understand the farmer’s -social and economic plight, must turn -their back on the city, and take up labors -for the country flock.</p> - - -<p><i>A New Type of Training School</i></p> - -<p>But will there ever be such a right-about-face -of virile, holy men until we -have in America a new type of theological -seminary for the training of -country-bound ministers of Christ? -I doubt it. The present schools of -training are city-set, city-wise, city-satisfied; -not but that a score or more of -them give some “rural courses”; not but -that a trickle of men has started already -from them toward the country. You -can better understand the case if I -were to ask what hope there would -have been for agricultural science, if -total reliance had been placed upon the -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span>great city universities, Harvard, Yale, -Columbia, Chicago, Pennsylvania, to -develop the practice of farming. Each -of these universities has already made -some notable contribution to agriculture -in one form or another; but the -great hope of agriculture lay in a farming -college, and fortunately, the common -sense of this country perceived -this truth.</p> - -<p>In like manner, the hope of the rural -ministry, in my estimation, lies in a -rural theological seminary under the -eaves of one of our great colleges of -agriculture—preferably a college of -agriculture in close proximity to a -great state university. Here is the -farmer’s intellectual center. Here are -gathered men and women of hope for -farm life. Here are the men and -women who have social vision for rural -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span>society. In touch with these men and -women, under the spell of the intelligent -hope for the American farm -and farmer, a school of religion can -grow up which will train men to go into -the country and help redeem it from -its present social chaos. They can -carve out community churches of distinction. -They can create a line of -such churches, wholly in rural territory, -which will furnish steps of promotion -for the most strenuous and ambitious -pastors. Flight is not the cure of the -plight of country parsons. The cure -is rather intelligent consecration to the -country flocks.</p> - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span></p> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</h2> -</div> - - -<p>“But,” went on the author of -Christian idealism,—mind you, in -the same breath in which He had paid to -His followers the superb compliment, -“Ye are the salt of the earth,”—“if the -salt have lost its savor—”</p> - -<p>And the story of Protestant home -missions in rural America during the -last two or three decades has in it the -taste of this “lost savor.”</p> - -<p>Let me lay bare before you,—with -the shame of a churchman very much -embarrassed, it must be confessed,—not -so much the facts of this unsavory -home-mission story, for the facts have -been public property for some years, as -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</span>an interpretation of the facts and an -appraisal of the damage done to -American churchdom.</p> - -<p>For the benefit of him who does not -understand the situation at all, a word -is necessary. Here is the picture, and -here are the essential features in the -picture, whatever variations there may -be in minor details.</p> - - -<p><i>Twice Too Many Churches</i></p> - -<p>A community of rural folk of a definite -population is spread out before you. -Christian churches, usually from two to -ten in number, are alive, if not all going -concerns in the community. Whatever -differences there may be in the -membership rolls—and of course we -shall expect many points of difference -here—or in the number of services per -week or per month, or in the presence -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</span>or absence of resident pastors, or in -the organization of the churches into -Sunday-schools, mission societies, clubs, -social committees and the like—whatever -the variations may be, I say, the -number of persons in the community, -counting every single soul, is far short -of enough to man all of the churches, -use any reputable standard of church -organization you please to measure by.</p> - -<p>Furthermore, in the type community -in question, some or all of the churches -are weak and ineffective, if not virtually -down and out. Moreover,—and -this is the central feature of the picture,—one -church is, or several or all of -these churches are, receiving subsidies -in the form of money from the home-mission -funds of the respective denominational -state body or national body -or both, the sum of money being just -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span>enough to keep the particular church -competitively in the running in that -community.</p> - -<p>The essential fact in this situation -may be stated thus: In a community -where there is known to be a mass -of persons (in commercial parlance, -“volume of business”) sufficient to build -and maintain only from one to five -churches, there are actually found to -be from two to ten; and the excess of -churches over and above the number -which the volume of business justifies -is the direct result of the injection of -home-mission money into the community.</p> - - -<p><i>Veiled Hate</i></p> - -<p>It does not require a clever mind to -know what will happen. When from -two to ten kernels of corn are planted -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</span>in a piece of soil which has nutritive -elements sufficient to bring only from -one to five stalks to maturity, we know -that a struggle for life is on which may -doom one stalk, several stalks, or even -all stalks. It is so with the competitive -churches; but the corn simile fails -to illustrate the case at the really tragic -point. The subsidized churches, which -make up the redundance, create in the -community what is known by everybody -there to be a case of veiled malignancy. -Self-respecting persons either -hold themselves aloof from formal religion -there, or, conscience-stricken, -stand helplessly bewildered, or in plain -disgust they pick up and leave. And -the community turns sour. The salt -has lost its savor.</p> - -<p>If you would sense the disaster of -this competition, please read between -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span>the lines of the following resolution, -passed within the last year, by a minister’s -association in a small rural community -where six Protestant churches -are breathing the air that is hardly -enough for three!</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“Whereas we are joined together as -Christian ministers in the association -of brotherly fellowship and helpful co-working, -we hereby agree that the -following principles shall guide and -control us individually, and, so far as -our proper influence can go, our several -congregations in our mutual relationships....</p> - -<p>I. That we decline and discourage -proselytizing in any form.</p> - -<p>II. While we recognize that every -man is free to worship where and as he -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span>wills, yet we realize that shifting from -one denomination to another save from -absolute religious conviction is not -edifying, but harmful. Wherefore, -we will not encourage those who from -pique or temporary dissatisfaction with -ministers or people of their own local -congregations wish to unite with ours.</p> - -<p>III. That we will not, save in exceptional -cases, receive into our Sunday-schools -as regular members thereof, -children of families who are affiliated -with other congregations of the town.</p> - -<p>IV. That whenever we come across -new-comers to the town who are -affiliated with, or declare preference -for, some Christian body other than our -own we will not (if the church of their -choice be represented by a congregation -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span>here) ask them to unite with our -congregation or send their children to -our Sunday-school until we have given -to the minister or church officials of the -church of their preference the name -and address of such persons, and -allowed reasonable opportunity for -them to claim their own.”</p> -</div> - -<p>It is clear on the face of it that the -recognized principles of Christianity -have failed to keep these churches -sweet to one another; and resort is, -therefore, had to a contract—a perfectly -human document of agreement, such as -governs sinners in mundane business—in -hope that an-out-and-out bargain -may accomplish what Christian love -can not.</p> - -<p>These ministers agree <i>not</i> to proselytize, -<i>not</i> to encourage lifting members -from another church, <i>not</i> to -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</span>receive children into the Sunday-school -from families of another flock, <i>not</i> to -pick up new-comers without advertising -them and waiting a reasonable -length of time for a claimant. This -document of “nots”—of things not to -be done—naïvely uncovers the teasing -things that were done behind curtains.</p> - - -<p><i>Dispensing With Mission Aid</i></p> - -<p>Before reading further, you will wish -to know whether there is much of this -sort of thing going on in rural America; -whether, in fact, it is not fussing -over trifles to beckon anybody to look -at this thing.</p> - -<p>The best authorities, after a long -study on this subject, are quoted as -estimating that the amount of Protestant -home-mission money annually -wasted in competitive religion in -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</span>rural communities is at present $3,000,000; -and if we may generalize from -twenty-five thoroughly studied counties, -widely separated, where there are -211 churches aided by home-mission -money, of which 149 are disastrously -competitive, “most of the home-mission -aid which is now granted could be withdrawn -without any danger whatsoever -of leaving communities (rural) with inadequate -facilities.”</p> - -<p>The official report goes on to say, -“Aside from any possible loss in denominational -prestige, which a purely -objective study such as this can not -undertake to measure, on a careful examination -of all the data at hand, it -seems that 149 of the 211 aided -churches in these counties might be dispensed -with, to the general advantage -of the religious life in their communities -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span>and to the greater glory of the -Kingdom of God.”</p> - -<p>This thing, look at it from any angle -you please, is as rust on the wheat, a -rot in the potato, a blight on the peach-tree, -a boll-weevil in the cotton. God -knows that the farmer already carries -along enough of a handicap in community -matters without being afflicted -with this canker on his religion, as a -discipline. It certainly looks like -jumping on the man that’s down. But -this sin against the farmer is not the -worst of the wicked business.</p> - - -<p><i>Worse Than Wasted</i></p> - -<p>What hurts most in this paradoxical -practice is the prostitution of the most -beautiful gift in all religion.</p> - -<p>“Missions!”</p> - -<p>The very word conjures up angels -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span>of mercy. It brings to mind the last -words of Christ to his disciples and to -his followers of all time. And this -mission money (it is not so pathetic -that it sometimes is the widow’s mite or -that it is sometimes earned in feebleness -with many a pain) is the purest -money handled by men. It is the visible -sign of tears of longing for love to -govern men. Missions are the church’s -great romance. When out of the barrenness -and weakness of my little life, -I put into the hands of the church a gift -for the whomsoever, in faith, I do it -with a prayer that it will help bring -peace to some soul, harmony to some -family, blessing to some community -which is beyond my power otherwise -to help.</p> - -<p>To think, then, that the tip of your -prayer and mine, the sweetest thing we -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span>can give, is poisoned, and shot into a -rural community, there to hurt—Well -the words, are not so much wanting -to express my indignation and -yours, as the mind fails to comprehend -how such tactless blunders can happen.</p> - -<p>“Why do these church bodies do this -wicked thing?” you enquire.</p> - -<p>Let the words of a high church official -I once knew convey to you not so -much the real reason, as the state of -mind out of which the thing grows!</p> - -<p>“So long as there is a family of our -faith in that village, that family shall -have the sacraments of our faith ministered -to it.”</p> - -<p>He might just as well have added, -“even though the heavens fall”; for -what he did was to force a subsidy into -a community to help a small faction -of his particular church to survive when -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span>the majority of the people, even the -majority of his own little church organization, -had voted voluntarily to cut -down the number of churches and eliminate -the unnecessary one. The high -church official just ripped open a -community sore, when it had begun to -heal. He poured gall in again after -somebody had sweetened community -life for a moment.</p> - - -<p><i>A New Religious Ethics Between -Churches</i></p> - - -<p>The egotism of a particular church -group; the flaunting individualism of -a particular denominational combination -of persons, whose personal egos -are, religiously, to be subjected, but -whose combined ego is to be exalted! -Here is an uncharted sea of ethics and -religion between church groups. Shall -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</span>it not be discussed? Especially when -it grinds the rural community to powder? -Shall it be good Christianity for -one Christian sect to crowd and shove -just like a bully in a mob?</p> - -<p>The day and generation is getting -suspicious of pietists of all sorts who -can tell sinners how to behave individually -to one another; yes, who can even -tell the labor group how to behave to -the employer group and the employer -group to the labor group, but who have -no conception of what Christian principles -apply as between one church -group and another church group in the -realm of religion, except to beat the -other church group at all costs. If I -were not heart and soul captured by the -character, life, philosophy, and guidance -of Jesus himself, if I were not -thrilled by his words, and electrified by -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</span>his life and death, more and more the -older I grow, I should be tempted to -see in this cutthroat group egotism of -competitive Christian church groups -a decline of Christianity itself.</p> - -<p>“They all do it” is a lame excuse for -sinners; but for a church body, it is -tragic. Think of a million people, -more or less, possessing one shibboleth, -trying to embody earnestly the -Christ, while deliberately hamstringing -another Christian church body which is -doing the same thing!</p> - -<p>But who is to blame? Whose sin is -this prostitution of a holy thing?</p> - -<p>Did you ever happen to know the officials -at the head of a Protestant -church body, either national or state? -Did you ever know the persons who -distribute home-mission money after -it is once collected? Did you ever get -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span>a glimpse of the inside? Well, if so, -then you know how intensely human -this situation is. You know how complex -are the forces that operate, how -like politics are the powers behind the -locked doors. You know then that -when you try to track this sinner, you -can’t find him. Nobody does the thing. -Nobody does anything. Nobody is to -blame. The Christian leaders are not -leading on such matters. They are -fighting the individual sins of the -people.</p> - -<p>What would America think of a -great Christian leader who should come -out and insist that Christian churches -ought to love, respect, defer to other -Christian churches? What a stir in -Christendom it would make for a great -man carrying his own church with him, -let us say, to go up and down the land -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span>preaching that membership in one -Christian church should thereby make -us members in all Christian churches; -preaching that we should discount -all the differences among Christian -churches and love all Christian churches -for their likenesses?</p> - -<p>Look at this straw:</p> - -<p>In Canada an outstanding movement -is nearing completion to unite -organically three great Protestant -bodies, affecting more than three -quarters of a million of church members. -The daily press recently in -explanation of the union, carried this -item:</p> - -<p>“The Union had its origin in the -conviction that many separate -churches of each denomination, especially -in the rural districts, were -handicapped in limited membership and -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</span>were unable to maintain properly -separate buildings and ministers. It is -therefore a part of a tendency in many -other countries to submerge religious -differences in an effort at wider and -more effective service.”</p> - -<p>This looks on the horizon like the -peep of dawn of a new Christian day—and -what a dawn for the rural community -that would be!</p> - -<p>But—lest we be too sanguine—that -dawn has some climb to make yet. -Has not the Home Mission Council of -the Federal Council of Churches in -America put into practice on the -Western frontier for several years -principles of denominational courtesy? -Have not the phrases of their documents -on “Overchurching,” “Underchurching,” -and “Wasteful Competition” -seeped very generally throughout -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</span>the settled portions of the United -States, as well as into the frontier? -Have not the Foreign Mission Boards -of the various denominations for years -gained conspicuously the confidence of -their laymen by the intelligent distribution -of territory among the missions of -different church bodies abroad? The -fact is and must be reckoned with that -all the words and phrases and ideas and -logic on this subject, pro and con, -have been bandied about until they are -almost threadbare. The will to do, -however, is still very stubborn in old, -established communities.</p> - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span></p> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</h2> -</div> - - -<p>“What is the difference between -a state university and an ordinary -university?”</p> - -<p>A rather silly question, perhaps; but -the answer that came back, lightning-like, -gave me the jolt of my life, and incidentally -picked out in my mind the -pattern for the community church. Here -is the occasion and what took place:</p> - -<p>A reception for the distinguished -regents of the University of Wisconsin -at the home of the president. In due -time I found myself approaching that -awful reception line, terrifying, indeed, -to me, a new-comer. Suddenly I became -aware that I was shaking hands -with the president, whose newness to the -job of presiding over a university had -not entirely worn off.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span></p> -<p>It was up to me to say something, -and so, after the manner of a pedagogue, -I blurted out a question:</p> - -<p>“Mr. President, will you tell me the -difference between a state university -and an ordinary university?”</p> - -<p>President Van Hise didn’t hesitate -an instant with his answer.</p> - -<p>“I cannot speak for all state universities,” -said he, “but this university is -run not for the students who happen to -be here, but for the persons who may -never see the university—even to the -last man, woman, and child in the last -community of the State.”</p> - -<p>I had become unconscious of the reception -line, for I was startled with an -idea foreign to my bringing up, and I -must make sure that I perfectly understood.</p> - -<p>“Mr. President,” I interrupted, “do -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</span>you mean to say that the University -of Wisconsin is not proud of turning -out highly developed personalities?”</p> - -<p>“Only as carriers,” President Van -Hise quickly replied, in his characteristic -jerky manner; “carriers of ideas -and attitudes even to the isolated community -and to the unpromising man. -The students who are here are here, as it -were, by accident. But the university -is run for Wisconsin’s people at work.”</p> - -<p>I passed on down the line, and eventually -out into a world strange to me, -where being a “carrier” of intellectual -goods to the “isolated community” and -to the “last man” was an academic -commonplace.</p> - -<p>Fourteen years of that day-by-day -commonplace, however, never rubbed -off the beauty of its bloom for me; for -here was a university running at least -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</span>neck and neck with church Christians -in love for,—or duty to, if you prefer -it so,—the Gospel’s whomsoever.</p> - -<p>Having seen with my own eyes -these last communities of a State -quickened into intellectual fervor -through the devotion of university men -and women, do you think I do not know -what would happen to the spiritual life -of these out-of-the-way communities if -the supreme love of devoted church -men and women were brought to bear -upon them?</p> - - -<p><i>A Forecast Founded on Fact</i></p> - -<p>I will venture to forecast some of the -things that would happen. Every -rural community would have a community -church—a church for the whomsoever, -even to the last man, woman, -and child in that community. If -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span>topographically possible, every such -church community would stretch the -bounds of its parish to include a -thousand souls all told. In communities -of two thousand souls, there -would be two churches—two only, and -both community churches. In communities -of three thousand souls, there -would be three community churches, -and three churches only, every church, -a community church; and no more -churches than one to one thousand of -the community population; for it takes -one thousand of the population to maintain -an effectual modern church; and -every church is to be a Christian community -church as a safeguard against -paganism. But why am I so foolish -as to foretell what would happen when -I can tell what is happening?</p> - -<p>There are to-day, we are told by -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</span>those who keep informed on the matter, -a thousand community churches -in the United States, of which the -greater part are in rural territory. In -fact, it is reported that new community -churches are being organized at the rate, -at present, of six a month. To say -that there is a community church movement -well-started is no exaggeration. -Some States such as Massachusetts, -Vermont, Connecticut, Ohio, California, -Colorado, Iowa, Illinois, are -outstanding in the movement.</p> - -<p>Of course, the community church is -not yet standardized, but it is shaping -up. To affirm that there are three -types, as some say, or five, as others -put it, is more or less arbitrary. Still, -for the sake of the man who understands -better by types, I may say that -some community churches like to be -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</span>known as having arrived at the community -ideal by “federation” of two or -more denominational churches, the new -church preserving connection with a -national church body.</p> - -<p>Other community churches pride -themselves on being “union” churches, -each having originated from the organic -union of two or more churches, -or having been established as a “union” -church in a community possessing no -church, but containing families of various -denominational connections in the -past. The union church once formed -usually stands alone, without any denominational -affiliation.</p> - -<p>Then there is the regular “denominational” -church, which either just happens -to be or has come purposely to be -the only church in the community; and -which makes the boast of existing for -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</span>the whole community rather than for -its particular denominational group.</p> - -<p>And there are other varieties, which -could indeed be dignified into types, if -we were pushed to it. The important -thing, however, is that out of a general -unrest and dissatisfaction with churches -that aim to keep breeding up within -themselves a highly pedigreed group of -personalities which possess decidedly -exclusive, if not aristocratic, characteristics, -have arisen overnight, as it were, -churches which admit to the inner circle -all the pedigrees and aim at the democratic -ideal of acting in the realm of -religion for the last man, woman, and -child in the community.</p> - - -<p><i>Churches for the Whomsoever</i></p> - -<p>Here we have before our very eyes, -then, a kind of a church which is run, -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</span>as President Van Hise said his university -was run, not for a select few -within its walls, but for the whomsoever -within its own territory; a church that -views every single member as a “carrier” -of the goods of life to the last -man, rather than as a precious mechanism -in which should be lodged all the -mysteries of a peculiar cult.</p> - -<p>Look over some of the stories of -these churches which are confessedly -trying to find their way to a new expression -of social religion designed to -prevent the wastes of competitive -Christianity.</p> - -<p>Here are the high points in an Idaho -community church: Rural, in a town -of 600 souls. Presbyterian by connection, -but with members formerly -of sixteen different denominations. -Membership, 400. Plant worth $50,000, -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</span>with eighteen separate class-rooms -for Sunday-school use. A community -house, with gymnasium. Rest room -for women and girls. A week-day -church school using one hour a week -of school time. In summer, a daily vacation -Bible school. A Boy Scout -troop. A Campfire Girls’ organization. -Potato growers and fruit men -freely using the community hall. -High moral standards reflecting the -unity of the people.</p> - -<p>Take another community church -of farmers in Iowa, in the open country: -An architecturally commanding -building, providing, like a well-organized -school-house, many separate rooms -for religious instruction. The church -has deliberately packed into its conception -of “community church” the idea -that, assuming Christianity to have contact -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</span>with every phase of living, the -church has responsibility for providing -the auspices under which all social activities -of the community take place. -What more natural, then, than that the -Fourth of July celebration should be -around the most beautiful spot in the -community, the church? Farmers’ -Institute in the church? Young people -having a place for good times at the -church? A church committee looking -after the matter of bringing good families -on to farms that are for sale or -rent in the community?</p> - -<p>Take a certain community church in -Indiana. Here is the story of an honest -struggle on the part of four church -pedigrees to burn their bridges behind -them, and, pooling their resources, to -start in anew. The peculiar traditions -of each cult, however, cling desperately -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</span>to each group, until, after trying in vain -to carry these psychological contradictions -along in an artificial unity, in a -moment of supreme devotion to the -good of their community, they strip off -their trade-marks, forget their shibboleths, -and step forward into religious -freedom.</p> - -<p>The community-church movement is -not going to create, I surmise, new -sects, leaving a residuum of several -more denominations. Rather it is a -real step towards the organic union of -kindred church bodies on the one hand, -and so a reduction of sects; and on the -other hand, a step towards democratizing -every church and making it a real -community church.</p> - - -<p><i>The Rural Dilemma and the Way Out</i></p> - -<p>It will require only another thousand -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</span>of these brave, venturesome community -churches to turn every select-bodied -denomination to looking itself over. -This self-criticism will lead the great -Protestant church bodies, let us hope, -to a church conscience in regard to -destructive church competition. Then -it will be an easy step to coming to -terms with one another in any locality, -so as to give the community a chance to -have a community church.</p> - -<p>The community church, if we can -have any faith in mankind, is sure to -come along strong. If high officials -become obstructionists, they will be -swept away; for the people, when they -once clearly see, will have their way in -churches and religion as in the long run -they do in government and politics.</p> - -<p>The sooner the great Protestant -bodies confess their sins of competition -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</span>and put their houses in order, the -sooner the new day will come for the -remote community and the last man.</p> - -<p>Some of us know what it is to be -a devotee of a great church sect. The -absolute rightness of our cult has been -no more questionable than our own existence. -When our sect was in parallel -columns with any other religious -sect, we did not, could not yield right -of way.</p> - -<p>But when we are all consciously confronted -with the problem of working -out the religious life of 30,000,000 of -isolated farm people, we wake up to -the fact that we occupy a position -where cult pride, cult individualism, -and cult exclusiveness break down. -Then we find ourselves in a dilemma; -we must leave the farmers to rot, a -thing which is unquestionably abhorrent -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</span>to our cult; or we must modify -our cult, a thing which on the surface -seems a sacrilege to do.</p> - -<p>But there is a way out of every -dilemma; generally, however at the -cost of a bit of human pride. The community -church shows the various noble -church cults one way out of the rural -church dilemma.</p> - -<p>Read these bold words from a group -of fifty young Methodist rural workers -penned to bishops:</p> - -<p>“To the Bishops of the Methodist -Episcopal Church: We the undersigned -members of the Methodist -Episcopal Church appeal to you to -give prayerful consideration to the -following suggestions:</p> - -<p>1. That the bishops, district superintendents, -and other administrative -officers of our denomination cordially -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</span>coöperate with the leaders of other denominations -in an effort to so organize -rural church geographical units that -not more than one Protestant church -to every one thousand population shall -prevail as a standard.</p> - -<p>2. That service to the community -rather than to the denomination be the -basis on which ministers shall be -trained, appointed, and promoted.</p> - -<p>3. That the Methodist Episcopal -Church take the lead in the give-and-take -method with other denominations, -even to the extent of -encouraging the discontinuance of -small, struggling, competing Methodist -churches in the interest of rural -Christian service to the communities -involved.</p> - -<p>4. That zeal for service to the entire -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</span>community and a sympathetic consideration -for those whose background -and training are non-Methodist shall -characterize the efforts of the Methodist -Episcopal Church wherever it alone -occupies a rural field.</p> - -<p>5. That the conference membership -of a Methodist Episcopal minister -shall not be jeopardized by appointment -as pastor of a federated or undenominational -church where such a -church is required for the largest service -to the community.”</p> - -<p>Theological students and college -students are not to be outdone by their -elders in bravery. Read the following -document for circulation among the -officials of the various church bodies—a -document which sounds like the “first -call” for the rural community church:</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</span></p> -<p>“We the rural college student delegates -at the American Country Life -Association Student Conference believe -that the minister who serves in a church -which has no right to exist loses respect -for his profession and can not do outstanding -work; we believe that our -denominational boards which appropriate -money we give to keep churches -going in overchurched communities and -which send leadership into such communities -are only making people feel -that the ideals of Christianity are no -higher than those of pagan religions. -We would apply the principles and -teachings of Jesus Christ. Therefore -we recommend:</p> - -<p>1. That students preparing to enter -the rural ministry refuse to serve -charges in overchurched communities.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</span></p> -<p>2. That we, as rural students, do all -in our power in our communities and in -places of leadership that we may attain -to prevent denominational church -boards from pouring money and leadership -into communities, which is to be -used to perpetuate denominational -strife that is destroying the religious -life of our communities.</p> - -<p>3. That we pledge ourselves to endeavor -to substitute the principles and -teachings of Jesus Christ for narrow -denominational creeds and doctrines. -In view of this, we shall try to obtain -an atmosphere and physical equipment -of rural churches, as well as church -services themselves, that shall be designed -to meet the physical, social, mental, -and spiritual needs of the people -who worship there, regardless of their -denominations.”</p> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</span></p> -<p>The press carries the story that -down in Georgia five hundred farmers -last season dedicated an acre of land -apiece, with all it grew, to the Lord. -These pieces of land are spoken of -generally in Georgia as the “Lord’s -Acres,” and the “Lord’s Acre Plan” -is hailed as a hundred per cent. way to -finance the country church.</p> - -<p>The story goes on to say:</p> - -<p>“Farmers in the South are firmly -convinced that the Lord’s Acre yields -better crops than surrounding land, -and that the entire farm of the one -giving the acre is more productive than -those of his neighbors.”</p> - - -<p><i>The Community Church as a Democracy</i></p> - -<p>The community church strikes me as -a Lord’s Acre in rural Christendom -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</span>bearing a crop dedicated to God. -And, if I read the returns aright, the -comparative yield justifies the belief. -It is a church of the people—a democracy -in very truth. Any subtle influence -that would tend to wash in upon -this democracy and wear it down to a -dominating set of people or to a group -of negligible folk or to a loose aggregation -of nondescripts must be walled -off with reinforced concrete.</p> - -<p>A single type of religious temperament -will not govern the range and -character of the community church. -A constant sort of ideals that appeals -only to the seraphic souls or to other -minds only in moments of exalted pitch -will, by a natural process of elimination, -soon reduce the church to a temperamental -sect. No, the church is made -up of all temperaments the matter-of-fact, -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</span>active, and practical; the poetic, -sentimental, imaginative; the strenuous; -the easy-going; the enthusiastic; -the petty; the anxious; the -generous, self-denying; the jolly, -optimistic; the gloomy, conservative; -the militant, crusading; the important; -the retiring. Their interests, too—the -interests of the whole church are -as broad and various as human nature.</p> - -<p>A cross-section of Christianity will -reveal a ten-thousand fold variegation -of human streak and human color -wherever religion has filtered into -actual life. This meeting-ground of -all the higher interests of the community -will, therefore, be home for each interest. -As no single type of temperament -should repulse the others and shrink the -church, so no single activity of the -church should monopolize the focus of -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</span>attention. The mission interest, the -Bible interest, the educational interest, -the interests social, musical, ceremonial, -disciplinary, the evangelistic interest, -the civic and industrial interest, the -financial interest, the idealistic interest, -both personal and social—all these -and the rest will have good footing in -the community church.</p> - -<p>A church which should undertake to -be a democracy in fact would find that -there is only one way of “maintaining -interest” enough actually to keep bringing -the people together. This way is -sounding God’s summons to keep going -the redemption of its community at -every point. The summons to definite -undertakings to improve community -life is like the summons to a pioneer -homesteader to make a home fit for his -family. He gears his hands to ax and -<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</span>saw, to plow and hammer, and he knows -that he can change the wilderness.</p> - -<p>Besides stereotyped church procedure, -a steady look at living conditions -in the community, with the determined -expectation of changing these -conditions for the better; a look for the -moral clues to whole wretched situations; -a look to disentangle from the -chaotic mass single, great, unmistakeable -moral issues—these steady looks, -under God’s summons, must be given -anew in every generation to the -kaleidoscopic facts of human life.</p> - -<p>The church that shall go into the business -of becoming self-conscious and of -realizing its democracy will hear God’s -summons to community redemption -and begin to re-scale the map of church -importance and usefulness in the community -on heroic lines.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<div class="tnote"> -<h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_note">Transcriber’s note</h2> - - - -<p>Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized where appropriate.</p> - -<p>Other spelling -has also been retained as originally published except for the -corrections below.</p> - - -<table class="autotable"> -<tr> -<td class="tdr">Page <a href="#Page_127">127</a>:</td> -<td class="tdl">“pinked out in my mind the”</td> -<td class="tdl">“picked out in my mind the”</td> -</tr> -<tr> -<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#Page_144">144</a>:</td> -<td class="tdl">“which appopriate money we”</td> -<td class="tdl">“which appropriate money we”</td> -</tr> -</table> - -</div> -</div> - -<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74857 ***</div> -</body> -</html> - diff --git a/old/74857-h/images/cover.jpg b/old/74857-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index a4e9c96..0000000 --- a/old/74857-h/images/cover.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/74857-h/images/ititle_decor.jpg b/old/74857-h/images/ititle_decor.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index eadbc8b..0000000 --- a/old/74857-h/images/ititle_decor.jpg +++ /dev/null |
