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The Country Church 
 
 and 
 
 Community Cooperation 
 
 Edited by 
 
 HENRY ISRAEL 
 
 Editor of Rural Manhood 
 
 
 
 New York: 124 East 28th Street 
 
 London: 47 Paternoster Row, E. C. 
 
 1913 
 
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 'V* Copyright, 1913, by 
 
 The International Committee of 
 Young Men's Christian Associations 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 This conference is the third of a series 
 beginning with the gathering of December i, 
 19 10, the proceedings of which were pub- 
 lished under the title, "The Rural Church 
 and Community Betterment." That certainly 
 acted as an appetizer, and last year the con- 
 ference developed into a somewhat larger 
 and more comprehensive one. It was held 
 at the International Committee Building, 
 Thursday, November 23, 191 1 ; the proceed- 
 ings were published under the title, *'The 
 Country Church and Rural Welfare." 
 
 This year it is evident that the conference 
 has assumed even larger proportions. Its 
 object was to compare the work of the men 
 who labor and know the problems, the men 
 who are making special studies of these prob- 
 lems from the outside as well as the inside 
 point of view. The matter here presented is, 
 therefore, of real value and includes papers 
 and some recommendations by a Commission 
 especially appointed consisting of Professor 
 T. N. Carver of Harvard University; Pro- 
 fessor E. L. Earp of Drew Theological 
 
 281286 
 
4 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 Seminary; Dr. M. A. Honline of the Inter- 
 national Committee, Religious Work Depart- 
 ment; Mr. D. C. Drew, State Secretary of 
 County Work of Massachusetts and Rhode 
 Island; and Rev. Charles O. Bemies, pastor 
 of the Presbyterian Church in McClelland- 
 town, Pennsylvania. 
 
 D. Hunter McAlpin. M. D. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Introduction . 3 
 
 I. Community Cooperation — The Coun- 
 try School and the Country Church. 
 
 T. S. Settle 7 
 
 II. Religious Education as a Factor 
 in Training for Country Life. 
 G. Walter Fiske 21 
 
 III. A Coordinating Factor. Henry 
 
 Israel 44 
 
 IV. Educational Readjustment of Country 
 
 Life. Mason S. Stone ... 53 
 V. How a Whole Community Is Being 
 
 Helped. Wickliffe Rose . . 60 
 VI. The Value of a Social Survey to 
 a Community. Hermann N. 
 
 Morse 67 
 
 VII. A Method of Making a Survey. 
 
 John Brown, Jr., M. D. . . . 73 
 VIII. The New Rural South. James H. 
 
 DiLLARD 80 
 
 IX. Religious and Educational Coopera- 
 tion with County and State Fairs. 
 A. C. HuRD 87 
 
6 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 X. Play a Socializing Factor in Rural 
 
 Communities. E. K. Jordan . . 95 
 XI. The Moral and Educational Value 
 
 of Athletics. H. D. Maydole . 100 
 XII. The Importance of the Social Survey. 
 
 T. N. Carver 107 
 
 XIII. The Need of Trained Leadership in 
 
 Rural Life. Edwin L. Earp . . 117 
 
 XIV. Home-made Leaders. D. C. Drew 131 
 XV. Religious Education in Country Life. 
 
 M. A. HoNLiNE . . . . . 142 
 XVI. The Opportunity of the Country 
 Pastor to Direct Social Enterprises. 
 Chas. O. Bemies 158 
 
COMMUNITY COOPERATION— THE 
 
 COUNTRY SCHOOL AND THE 
 
 COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 T. S. Settle 
 
 State Supervisor of Rural Elementary 
 Schools of Virginia 
 
 This is an age of cooperation. It is being 
 practised on every hand and in all walks and 
 occupations of life. The business world has 
 learned its value, bankers, merchants, manu- 
 facturers, railroad magnates are practising it 
 as never before. Educational and philan- 
 thropic movements are also awakening to its 
 importance. Every day one sees striking 
 illustrations of cooperative efforts succeeding 
 where heretofore individual endeavor failed. 
 
 While cooperation is valuable and highly 
 desirable in many lines of business and in the 
 various enterprises connected with city life, 
 it is the first essential in bringing about any 
 real development and improvement of indus- 
 
'*' 8 . V : ;v'7 T.^^ COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 I y^nii; ' cconomiCy educational, social and reli- 
 gious conditions of present day American 
 country life. The country is so sparsely 
 settled, the amount of revenue is so limited, 
 the number of efficient workers is so small, 
 that unless all cooperate enthusiastically and 
 intelligently real progress cannot be attained. 
 Nor are there any two forces working for 
 the country community's betterment between 
 which cooperation is so essential as between 
 country school and country church. The 
 country school exists primarily to make good 
 citizens, but no one can be a good citizen who 
 lacks the moral and religious training that 
 the church gives. The country church exists 
 primarily to give moral and religious train- 
 ing, but no church can accomplish satisfactory 
 work without an intelligent and educated 
 membership. This educational training must 
 be obtained largely from the country school. 
 If then cooperation is so essential between 
 the country school, the country church, and 
 all other country betterment forces, the first 
 thought that comes to us is. Around what can 
 these forces unite? What is the logical 
 center of community life and community 
 activity? In some communities it is one thing 
 and in other communities it is another, but 
 
COMMUNITY COOPERATION 9 
 
 taking the United States as a whole, in a 
 great majority of communities the logical 
 center is the country school. If it is not now 
 the center of community life it is because the 
 possibilities connected with it have not been 
 developed. It is the one building owned by 
 all the community. It is the one place where 
 the rich man, poor man, Protestant, Catholic, 
 feel equally at home and have equal right 
 to be. It is where the future citizens are 
 being trained and where their parents should 
 be learning how better to discharge the duties 
 of present day citizenship. 
 
 If then the country school is the logical 
 center of country life, the country school 
 plant should be adapted to this broad use. 
 In Virginia we are including an assembly hall 
 in every new school building, even though 
 the school has as few as two teachers. This 
 assembly hall is used for almost every kind of 
 public gathering from school exercises to 
 farmers' meetings and political rallies. It is 
 where we train the "grown-ups." These 
 schoolhouses are located on lots varying in 
 size from two acres to eleven acres. These 
 large lots furnish a place for play and 
 athletics for the school children, for all the 
 people of the community. It is the com- 
 
10 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 munity's baseball park, the track field, picnic 
 ground, play festival ground. 
 
 Agreeing that the school is the logical 
 center of community life and given a school 
 plant adapted to this broad use, along what 
 lines can the country school, the country 
 church, the country Young Men's Christian 
 Association and other forces cooperate in 
 building up country life? There are many of 
 them but I will attempt to discuss only three ; 
 they are: 
 
 First. Citizens' Leagues. 
 Second. Play and Athletics. 
 Third. Mountain Mission Schools. 
 
 I take it for granted that the reader 
 prefers hearing about something the people 
 are doing or beginning to do to mere theo- 
 rizing; that the concrete is preferable to the 
 abstract. I will therefore confine my discus- 
 sion of these three lines of activity to what 
 we are doing in my own state of Virginia. 
 
 Citizens' Leagues 
 
 We are attempting in Virginia to organize 
 in connection with every country school a 
 citizens' league. By the means of the school 
 
COMMUNITY COOPERATION 11 
 
 machinery, we gather together all the people 
 of the community at the school building, 
 explain to them that we want to organize a 
 citizens' league whose object will be "To 
 advance the social, civic and school interests 
 of the community," and invite all interested 
 in the objects of the league to become mem- 
 bers. When the objects of the league are 
 thus presented they rarely fail to organize. 
 Officers are elected, simple constitution and 
 by-laws are adopted and, what is much more 
 to the point, they go to work. 
 
 One of the first things the league fre- 
 quently does is to clean up and beautify the 
 school grounds. It is an inspiring sight to 
 see farmers, merchants, bankers, ministers, 
 teachers, gather on the school grounds with 
 picks, crowbars, shovels, hoes and teams, pull 
 off their coats and go to work shoveling dirt, 
 leveling ground, digging post holes, planting 
 shade trees, setting out hedges and in other 
 ways working to make this, the one piece of 
 public property, the most beautiful and 
 attractive spot in the community. 
 
 The league also frequently cooperates with 
 the school board (which often has a very 
 limited amount of money) in securing proper 
 furniture and other equipment. It presents 
 
12 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 to the school portraits of such famous Vir- 
 ginians as Washington, Jefferson, Jackson 
 and Lee. It nearly always buys a piano or 
 organ for the school. There is nothing that 
 country people appreciate more than music. 
 
 These leagues have placed libraries in 
 many of the country schools. The library 
 contains books, not alone for the children, 
 but also for the grown people. Indeed it is 
 not merely a school library but a community 
 library. One room in the school is set aside 
 for its use. In addition to books it is supplied 
 with daily papers, periodicals and leading 
 magazines. The library is kept open in the 
 afternoons and evenings. Public spirited 
 citizens alternate in acting as librarians. All 
 this work is given because the community 
 cannot afford a paid librarian. 
 
 Another valuable thing the league does for 
 the community is to conduct a lyceum course. 
 This course includes lectures on health, given 
 by representatives from the State Depart- 
 ment of Health and by local health de- 
 partments and local physicians; lectures by 
 representatives of the State Department of 
 Education and local educators. Local talent 
 is also utilized in these courses. Frequently 
 outside paid lyceum numbers, including high 
 
COMMUNITY COOPERATION 13 
 
 class music, trained elocutionists and high 
 grade comedy are a part of the course. 
 
 The league takes up many other lines of 
 work such as good roads, village sidewalks, 
 study of better farming methods, literary 
 clubs, etc. 
 
 But how does the church cooperate in this 
 work ? The most active members of the vari- 
 ous churches are usually the most active 
 workers of the citizens' league. Nearly 
 every minister of the community is an active 
 worker in the league and frequently the 
 president of the league is a minister. The 
 ministers assist in cleaning up the ground, 
 keeping open the community library, in 
 bringing the right kind of lecturers and enter- 
 tainers to the community and frequently 
 furnish one or more of the lyceum lectures 
 themselves. Owing to their talent, training 
 and position, they become the leaders of the 
 people in this as well as in other work. 
 
 Play and Athletics 
 
 Throughout America, both in the country 
 and in the city, there is being preached the 
 gospel of play and athletics. People are 
 realizing as never before the physical, mental 
 
14 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 and moral training value of play, provided 
 that the play Is properly directed. Virginia 
 Is awakening to the possibilities of play. Our 
 country school teachers are teaching and 
 directing pupils In simple games and, through 
 the school, they are Introducing suitable 
 games for the home. Playground equipment 
 Is being Installed on many country school 
 grounds. Baseball, basket ball, soccer, tennis 
 and such games are being Introduced and 
 enthusiastically received. The athletic badge 
 contests for boys and girls, that have been In 
 use In New York, Chicago and other large 
 cities, have recently been adopted by the State 
 Department of PuWIc Instruction for all the 
 schools of the state of Virginia, both country 
 and city. To Illustrate : A boy in any Isolated 
 country school who can chin the bar four 
 times, run sixty yards In eight and three fifths 
 seconds, do the standing broad jump five feet 
 nine inches, will be presented by the State 
 Department of Public Instruction with a 
 "Class A" button. By meeting higher re- 
 quirements he can secure "Class B" and 
 "Class C" buttons. 
 
 But we take a step beyond athletics for the 
 individual school. We organize the schools 
 of a county into a County Athletic League. 
 
COMMUNITY COOPERATION 15 
 
 A baseball tournament is arranged for the 
 boys, a basket ball tournament for the girls. 
 The rivalry between the different schools is 
 usually very keen. An outsider would think 
 that a "World's Series" was being played. 
 A track and field meet is held in the spring 
 and to this meet each school sends its best 
 runners, jumpers, pole vaulters, shot putters, 
 etc. 
 
 It is not difficult to introduce these games 
 and athletic contests. Children enjoy them 
 and respond readily. It is, however, often 
 difficult to have them conducted properly, to 
 find people in a country community, who are 
 trained in athletics and understand how to 
 conduct such contests. It is in this capacity 
 that the country preacher, the country Y. M. 
 C. A. worker, can render and often does 
 render the most valuable cooperative ser- 
 vice. Frequently our country ministers 
 umpire the baseball and basket ball games. 
 I recall one instance where a Methodist 
 minister was umpiring a game and darkness 
 coming on, the score a tie, he tossed a quarter 
 to decide the winner. In another community 
 the Presbyterian minister has trained the high 
 school track team that has won the county 
 championship for several years. In another 
 
16 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 county where we have recently organized such 
 a league, the county Y. M. C. A. secretary 
 was made a member of the executive commit- 
 tee and he will do much to train the teams and 
 conduct the meets. This is a fine illustration 
 of cooperation between religious workers 
 and the school. He finds this an excellent 
 means of connecting himself with the life of 
 the county. We have 7,000 school children 
 to be trained and directed and he is a potent 
 factor in this work. 
 
 Mountain Mission Schools 
 
 Another most valuable line of cooperation 
 for country school, country church and the 
 Home Mission Board is the Mountain Mis- 
 sion School. Allow me to illustrate what I 
 mean by describing a school and community 
 that I visited and studied last summer. In 
 Rockbridge County, situated in an isolated 
 hollow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is a 
 settlement, eight miles from the railroad, 
 known as "Irish Creek." Rockbridge County 
 is one of our richest counties and boasts of 
 more blue blood than perhaps any other 
 county of the state. Located at its county 
 seat are two noted higher institutions of 
 learning, Virginia Military Institute and 
 
COMMUNITY COOPERATION 17 
 
 Washington and Lee University. But none 
 of the professors of these institutions or the 
 *'blue bloods" had ever attempted to carry 
 the light of civilization to Irish Creek. It 
 was considered a very dangerous community 
 to visit. Rumor has it that many people have 
 been killed there in times past. 
 
 The inhabitants have cleared small patches 
 of ground on the mountain sides and live by 
 farming them and by lumbering. Their 
 homes are for the most part wretched huts. 
 I visited one such home in which two families 
 lived. One family had four children and the 
 other five and these thirteen people were 
 living in a hut eighteen by twenty-two feet 
 containing only one room; not even a cur- 
 tain was used to separate one family's domain 
 from the other. The other homes were not 
 so crowded, but the houses were on a par with 
 this one. 
 
 Although a little one-room schoolhouse 
 had been erected in that community years ago, 
 no school had been conducted there for the 
 past six years. It had been impossible for 
 the school board to induce teachers to take 
 this school. Last session the board offered 
 this school to twenty-one different teachers 
 but every one refused. You can readily 
 
IS THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 understand that a trained teacher who could 
 get a position elsewhere would not care to 
 live in this isolated community, board at one 
 of these miserable huts, associate constantly 
 with people, the majority of whom are illit- 
 erate and only one of whom could boast of 
 having traveled as far on the road of learn- 
 ing as the mile post of ''common fractions." 
 Nothing but the genuine missionary spirit 
 could compel one to take such a position. 
 
 But the people continued to implore the 
 school authorities to send them teachers. So 
 they decided last spring to attempt to conduct 
 a summer school. Two of the best teachers 
 of the county volunteered to undertake the 
 work. Taking along a twelve-year-old boy 
 for assistance and protection, they went into 
 this mountain hollow, carrying their tents, 
 provisions and cooking utensils with them. 
 You can readily imagine the hardships they 
 underwent. Think of housekeeping eight 
 miles from the base of supplies and with no 
 telephone, no deliveries, no buggies and only 
 occasional communications from the outside 
 world. 
 
 But they endured these hardships and went 
 earnestly to work. Soon they had a school 
 of sixty-five pupils, varying in age from seven 
 
COMMUNITY COOPERATION 19 
 
 to twenty-one. The great majority were in 
 the primer, none were beyond the fourth 
 reader. A class for grown people was 
 also organized and every Wednesday and 
 Saturday afternoon twenty-five illiterate but 
 earnest mountaineers, both men and women, 
 learned to read and write. In this class was 
 a grandmother of seventy-five studying the 
 same primer and the same lessons as her 
 granddaughter of eight. 
 
 When my co-worker, Mr. J. H. Binford, 
 and I visited this community we organized a 
 citizens' league, a debating society, gave a 
 series of stereopticon lectures, had an old 
 time spelling bee and held an athletic meet. 
 
 We had not been working in this com- 
 munity long, however, before we found that 
 the people needed religious training; that in 
 order to make a success of our work and to 
 really elevate the tone of the community it 
 was necessary to have the cooperation of the 
 church. As this is a Presbyterian county, a 
 Presbyterian minister came there and held a 
 series of meetings. He brought with him an 
 especially talented worker, a ministerial stu- 
 dent of twenty years of age, who pitched his 
 tent near that of the teachers, boarded with 
 them and cooperated with them in the com- 
 
20 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 munlty betterment work. He and they organ- 
 ized a Sunday-school, taught the people songs 
 and hymns. He preached every Sunday. He 
 also built a dam across a small mountain 
 creek and made a large swimming pool in 
 which many of the natives learned for the 
 first time the joys of taking a weekly bath. 
 He was a great aid to the teachers and but 
 for him they could not have remained and 
 continued their work. 
 
 I frankly admit that without the coopera- 
 tion of the church our attempt at a school 
 would have proven a failure. But I also 
 claim that without the school, church work in 
 such a community would prove a failure. 
 How could a church prove a success with such 
 an illiterate membership? 
 
 The State Department of Public Instruc- 
 tion is making a survey of the mountain 
 sections of Virginia for the purpose of con- 
 ducting many such schools as the one at Irish 
 Creek. But our minds are made up upon one 
 thing — we will not attempt to conduct such a 
 school in any community where we cannot get 
 the cooperation of the logical religious 
 denomination. In some communities it will 
 be one denomination and in other communi- 
 ties it will be another. 
 
II 
 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AS A 
 
 FACTOR IN TRAINING FOR 
 
 COUNTRY LIFE 
 
 G. Walter Fiske 
 Junior Dean, Oberlin Theological Seminary 
 
 The teaching function of the church; the 
 opportunity of the country Sunday-school; 
 fundamental principles involved; specific aims 
 and a constructive policy. 
 
 Invaluable as our public school system is 
 as a prime agency in training for citizen- 
 ship and leadership, it has at least two limi- 
 tations which are rather permanent. We all 
 have high hopes for the rural school. We 
 look forward to the time when it shall be 
 centralized in its township; when it shall be 
 well housed and equipped, properly super- 
 vised and maintained by county or state taxa- 
 tion instead of on the niggardly district 
 system. We pray for the time when the 
 
22 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 rural schools everywhere shall have teachers 
 who love the country and are not eternally 
 hankering for the city, and giving the farm 
 boys and girls the city fever; when the 
 country school shall really train for country 
 life and for farm life, and shall utilize the 
 splendid rural materials for education that 
 are everywhere near at hand, and shall 
 develop a generation of country lovers who 
 know how to utilize the forces of country life. 
 But even then the public school is likely to 
 have limitations. 
 
 The public school is, and doubtless always 
 will be, limited in its scope of instruction and 
 its content of teaching. Although it must 
 increasingly serve the interests of the whole 
 community, only a small portion of the com- 
 munity will at any time be under its direct 
 influence; and some of the most important 
 subjects it dare not now, and perhaps never 
 will, teach. So long as our public schools 
 teach only children and confine their atten- 
 tion to secular subjects, they will need help 
 in this problem of training for rural leader- 
 ship and citizenship. Foremost among these 
 institutions which share this responsibilty is 
 the church, particularly through its Sunday- 
 schools. 
 
A FACTOR IN TRAINING 23 
 
 It is a well-known fact that 95 per cent of 
 our boys and girls the country over never 
 reach the high school. It is not so generally 
 known that the bulk of the pupils are in the 
 lowest grades. Fully four-fifths do not reach 
 the seventh grade; that is, they leave school 
 before they enter their teens. In the public 
 grade schools of the city of Cleveland two 
 weeks ago there were only 60,881 children, 
 or one-ninth of the population. (The nor- 
 mal proportion of children from five to four- 
 teen years inclusive is 22 per cent.) But of 
 this 60,881, only 15 per cent were in the 
 seventh and eighth grades; while 61 per cent 
 were in grades from one to four. Compari- 
 son with last year's figures shows a relative 
 decline in the higher grades. Apparently 
 then, in one of our cities of the first class, 
 where educational standards are relatively 
 high, nearly half of the children under fifteen 
 are not in the public schools at all; and of 
 those that attend, nearly half graduate after 
 the third grade. That is to say, making fair 
 allowance for the children in parochial 
 schools, the average schooling of Cleveland 
 children is not far from three years. 
 
 We have no such accurate figures for the 
 rural districts or I should have quoted them. 
 
24 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 But we have little reason to think that the 
 conditions are very much better than in the 
 cities, except in prosperous villages or in 
 townships where the schools are consolidated. 
 More country children are in school, but 
 probably for a much shorter school year and 
 for irregular periods. The fact is clear that 
 our public school constituency is very limited. 
 Great is our debt to the schools. They are 
 the hope of the republic. There is a splendid 
 army of earnest men and women giving 
 heroic service as teachers, and every year 
 their standard of efficiency is raised a little 
 higher. I am not criticising them; I am 
 simply showing that they cannot do the whole 
 work of training for country life and leader- 
 ship, for their scope of influence is seriously 
 limited, mainly to young children. 
 
 This is not true of the church or the 
 Sunday-school. Both include potentially the 
 entire population and actually include people 
 of all ages as no other institution does. 
 Whereas isolated Sunday-schools can still be 
 found in which most of the members are 
 children, they are very exceptional, especially 
 in the country districts. The "Adult Bible 
 Class movement" the past ten years, and the 
 growth of the "Home Department" have 
 
A FACTOR IN TRAINING 25 
 
 considerably increased the percentage of 
 adults in Sunday-schools, so that I think the 
 results Dr. Wilson found in three Indiana 
 counties, which were intensively studied, will 
 prove typical of most rural counties. The 
 total enrollment was found to be divided into 
 almost equal thirds, children under fourteen, 
 adults over twenty-one, and youth between 
 those ages. Substantially the same results 
 are found in Missouri. This is not saying 
 that there are more children in Sunday-school 
 than in day school ; but it shows that the scope 
 of the former Is far broader, that the coun- 
 try Sunday-school especially is not merely a 
 child's institution. There are villages In 
 which the Sunday-school enrollment exceeds 
 the village population, because of attendance 
 from outside, added to efficient work in the 
 neighborhood. 
 
 There can be no question that the Sunday- 
 school is a far greater factor in the com- 
 munity life In the country than in the city. 
 Three-fourths of the total Sunday-schools in 
 America are In the rural sections. They are 
 far more representative of the population 
 than the city schools. Usually they are com- 
 munity Institutions and often the country 
 people think more of them than they do of 
 
26 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 their churches! While the preachers come 
 and go and are usually non-residents any way, 
 the Sunday-school officers and teachers are 
 the permanent religious leaders of the com- 
 munity and are often prominent citizens. 
 Preaching services are irregularly held, but 
 the Sunday-school meets every Sunday in the 
 year. 
 
 In the Southern Baptist and Methodist 
 churches we are told there are 17,000 preach- 
 ing services omitted every Sunday for lack of 
 a regular pastor, but their Sunday-schools are 
 doubtless in session regularly. The Sunday- 
 school is a laymen's institution with lay 
 leadership; perhaps that is why Dr. Wilson 
 found 12 per cent more men in the Sunday- 
 school than in the church. Though rural 
 Sunday-schools are often very crude in 
 their methods, it is evident that they have a 
 great opportunity to wield vast influence in 
 country life and to train a staunch, true rural 
 leadership. 
 
 This is doubly evident when we reflect that 
 the church school is teaching what the public 
 school cannot teach — spiritual realities, and 
 what the schools at present seldom teach — 
 ethical standards, moral principles and 
 motives for the making of character. Until 
 
A FACTOR IN TRAINING 27 
 
 the public schools of America, which are so 
 much more timid than the schools of Ger- 
 many, France and even Japan, discover how 
 to teach ethics, the rural Sunday-schools will 
 be indispensable. It is the church's unique 
 function then, as the teacher of the most vital 
 spiritual and ethical truths to all classes and 
 ages, which compels us to consider it one of 
 the foremost factors in training for country 
 life. 
 
 I have carefully noted conditions to remind 
 you that we cannot afford to neglect the 
 Sunday-school as we face our problem of 
 vitalizing country life with new purposeful- 
 ness, of training a rural citizenship which 
 shall be efficient and loyal to the country, and 
 of developing a rural leadership which shall 
 be able to cope with the serious difficulties 
 involved in rural redirection. 
 
 A new country life is surely in the making. 
 A new rural civilization is already here, with 
 its modern equipment, its scientific agricul- 
 ture, its wonderful machinery, its gradual 
 conquest of isolation and drudgery and the 
 hopelessly commonplace, and its crying need 
 of social cooperation in every phase of life. 
 We rejoice in our "bumper crops," the foun- 
 dation of our national prosperity, but whence 
 
28 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 shall come the high ideals which shall thwart 
 an increasing rural materialism? Whither 
 shall we look for the leadership of the spirit 
 which shall keep country life sound and true 
 at heart? Our rural leadership must not be 
 simply corn fed. It must be an illumined 
 leadership; not merely intelligent but pro- 
 phetic, keen in insight and with spiritual 
 perceptions. Our choicest country boys and 
 girls, yes, and the rank and file, must come to 
 the purest springs of inspiration which the 
 world has known, the literature of the Old 
 and New Testaments, and here kindle the 
 noblest enthusiasms of their young lives, and 
 see the visions of the world's greatest seers 
 and share the heart throbs of God's prophets 
 who felt the divine call and the divine impulse 
 in their lives. 
 
 The people of the open country have so 
 few institutions, their social structure is so 
 simple and so bare, they can ill afford to lose 
 any of their effective social outfit. They 
 need to utilize and vitalize every institution 
 they possess which makes for righteousness 
 and an efficient life. Anyone can criticise 
 the country Sunday-school. It is an easy 
 mark; so naive in its blunders and so quaint 
 in its crudeness ; but before we deign to criti- 
 
A FACTOR IN TRAINING 29 
 
 else it, let us recognize the service it has 
 rendered and the unique position it still holds. 
 It is too essential — ^just because of its unique 
 opportunity for influence — to justify either 
 condemnation or neglect. Let us find its 
 needs and try to improve it; for we cannot 
 do without it. 
 
 I suspect that we need a different objective, 
 or rather a broader objective, in most of our 
 rural Sunday-schools. Too many of them 
 limit their efforts to making Christians, or 
 perhaps Baptists, instead of developing 
 manly, effective Christian citizens. Do not 
 misunderstand me. I mean simply this. The 
 evangelistic aim should not be the whole pur- 
 pose of the Sunday-school. Leading the boys 
 and girls to begin the Christian life should 
 not be the end of the Sunday-school's effort, 
 as I fear it is too frequently. This is making 
 an end of a beginning — a manifest absurd- 
 ity. What then should be the end of the 
 Sunday-school's effort? I do not know. It 
 is invisible. It is very great, but too far away 
 to see. There is a vast area of service in 
 between. But I am sure that the Sunday- 
 school should aim at nothing less than to 
 develop a symmetrical Christian manhood 
 and womanhood in its boys and girls, and to 
 
30 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 have a share in making efficient citizens of 
 its men and women; citizens of this pres- 
 ent world, I mean, not merely passengers 
 safely ticketed on the Methodist Limited to 
 Emmanuel's Land far away. In saying this 
 I would not diminish at all the right sort 
 of evangelism in the Sunday-school. It is 
 mighty important for a boy in his teens, yes, 
 before, to become a friend of Jesus Christ 
 and to ally himself loyally with his great 
 world movement; but enlistment is only the 
 soldier's first duty. The cross is no mere 
 resting place. Let Christian make himself 
 useful on the King's highway. 
 
 It is quite evident that many country 
 Sunday-schools are handicapped by the low 
 ideals of the churches and their serious mis- 
 conception of what religion really is. In 
 many places I have discovered the ideal of 
 religious experience to be so crude and vapid, 
 so unintelligent and so lacking in real moral 
 results in character that it fails to win the 
 respect of the average man in the community. 
 I am making no attack upon sane evangelism 
 when I say that country churches must quit 
 depending on periodic debauches of feverish 
 emotional revivalism to maintain their spirit- 
 ual life. Self-respecting people shun stimu- 
 
A FACTOR IN TRAINING 31 
 
 lants. The after effects are too awful — 
 whatever may be the temporary exaltation. 
 
 When^ the country churches frankly face 
 the fact that a permanent religious experience 
 must be based upon an intelligent consecration 
 of the individual life, and that this must be 
 prepared for by a patient course of teaching 
 and training — then the Sunday-school will 
 come to its own. I rejoice that many churches 
 have already come to the joy and peace of 
 this discovery and are making religious edu- 
 cation, both in the Sunday-school and in a 
 thoughtful pulpit, the practical ideal of their 
 chief service to the community. The wise 
 minister is depending less upon the "rouse- 
 ments," to which an over-exhorted congre- 
 gation soon becomes immune, and more upon 
 the practical teaching of the facts of religion 
 and life, which feeds souls and grows charac- 
 ter. Sermons of frothy piosity and noisy 
 '^hot-air" are more and more repulsive to the 
 country people after once they have heard the 
 real preaching of a man with a life message 
 who rejoices in the function of a true religious 
 teacher, appealing to intelligence first, and 
 the will second and then developing through 
 action the wholesome emotion which endures 
 in a permanently consecrated life. 
 
32 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 While we are speaking of fundamentals, 
 next in importance after the new ideal of the 
 religious life itself is an intelligent knowledge 
 of the Bible. The blight of country life is a 
 perfunctory belief in a dead book, which 
 somehow, no man knows how, like Moses' 
 tables of stone, is supposed to have come 
 from the finger of God. Religious education 
 needs a better foundation than this, or, under 
 the onslaughts of doubt, faith totters to its 
 fall. The basis of a Hving faith must be a 
 Book of Life. The Bible is not a mere maga- 
 zine for the storage of theological powder 
 and shot for use against heretics, higher 
 critics and the devil, nor is it an unearthly 
 book of apoqalypses like the Koran or the 
 book of Mormon. The Bible is a wonderful 
 part of human history. A splendid enthusi- 
 asm will increasingly come to the country 
 churches as they discover the Bible to be the 
 record of actual life-struggles of real proph- 
 ets and living apostles, who left the world 
 these glowing records of their lives and of 
 God*s progressive revelation of himself to 
 them. The historical interpretation of the 
 Bible gives a new and vital meaning to many 
 chapters which have been dead letters, neg- 
 lected and forgotten. Young people espe- 
 
A FACTOR IN TRAINING 33 
 
 daily, trained to the scientific method in the 
 schools, welcome it as a reasonable and 
 worthy basis for a vital, self-respecting faith. 
 
 Our faith in the Sunday-school as an insti- 
 tution of unique importance in the country 
 must not blind us to its defects. We must 
 discover them to remedy them. Often the 
 country Sunday-school is just as efficient and 
 conducted on just as modern lines as the best 
 in the city; but in general the country Sunday- 
 schools are fully as defective as the local 
 public schools and for similar reasons. The 
 state Sunday-school associations are making 
 rapid progress in standardizing the schools 
 by the introduction of partially graded les- 
 sons and something of the machinery of the 
 modern system. But the teachers are usually 
 untrained, though well-meaning; and they 
 usually stay with the same class year after 
 year, growing up with the members instead 
 of remaining in the same department and 
 becoming expert teachers in some one grade 
 and period of boy life and girlhood. 
 
 A very common fault in the country 
 Sunday-school is not merely the disorder but 
 the noise — the extremely loud talking in- 
 dulged in by everybody simultaneously! It 
 is very distracting to one not used to it and 
 
34 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 sometimes very laughable. It seems to add 
 to the boys' interest in the auction-like pro- 
 ceedings, though certainly not to their intelli- 
 gence about the lesson. Such schools are not 
 equipped of course for effective teaching, the 
 classes being so near together as to fatally 
 disturb each other. 
 
 In harmony with the parsimonious thrift 
 of rural church finances, the popular lesson 
 quarterlies in the country are often of the 
 cheapest variety, Chicago-made canned ortho- 
 doxy preserved in perfectly harmless pre- 
 digested doses, and printed on appropriately 
 cheap paper. The teachers are apt to follow 
 all too faithfully the golden rule of ancient 
 pedagogy: "Teach unto others as it was 
 taught unto you." Stereotyped questions and 
 printed answers are consistently recited by 
 the younger classes without stirring anything 
 but surface interest. The older classes often 
 make the lesson merely a point of departure 
 and soon take to the well-worn fields of theo- 
 logical discussion on trite themes of personal 
 hobbies. Or, if the teacher happens to be 
 fluent and the class more patient than talka- 
 tive, he makes the teaching purely homiletic, 
 and, like the apostles of old, takes a text and 
 then goes everywhere preaching the gospel. 
 
A FACTOR IN TRAINING 35 
 
 Though many country Sunday-schools have 
 already been rescued from the dull monotony 
 of this fruitless routine, there is still great 
 improvement needed. The first essential is 
 to raise up and train a new corps of teachers 
 of the vital, full-blooded sort, men for the 
 classes of boys in their teens which are more 
 often found in the country than in the city. 
 The teaching must be less a matter of mere 
 parrot-like recitation or weak moralizing 
 and more a matter of definite instruction. 
 Nothing is taught unless somebody learns 
 something. 
 
 I am confident that the country Sunday- 
 school has a great possible usefulness among 
 the men of the community, as a developer of 
 public opinion and a community spirit. A 
 year ago in a rural county of Central Ohio 
 the annual County Sunday-school Conven- 
 tion demonstrated the loyalty of the men to 
 religion with a street parade of over three 
 thousand men ( lo per cent of the total popu- 
 lation of the county) . The finest men in that 
 county are back of the Sunday-school move- 
 ment and are really making it efficient. 
 
 To arouse such enthusiasm the Sunday- 
 school must be definitely practical in its 
 teachings. Sectarianism must be discarded 
 
36 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 and the great essentials of a universal Chris- 
 tian faith must take its place, the vital truths 
 which evangelical Christians hold in common. 
 And there is surely a great opportunity in 
 the country for the study of the social gospel 
 of Jesus and the prophets, covering the vital 
 matters of common life, of ordinary right- 
 eousness and social ethics, the relations 
 between men. Here is an opportunity not 
 merely for developing the most exciting sort 
 of class discussions among adult men, on live 
 topics in which they are keenly interested, 
 bringing to bear all the pure white light of 
 Christian teaching where it will do the most 
 good ; but also the opportunity to get speedy 
 results in the life of the community, as the 
 social ethics and the practical personal reli- 
 gion of Jesus work out in life and the church 
 becomes most effectually a community builder. 
 I know of no better place to discuss all the 
 problems of rural progress and to develop 
 constructive plans for real community build- 
 ing, than right here in the Brotherhood class 
 of the Sunday-school. 
 
 We have yet to develop a Sunday-school 
 literature which is adapted to the needs of 
 the country Sunday-school and is therefore 
 well fitted to train for country life. It is an 
 
A FACTOR IN TRAINING 37 
 
 unfortunate fact that most Sunday-school 
 quarterlies and lesson studies are being pro- 
 duced in the cities and by city editors, and 
 like practically all text-books bear pretty 
 evidently the urban stamp. 
 
 Yet the Bible itself is a book of rural life 
 with the exception of some of the writings of 
 Paul. The Gospels breathe the free air of 
 Galilee and Perea; and the Old Testament 
 is rural from the Garden of Eden down. No 
 wonder country folks appreciate it. As Dr. 
 Franklin McElfresh well says: ''The Bible 
 sprang from the agonies of a shepherd's soul, 
 from the triumph of a herdsman's faith and 
 the glory of a fisherman's love." Its religion 
 keeps close to the ground and interprets the 
 daily life of sincere men who lived near to 
 nature. One of the great days in the history 
 of religion and of liberty is on record when a 
 vinedresser named Amos stood up before the 
 king of Israel to speak the burden of his soul. 
 'Trophet," said he, "I am no prophet, only 
 a plain farmer; but I came by God's call to 
 tell you the truth." This was the daydawn 
 of Hebrew prophecy. 
 
 "The Bible can best be interpreted in the 
 country. It sprang from a pastoral people. 
 It is full of the figures of the soil and the flock 
 
38 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 and the field. Its richest images are from the 
 plain face of nature and the homely life of 
 humble cottages." Country Sunday-schools 
 need a lesson literature which can interpret to 
 them the wonderful messages of the Book of 
 books in terms of rural life; but meanwhile 
 they are doing their best to discover these 
 messages of life themselves; and a vast army 
 of teachers are week by week sharing their 
 visions and giving of their best to make the 
 country Sunday-school an effective institution 
 in the Kingdom of God. 
 
 It is difficult for us, meeting in this metrop- 
 olis, where we are overwhelmed by the 
 greatness of all things urban, to think of the 
 real vastness of things rural. Among these 
 rural forces the country Sunday-school I 
 believe is one of the greatest. In the aggre- 
 gate it is after all a great affair. When I 
 remind you that there are in our land 
 17,000 annual Sunday-school conventions, 
 and that most of these are in the country, you 
 can imagine for yourselves the far vaster 
 number of separate Sunday-schools which 
 practically everywhere are serving the inter- 
 ests of the people who live on the land. 
 There are state, district, county and township 
 organizations, in which sectarian divisions. 
 
A FACTOR IN TRAINING 39 
 
 the curse of religion, are merged and tem- 
 porarily forgotten; and so thorough is this 
 work, in some places practically the entire 
 population of a rural community is connected 
 with the Sunday-school. 
 
 In attempting in conclusion a summary of 
 my message I would offer a constructive 
 policy as follows : 
 
 Inasmuch as the breadth of the coun- 
 try Sunday-school's opportunity is unique, 
 broader than the public schools and even 
 broader than the church itself, because more 
 nearly universal, and including in its scope 
 the entire population, both children and 
 adults; and because its business is to teach the 
 great truths of life and apply them to prac- 
 tical living; it is evident that this is one of the 
 greatest of all rural institutions, possibly 
 second to none in its actual influence. 
 
 Because of this vast potential influence of 
 the country Sunday-school, all country lovers 
 should recognize that it can be made to out- 
 grow its crudities and to become one of the 
 mightiest allies of the country life movement 
 for permanent rural progress; that by devel- 
 oping the eflSiciency of the Sunday-school we 
 are not only enriching country life at its very 
 
40 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 center, but are helping to train an intelligent, 
 consecrated, community leadership. 
 
 What then should be our endeavor in rela- 
 tion to this great social factor in rural 
 community life? 
 
 1. To enlist in it and claim for it the 
 loyal support of the entire rural community; 
 insisting that the strongest men and women 
 in the community will find it not only a potent 
 agency for their local influence and service, 
 but also for their own personal development 
 and training for better leadership. 
 
 2. To obtain for the Sunday-school an 
 adequate equipment, so that it can do efficient 
 work. It is a wonder that Sunday-schools 
 using merely a single room, with practically 
 no equipment at all, accomplish as much as 
 they do. 
 
 3. To relate the Sunday-school and the 
 work of religious education to the educational 
 forces of the community and to be content 
 with no lower pedagogical standard than the 
 day schools maintain. 
 
 4. To claim the cooperation of the best 
 trained teachers available, including the 
 public school teachers; and to maintain 
 teacher training as a regular part of the 
 church's work. 
 
A FACTOR IN TRAINING 41 
 
 5. To develop a Sunday-school literature 
 indigenous to rural life and adapted to its 
 needs, which shall utilize the vast body of 
 rural material in the Bible, and shall be pre- 
 pared for the making of country character 
 by writers who understand country life and 
 the needs and viewpoints of country people. 
 
 6. To combine in the objective of the 
 Sunday-school a vital evangelism with a gen- 
 uine religious culture which shall incarnate 
 spiritual teaching in ethical character, so that 
 the moral results of our Sunday-schools in 
 the country may be more evident and more 
 permanent. 
 
 7. To relate the work of the country 
 Sunday-school in some effective way to the 
 play life of the boys and girls, and, when 
 necessary, to the recreative life of the whole 
 community. This does not necessarily mean 
 turning the annual time-honored Sunday- 
 school picnic into a continuous performance. 
 But it means the frank facing of the fact by 
 the Sunday-school authorities that no rural 
 community can be saved until its play life is 
 redeemed, and wholesome recreation pro- 
 vided as a basis for morals. If the Sunday- 
 school can stimulate other agencies to func- 
 tion socially, well and good; otherwise the 
 
42 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 Sunday-school must see to this work, if it 
 would save Its boys and girls. 
 
 8. The Sunday-school leaders should be 
 statesmanlike enough to discover latent 
 leadership in the young people and help to 
 train it. The leader's knowledge, power, 
 skill, character and vision must somehow be 
 developed in the most promising members 
 of the community, in order that these choice 
 spirits may grow to their largest possible 
 service either in their own community or in 
 some other. Somehow the raw material of 
 leadership, that most costly thing in the 
 world, must be better conserved. This is 
 tremendously vital both in the case of the 
 country youth who go to the cities, so often 
 unprepared, and also for those who stay at 
 home with great undeveloped capacity for 
 leading their native township to an effective 
 community life. In this single point there 
 is suggestion for broad usefulness for the 
 Sunday-school. 
 
 9. There should be the closest coopera- 
 tion between the Sunday-schools in the coun- 
 try and the work of the rural Young Men's 
 Christian Associations, where these are 
 found. The rural secretaries are usually well- 
 trained college men, experts in boy life and 
 
A FACTOR IN TRAINING 43 
 
 leadership as well as in all fundamental rural 
 interests. They can be of great help to the 
 rural Sunday-schools when cooperation is 
 secured. 
 
Ill 
 
 A COORDINATING FACTOR 
 
 Henry Israel 
 International Secretary of County Work 
 
 Our hearts and patriotic impulses were 
 greatly stimulated as we read in the news- 
 papers that through the judicious statesman- 
 like leadership of our President, Mr. Taft, 
 we have been placed in the peculiar position 
 of a coordinating factor with relation to all 
 the other nations of the world in the use of 
 the Panama Canal. 
 
 A few months ago Mr. Taft had submitted 
 to him the recommendations of Professor 
 Emery R. Johnson of the Department of 
 Commerce and Transportation of the Uni- 
 versity of Pennsylvania as to the charges that 
 shall be made for the vessels that shall pass 
 through the Panama Canal, considering the 
 variety of the capacity of these vessels and 
 other measurements. 
 
A COORDINATING FACTOR 45 
 
 We have since learned that after carefully 
 considering the recommendations our Presi- 
 dent is about to submit them to the other 
 nations of the world to secure their approval 
 and acceptance and thus achieve the ultimate 
 reimbursement to our government of the 
 millions which it has expended in the building 
 of the Canal. 
 
 Professor Johnson said it would take 
 approximately twenty years to pay the price 
 of this gigantic piece of engineering. 
 
 We are invited to discuss practically a 
 coordinating factor in the great rural prob- 
 lem. Who is to determine what price will 
 need to be paid for this progress of rural 
 civilization not only in our own land, but in 
 the nations of the world? Are we not face 
 to face with the need of scientific data with 
 regard to the money, the time and the human 
 energy which will be required? Can we be 
 consistent and approach this human and 
 spiritual task with any less exactitude than 
 does the engineer in the building of a canal? 
 
 Whoever or whatever agency undertakes 
 this task must be in a position to take a tele- 
 scopic view of the whole problem as it pre- 
 sents itself in this country. We face prob- 
 lems intensive as well as extensive. Some of 
 
46 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 these have been presented in other chapters, 
 along educational lines, civic, social and reli- 
 gious, and there are others that still need to 
 be discovered. We must first find the sources 
 out of which coordination can issue. Mr. 
 Taft is seeking out the farthermost nations 
 of the world which may have any use for the 
 Canal in order that he may submit to them 
 his proposals. As a coordinating factor he 
 must have an outlook; he must be statesman- 
 like as well as sympathetic; his overtures must 
 be acceptable. 
 
 Our nation presents the rural problem of 
 a vast area. There is need of understanding 
 and cooperation on the part of all those 
 factors who are participants in the furthering 
 of our rural civilization. There are experi- 
 ments going on in the state of Washington 
 and vicinity, in Texas, in New England, in 
 the north and in the south, and where is the 
 coordinating factor whereby duplication and 
 waste can be eliminated and inspiration given 
 to the consideration and experimentation in 
 those problems, of which there is no general 
 **awareness"? The time has come when we 
 must make for coordination in a constructive 
 program that will reach its consummation and 
 destination within a definite period. This is 
 
A COORDINATING FACTOR 47 
 
 what I mean by a factor with a telescopic 
 viewpoint — reaching out to a definite goal. 
 
 We need to establish friendly relationships 
 among all who have the least share in this 
 great ideal. In order that Professor Fiske's 
 findings may be made available to the student 
 in the state of Florida, in Maine, In India, 
 or anywhere in Great Britain, there Is needed 
 this Intermediary who Is accepted by all. 
 Such an agency, bureau, commission, organi- 
 zation or committee must be so situated that 
 It can readily see what is going on and 
 project the results into the realm where these 
 are needed. It must inspire, suggest and 
 cooperate. 
 
 Let me submit such a project that looks 
 forward to the consummation of a plan 
 within a given time to reach a definite goal. 
 It entails the ultimate Investment of ten 
 millions of dollars, the life energy of ^wo. 
 thousand trained leaders in the course of a 
 period of from sixty to seventy-five years. 
 
 If the payment for the Panama Canal can 
 be made In twenty years by patron nations, 
 on the basis of the accurate measurements 
 of their vessels which are to use the Canal, 
 then likewise we can approximate a superior 
 rural civilization within a given time provided 
 
48 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 adequate measurements and evaluations have 
 been made of all the elements involved. 
 Having thus established standards, any prac- 
 tical demonstration under such standardized 
 conditions can be readily duplicated under 
 like circumstances anywhere on the globe. 
 Thus we are compelled to reckon in terms of 
 the geographical units in which we are to 
 undertake our task. In our nation the fore- 
 going fundamentals must be applied to states 
 in and for themselves as well as in coopera- 
 tion with all the other states through an inter- 
 state or national coordinating agency. What 
 applies to this area applies to counties rela- 
 tive to the state, townships relative to the 
 county, communities relative to townships and 
 so on down until in the final analysis we come 
 to the individual who is the basis of our 
 whole propaganda. 
 
 These are the various realms in which not 
 general but very specific evaluations must be 
 made. This requires statesmanship, expert- 
 ness, leadership, yes, all that is embodied in 
 a real Christ-spirit life-sharing with the indi- 
 vidual in the community for the maximum of 
 efficiency and minimum expenditure of "pro- 
 fessional" leadership. It must be of the soil, 
 
A COORDINATING FACTOR 49 
 
 native to the community and to neighborhood 
 life. 
 
 It is to this sort of a program that the 
 County Committees, State Committees and 
 the International Committee are addressing 
 themselves. It is a herculean task that we 
 are facing in the helping of the group of boys 
 in the isolated community to find for itself 
 its own potentialities. Here begins the prob- 
 lem of coordination and cooperation because 
 the values of one are not known to the other 
 and collective values and powers much less. 
 Individualism, social stratification, denomi- 
 nationalism, family group jealousies of a cen- 
 tury we must face, and whether we believe in 
 predestination or not we are adding our fixed 
 share to the changing of thes^ conditions 
 through local volunteer leadership which is 
 being inspired, trained, developed and util- 
 ized by that employed leadership about which 
 Professor Fiske has previously spoken. 
 
 This is not a matter of weeks or months 
 or of impossibilities; it is not unlike the situa- 
 tion with which the Panama Canal Commis- 
 sion was confronted. Yet out of this 
 apparently impossible task which France had 
 proven impossible, the Canal is about to be 
 completed, and in our experience we find life 
 
50 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 m the open country In village, town and 
 hamlet yielding to the call to a new rural 
 civilization. This, if you please, is even 
 more than statesmanlike social engineering. 
 Nothing less than the dominating, patient, 
 persisting and pervading spirit of Christ can 
 overcome this static condition of country life. 
 
 We are now at work In something like 600 
 communities, in eighty counties in twenty-two 
 states and provinces in America. Over 1,500 
 volunteer leaders in these communities con- 
 stitute the pioneers of this new civilization; 
 they have come out of the old into the new. 
 They exemplify and project for their com- 
 munity in and through their groups of boys 
 twelve to fourteen years of age, the new 
 ideals of community life In which they dwell; 
 they dignify it; appreciation of it is awaken- 
 ing during that impressionable age of boy- 
 hood until, with patriotic pride and honor for 
 village and country together with intelligence 
 of conditions In the city, the suggestion of 
 and craving for urban centers loses its one- 
 time force. Such is the spirit in at least 1,200 
 boy groups. 
 
 Thus, as some of our rural leaders have 
 declared, the problem of the country is not 
 an economic but a moral problem. Laying 
 
A COORDINATING FACTOR 51 
 
 our foundations In the word of God as did the 
 founders of our nation, who landed on the 
 rock-bound coast of New England, and with 
 abounding faith In the superhuman leader- 
 ship of Jesus Christ, we hope to share in the 
 ushering in of this new civilization. It is 
 this supreme and superb inheritance which 
 humanly speaking needs to he capitalized, 
 particularly In the face of the kind of task 
 with which we are confronted. In demon- 
 stration of this spirit and unified approach, 
 individual churches, two and three, have 
 merged Into one community-serving church. 
 Boy power has been conserved and directed 
 purposefully involving lOO per cent of the 
 boy life In many communities. This spirit 
 of solidarity and coordination finds expres- 
 sion in the strong County Committee, each 
 member of which possesses the vision and 
 spirit of service, has the county-wide outlook, 
 is ready to share material as well as spiritual 
 weapons for this crusade. He experiences as 
 a pleasure and privilege the investment of 
 his money. Therefore, men of influence and 
 men of financial resources are enlisted without 
 difficulty when once the program of a genera- 
 tion or two is outlined. Thus ten millions of 
 dollars will not Issue from some inanimate 
 
52 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 *' Foundation" but from devoted and conse- 
 crated men and women in partnership with 
 God toward the consummation of his will, 
 that it be done on the earth, in community life 
 as it is done in Heaven. 
 
IV 
 
 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 
 OF COUNTRY LIFE 
 
 Mason S. Stone 
 Superintendent of Education, Vermont 
 
 A colored orator said that "Education is 
 the great palladium of our civil and religious 
 liberties and the grand pandemonium of our 
 civilization." In reporting for Vermont, I 
 am very glad to say that we have been 
 endeavoring to create a pandemonium be- 
 cause we prefer it to an unresponsive 
 quiescence. 
 
 It has been our great good fortune to invite 
 into the state and to have the benefit of 
 the services of that general disturber, Mr. 
 Roberts, and we are not through with him 
 yet. It is highly significant that we have men 
 who are giving themselves so generously to 
 the rural uplift and in this connection I am 
 especially gratified that the National Agri- 
 cultural Society and the American Country 
 
54 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 Life Federation have been organized, be- 
 cause, if I have understood correctly, they 
 are going to back the Page Bill, which will 
 mean more for the development of country 
 life than any other measure ever presented to 
 Congress. In the old country they are accus- 
 tomed to confer the degree of D. C. L., and I 
 am inclined to believe that some of our 
 American institutions will eventually confer 
 D. C. L. on such men as Messrs. Hays, Israel 
 and Roberts as Doctors of Country Life. 
 
 The condition of the country is rather 
 inviting as a field for work, but you all appre- 
 ciate that there are two adverse conditions, 
 one of which is isolation. The country people 
 are not brought together and socialized in the 
 manner in which they ought to be ; in fact, the 
 country people need to be saved from their 
 sordid and materialistic selves. When any 
 community becomes self-centered and self- 
 conscious, that community begins to rot 
 educationally, morally and spiritually. The 
 salvation of country life is a salvation from 
 itself. It needs a vision and I am highly 
 gratified to have been at a conference where 
 so much has been said in regard to vision. 
 
 One other feature which is adverse to the 
 development of country life is the push and 
 
EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 55 
 
 pull factor. The drudgery of the country 
 home and the lack of social activities, to a 
 certain extent, drive the young men and 
 women away from the country home ; and on 
 the other hand is the pull of the city and 
 village. In consequence there has been a 
 depletion of country life. The great problem 
 is, "How can we in any degree revive rural 
 conditions?" 
 
 I am to report in regard to some agencies 
 at work in Vermont for readjustment of 
 country life and for its development. I wish 
 to call your attention first to the fact that 
 Vermont has established a system of school 
 supervision by combination of towns and a 
 bill is before the legislature to make the sys- 
 tem mandatory. Also, I am glad to say that 
 the greatest agency we have in Vermont is 
 the establishment of a teacher training course 
 system by which we are fitting teachers for 
 the rural schools. We expect that within five 
 years Vermont will have a supply of trained 
 high school graduates available for all the 
 rural schools of the state. 
 
 Within a month, the Bureau of Education 
 at Washington has put forth a little bulletin 
 relative to the high school at Colebrook, 
 N. H., entitled "The Readjustment of a 
 
56 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 Community and Its Needs." In Vermont we 
 have one such Institution through which a 
 community is finding Itself and through which 
 it has discarded the old monopoly by the 
 classics and is trying to give the children, the 
 boys and girls of the community, an education 
 fitted to their experience and needs. In fact, 
 a complete change of teachers has occurred 
 and the school board has put in a department 
 of agriculture with an especially trained man 
 in charge, a domestic science course, a course 
 in good business citizenship and a course for 
 preparing teachers for rural schools. The 
 community awakened to the fact that it was 
 devoting its substance almost wholly for 
 college and was not expending Its public funds 
 for the benefit of the community. Mr. Hufd 
 of Windsor County has been doing a mag- 
 nificent work and his report In regard to it 
 appears In another chapter. 
 
 Vermont has also established a state agri- 
 cultural school. One night over In a little 
 town In the mountains, after I had spoken, a 
 boy came to me to know if he could get Into 
 the new agricultural school at Randolph 
 Center. I told him I did not know, because I 
 did not know what attainments he had 
 reached. After a while he told me, and I 
 
EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT SI 
 
 then told him I thought he could. He 
 explained to me his inability to get over there 
 because his people were very poor. His only 
 possession in the world was a swarm of bees. 
 But he went over to the agricultural school 
 and took his bees with him. Later I received 
 a letter from this boy and he wanted to know 
 what would destroy the bee moth. I wrote to 
 a gentleman who could inform him. The 
 boy also wrote, "Will you please tell me what 
 is the best rifle to use for deer hunting." I 
 wondered how a boy without any means 
 could go to school, pay his way and buy a 
 rifle without any money. On visiting the 
 school I learned that he arrived with the 
 swarm of bees the night prior to the opening 
 of the school. As he had to pay his way, he 
 was assigned to the care of one of the halls. 
 Early the next morning one of the instructors 
 was awakened by a disturbance in the hall, 
 and, on looking out, saw this boy at work. 
 The instructor asked him why he was up so 
 early. He said he wanted to earn as much 
 as he could. That first day at school, in addi- 
 tion to his regular recitations, he put in thir- 
 teen hours' work, and received credit for 
 $1.30. Then I understood how he could go 
 deer hunting. 
 
58 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 We have several instances of teachers who 
 have been trained in our teacher training 
 classes, who have gone out, not merely as 
 teachers but as workers with the country 
 people and with a proper attitude toward 
 country life. They go out, not to superim- 
 pose themselves as leaders in the communi- 
 ties, but to work for and with the people and 
 to live their life. In one of our training 
 courses, several young ladies met one day 
 with the specialist and wanted to know what 
 they could do along the lines of community 
 service and began at once to study country 
 life and to get all the literature they could in 
 order that they might go out fortified to meet 
 the problems which were to confront them. 
 
 Over in a little community there was a boy 
 who had attained the age where he was in- 
 tractable and he had caused the teacher con- 
 siderable disturbance and anxiety. The 
 father of the boy was one of the school 
 directors. At the close of school, the father 
 sent the boy over the mountains to the valley 
 beyond in order to carry the teacher to the 
 station. He went to the teacher's boarding 
 place in the morning, put her grip in the car- 
 riage, started down the village street, crossed 
 the little meadow, passed through the bridge 
 
EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 59 
 
 and began to climb the mountain. That boy 
 had never been out of the valley before, but, 
 as he climbed the mountain, he began to see 
 hills to the westward and, when he got nearly 
 to its crest, looking back he could see the 
 magnificent range of the Green Mountains. 
 Then as he passed around the mountain and 
 came out on to a little tableland, he obtained 
 his first outlook upon the world. Over across 
 the valley were forest-crowned hills; on the 
 slopes were large quadrangles of waving 
 grain and grass; below was a superb valley, 
 a majestic river and numerous goodly home- 
 steads. The boy could not control himself. 
 He rose up in the carriage and exclaimed: 
 ''Oh, Jiminy!" That boy on the mountain 
 top caught his vision of life, and from that 
 moment he was transformed. He hurried 
 down the valley to the railroad station, 
 helped the teacher out and asked if he might 
 not see her at the train when she returned. 
 She told him he might, and the boy was there. 
 From that moment that boy's life was 
 changed, simply because he had caught the 
 vision. That is what we are trying to do in 
 Vermont, to give the boys a vision, to help 
 them to realize their ideals and to make 
 country life richer, sweeter, better. 
 
HOW A WHOLE COMMUNITY IS 
 BEING HELPED 
 
 WicKLiFFE Rose 
 
 Executive Secretary of the Southern Educa- 
 tion Board and the Peabody Education 
 Board 
 
 Permit me, first of all, to modify so far as 
 our work goes, the conception of the country 
 school as given elsewhere by Dean Fiske. 
 The educational funds which we are using in 
 the southern states are being used for the 
 improvement of country schools; but the 
 country school as we conceive it is not de- 
 signed solely for teaching small children. 
 The country school whose work is limited to 
 small children and confined within the bound- 
 aries of the school grounds is not doing the 
 most important work that a real country 
 school ought to do. The type of country 
 school which we are seeking to build up has 
 the community for Its campus and all the 
 people of the community for its pupils. 
 
A WHOLE COMMUNITY HELPED 61 
 
 This is the kind of school I saw last spring 
 at Cokato, Minnesota. I am going to tell 
 you of some of the things I found going on 
 there. 
 
 Cokato is a country community located on 
 a railroad. In the village proper are four or 
 five hundred people ; the village is the center 
 of an unusually prosperous farming com- 
 munity; the whole population is thoroughly 
 rural, with rural activities, sympathies and 
 outlook. In this village is located the central 
 country school. This school comprises in its 
 course all grades through the high school; 
 and has under its supervision the thirteen 
 elementary schools of the surrounding 
 district. 
 
 I found here a school plant that is inex- 
 pensive; the building is unpretentious; the 
 equipment is simple; the whole work of the 
 school is kept very close to the simple life of 
 the farm and the farm home. I will not 
 attempt in this space to tell of the ordinary 
 things which one would expect to see in any 
 good school. I was interested mainly in the 
 school's effort to reach out a helping hand to 
 the community. 
 
 As I sat in the office Mr. Munroe, the 
 principal, was telling me of the farm demon- 
 
62 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 stration work and of the short course, which 
 is open for three or four months in the winter 
 to all the people of the community. To this 
 short course come farmers and farmers' 
 wives and the older children; they learn how 
 to select seed, to breed stock, to drain the 
 soil, to grow better crops, to keep farm 
 accounts ; they read history and literature and 
 sharpen their wits in debating clubs; in the 
 wood shop and blacksmith shop they learn to 
 use tools in repair work and in making the 
 simple things that are needed about the farm 
 and farm home ; they cook and sew and learn 
 to make the country home a better place to 
 live in. 
 
 As Mr. Munroe sat telling me of these 
 things a man came in and was introduced as 
 "Mr. Tappio, one of our demonstration 
 farmers." "Mr. Munroe," I said, "will you 
 please go on with your work and let me talk 
 with Mr. Tappio; he is the man I want to 
 see. 
 
 Mr. Tappio is a Finn, about thirty-five 
 years of age; had gone through four grades 
 in the public school ; had married and had two 
 small children; owned his farm and was 
 working it. 
 
 Turning to him I said: "Mr. Tappio, will 
 
A WHOLE COMMUNITY HELPED 63 
 
 you please tell me how you came to take up 
 this farm demonstration work?" 
 
 "It all began," he said, "with my coming 
 into the short course." 
 
 "Then tell me in detail just what you have 
 got out of it all." 
 
 "First of all," he said, "the man from the 
 school came out and tested my dairy herd. I 
 was milking twenty-four cows; he found that 
 fourteen of the twenty-four cows were not 
 paying for their keep." 
 
 "What did you do?" 
 
 "I sold them." 
 
 "Did you sell them to your neighbors to 
 milk?" 
 
 "No, I sold them to the butcher. Then I 
 began improving my herd by breeding. I 
 now have nineteen cows, and each one of 
 them pays." 
 
 "How do you know each one pays?" 
 
 "I keep an account of each cow." 
 
 On visiting his farm that afternoon I saw 
 this account, showing for each cow the feed, 
 the cost of feed, the cost of labor, the amount 
 of milk given, the percentage of butter fat 
 and the net gain or loss, week by week. 
 
 "Then," he said, "the school taught me 
 
64 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 how to increase my yield of corn by selecting 
 the seed." 
 
 *'How do you manage that?" 
 
 ''I have a seed plot. With the best ears I 
 plant this seed plot. From this crop I take 
 the best ears for planting my next seed plot ; 
 then I take the next best for planting the rest 
 of my corn crop; and what is left I sell at 
 fancy price as seed corn. In this way I have 
 brought the average yield of my farm from 
 thirty-five bushels per acre up to a little over 
 fifty bushels per acre." 
 
 That afternoon when we went into his 
 house he apologized for the sacks of shelled 
 corn which lined two sides of the sitting room, 
 and explained that the family had been shell- 
 ing the seed corn of evenings. I noticed that 
 each sack was tagged to sell for $6.00. I do 
 not know just how much it contained. 
 
 "Then," Mr. Tappio continued, "the 
 school planned a complete system of drain- 
 age for my farm. I have drained one seven- 
 acre plot, have plowed it and have it ready 
 for planting." 
 
 "What did it cost you?" 
 
 "It cost $20 per acre." 
 
 "How long will it take this plot to pay for 
 the draining?" 
 
A WHOLE COMMUNITY HELPED 65 
 
 "I can't say. They tell me the first crop 
 should pay for the draininjg. When this plot 
 has paid for itself I shall use the money for 
 draining another plot; and so on till the 
 whole farm is drained." 
 
 This community lies within the drift area ; 
 small lakes are numerous; they cover the best 
 soil. On the walls of one of the classrooms 
 I was shown the blue print of the drainage 
 system for Mr. Tappio's farm. The blue 
 print was not only serving Tappio as a guide, 
 but also was effectively serving the school as 
 basis for the teaching of farm drainage to 
 the pupils. 
 
 "Then the school through this demonstra- 
 tion work is showing me how to manage my 
 farming operations as a whole so as to cut out 
 the waste and to increase my income. For 
 example, I had no chickens. They showed 
 me that by having chickens I could add to my 
 income with but little increase in my expendi- 
 tures. I have built a chicken barn, have laid 
 out some runs and made a beginning toward 
 stocking the place with chickens." 
 
 ''In the short courses," he said, '*I learned 
 to use tools. I now do my own repair work, 
 and make many things about the house and 
 the farm." In the afternoon he showed us 
 
66 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 his new chicken barn which he had made and 
 painted with his own hands. I saw the wind- 
 mill which he had installed. It pumps his 
 water, grinds his feed, saws his wood. He 
 took us through his house and showed the 
 tank, pipes and fixtures which he had installed 
 for lighting his house with acetylene gas. 
 
 What this school has done and is doing for 
 Mr. Tappio it is doing for other farmers in 
 the community. It was the banker in town 
 who took us out in his automobile to see this 
 farm demonstration work. He is interested 
 in the school, he said, because it is making 
 business for him. His business is mainly with 
 farmers; the school, he said, has increased 
 the value of every acre of land for miles 
 around; and has greatly increased the 
 farmers' deposits in his bank. 
 
 Here is at least a most hopeful beginning 
 toward the realization of my conception of 
 what a country school should do in the way 
 of helping the whole community; in teaching 
 the grown people as well as the children: in 
 getting its hand on those fundamental eco- 
 nomic forces which underly all things that 
 make for a better individual and community 
 life. 
 
VI 
 
 THE VALUE OF A SOCIAL SURVEY 
 TO A COMMUNITY 
 
 Hermann N. Morse 
 
 Of the Board of Home Missions of the 
 
 Presbyterian Church Department of 
 
 Church and Country Life 
 
 We may define the social survey as the 
 collection and arrangement, in scientific and 
 orderly form, of all the information about 
 any given community which has immediate 
 social significance and constructive value. 
 
 In the study of social institutions in the 
 country, particularly the church and the 
 school, it is frequently an open question 
 whether one should say that they are minis- 
 tering to the country community or that the 
 country community is ministering to them; 
 that they are rendering a service to the com- 
 munity by making it more eflicient, or that 
 the community is rendering a service to them 
 by keeping them alive. The social survey 
 
68 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 owes its origin to this fact, that these insti- 
 tutions are in many cases unproductive of 
 substantial good to the community which 
 maintains them and that their maintenance is 
 an unjustifiable drag upon its resources, that 
 they must, in short, be classed as luxuries 
 which it cannot afford to enjoy. It is an 
 avowed attempt to bring social institutions in 
 the country into some more vital relationship 
 to the community, so that they may justify 
 their existence by adding to its productive 
 efficiency. 
 
 The value of the social survey hinges abso- 
 lutely upon its motive and its method. Its 
 motive is immediate and constructive useful- 
 ness for the building up of the country com- 
 munity. There isn't suggestion of pedantry 
 here. Its uses are not primarily for research 
 to give basis for speculation and theory. 
 Nothing has any place in the social survey 
 whose interest is primarily archaeological. It 
 aims to collect information for use. It is not 
 made for the archives, but for the hands of 
 social workers who will use its results to 
 advantage. It can afford to neglect many 
 things which are entirely true, but are without 
 direct social significance. It is not unduly 
 concerned with the remote origins of things. 
 
VALUE OF A SOCIAL SURVEY 69 
 
 Its whole justification lies in the fact that it 
 is a serious attempt to better a particular 
 community by ascertaining what are its pre- 
 vailing conditions and needs by fixing atten- 
 tion upon its pertinent problems and by indi- 
 cating a way to their solution. 
 
 Facts, carefully tested and rightly inter- 
 preted, are the material with which all social 
 workers must deal. Guesses and theories, 
 even a general acquaintance with the make-up 
 of a problem, will not fill their place. The 
 forces of social causation are more than skin 
 deep and are not to be determined by snap 
 judgments. They must be studied to be 
 known. The survey is a means of conserving 
 energy by locating problems and defining 
 issues. 
 
 The value of the survey is also dependent 
 upon its methods. Assuming the scientific 
 accuracy of its investigations, which is fre- 
 quently a big assumption, the important 
 thing here is that it works to as great an 
 extent as possible through local agencies and 
 by means of local cooperation. This is partly 
 because without local cooperation it would 
 not obtain the information it required; chiefly 
 it is because the best way to help people is to 
 direct them how they may best help them- 
 
70 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 selves and arouse them to do so. The survey 
 awakens and informs the conscience of those 
 who should be concerned over local condi- 
 tions. The chief value of many questions on 
 the ordinary survey blank lies in their moral 
 effect upon the minds of those of whom they 
 are asked. For example, the surveyor is far 
 less anxious to know whether the weeds are 
 cut around the school building and its 
 surroundings kept attractive, than he is 
 to implant in the mind of some indifferent 
 trustee the notion that this would be desir- 
 able, which possibly had never occurred to 
 him. 
 
 The survey is dependent upon those who 
 live in a community to carry out the work 
 whose need it points out. It therefore makes 
 use of those who are in the best position to 
 do this thing, namely, the ministers, teachers 
 and prominent farmers. It organizes the 
 forces of the community for civic betterment. 
 In doing this it puts the emphasis upon the 
 community rather than upon the individual, 
 an eloquent preachment for a social gospel. 
 
 It is recommended that even in the most 
 backward communities there are always those 
 who dream dreams of better things. The 
 survey tends to utilize dreams by showing a 
 
VALUE OF A SOCIAL SURVEY 71 
 
 definite program to well-wishers. Every 
 survey made by the Presbyterian Department 
 of Church and Country Life has resulted in 
 concise and constructive recommendations 
 being made to the community surveyed. In 
 numbers of instances the investigators have 
 left behind them organizations of workers 
 formed for the avowed purpose of bettering 
 their communities along the lines indicated. 
 
 Finally, the survey is of value in the actual 
 information which it conveys, not only to 
 resident workers but to those who must deal 
 with similar problems elsewhere. It thus 
 gives one community an opportunity to help 
 others. It puts into the hands of social 
 workers everywhere a well-ordered body of 
 knowledge which will make it easier for them 
 to interpret the conditions which they must 
 immediately face. 
 
 In summing up the value of the social 
 survey, it is just to say that a survey which 
 does not result in the substantial betterment 
 of conditions in the community surveyed is 
 almost a total failure; while a survey which 
 remains wholly of academic value and with- 
 out contact with vital problems anywhere is 
 a failure without any qualifications. The test 
 to be applied should not be whether the con- 
 
72 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 elusions reached have universal validity or 
 whether they will be accepted ten years hence ; 
 but whether the facts set forth are accurate 
 and verifiable and the deductions drawn from 
 them of immediate value for community 
 building. 
 
VII 
 A METHOD OF MAKING A SURVEY 
 
 John Brown, Jr., M. D. 
 International Secretary of County Work 
 
 I would rather undertake the conduct of 
 one of these surveys in two days than under- 
 take the telling about one in ten minutes. 
 
 I am going to pass over the value of the 
 survey and go on to the method of these 
 particular surveys we have in mind. The 
 method of these surveys is on the campaign 
 basis entirely; the same as our financial cam- 
 paign today. As in these campaigns quite a 
 little .preliminary work is necessary; the defin- 
 ing of the area to be included, the securing in 
 advance of as many statistics as possible, the 
 lining up of men to participate in the survey, 
 and the charting of these statistics in graphic 
 form, the lining up of a strong chairman for 
 the entire survey and strong men as chairmen 
 of the various committees to be appointed. 
 The survey is started by what we call a "set- 
 
74 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 ting up meeting." On a certain evening, 
 perhaps a Monday evening, every man in the 
 town, whether he has any interest or not, is 
 prevailed upon to be present if possible. The 
 meeting is not held in a church preferably, or 
 where men will be liable to stay away because 
 they have no particular interest in the build- 
 ing. The plan of the survey is presented. 
 Here we have to break down prejudice and 
 explain the purpose and plan of the survey. 
 After the plan is presented the committees 
 are appointed by the chairman. The general 
 meeting is then adjourned, breaking up right 
 there into the sub-committees. Each chair- 
 man is given an outline of the work his com- 
 mittee is expected to investigate in the next 
 two days. Two facts are impressed upon the 
 committees ; first, they must present a report 
 in writing based on actual personal investiga- 
 tions by the committee. Second, a written 
 report of recommendations based on what 
 they have found. During the two days inter- 
 vening between the setting up meeting and 
 the closing meeting, these different commit- 
 tees get the information as best they may on 
 the particular phase they are to investigate 
 and report upon. For instance, the com- 
 mittee on school conditions that have to do 
 
METHOD OF MAKING A SURVEY 75 
 
 with everything pertaining to health and 
 recreation of school children visits the 
 schools. They spend hours in this visit, as 
 much time as is necessary to go to the build- 
 ing, study its construction, its location, its 
 heating and lighting apparatus, sanitary con- 
 ditions, ventilation and water supply, the 
 curriculum with reference to the health of the 
 child, the recreational facilities and what 
 games the boys and girls play and whether 
 or not the teacher participates in them. 
 That committee bases its report on what it 
 finds, the idea being that these men who are 
 really on the job themselves when it comes 
 to following up the survey should be made 
 alert and educated while the survey is on, 
 someone going with them to point out what 
 is to be looked for. Medical inspection is 
 considered fully and defective children ob- 
 served. Before they have been doing this 
 work very long the committeemen are calling 
 attention to these things and saying, ''There is 
 a girl who is a mouth-breather; there is a boy 
 with bad teeth." This very often paves the 
 way for things we cannot get when we go in 
 from the outside. They will ask, "What 
 would be the steps necessary to have medical 
 inspection here?" In the larger centers, 
 
76 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 where men are perhaps more ready to under- 
 take these things, we take a grade and have 
 their local physicians examine them and test 
 their eyes, hearing and teeth, and the condi- 
 tion of their noses and throats. In one 
 instance, after examination, out of thirty-six 
 children, we found only eight normal in these 
 four things alone. The people then want to 
 know whether their own boys and girls are 
 among the defective ones. 
 
 So it is with each of the committees; they 
 bring in the reports on conditions found, then 
 the recommendations follow. The commit- 
 tee on community hygiene studies the matter 
 of water supply. This does not simply mean, 
 Is there a water system? But if there is a 
 water system, how many are using it? One 
 town of 420 homes had a splendid water 
 system but when investigated it was found 
 that only eighty-six homes were connected 
 with it. When the committee investigated 
 where the other families were getting their 
 water supply they found so many unsanitary 
 wells that it presented a different aspect 
 entirely. So with relation to the conditions 
 of the yards and privies, disposal of sewage 
 and garbage, manure piles, cleansing of 
 alleys and streets of the town. 
 
METHOD OF MAKING A SURVEY 77 
 
 The committee on amusements and recrea- 
 tion has an important phase to consider, 
 having to do with the outdoor and indoor 
 play and social activities of the boys and girls, 
 young men and women. This committee 
 studies the school as a social center and 
 invariably brings in a recommendation for 
 some kind of a play center. 
 
 The matter of proper bathing facilities 
 Is also investigated. Sunday baseball and 
 saloon control are very often encountered. 
 
 The committee on Sunday-schools and 
 churches discusses its whole work from the 
 standpoint of health and recreation. At the 
 closing meeting the reports are usually 
 accepted and the recommendations adopted 
 sometimes with slight modifications. 
 
 The surveys have been productive in vari- 
 ous ways. In some cases, each committee has 
 been charged with bringing about the im- 
 provements commended. The advantage of 
 such a survey is to arouse local interest — the 
 interest of several of the best men in the 
 town in all these things, as a survey by the 
 men from the outside cannot. No man 
 studies the thing he is interested in; we do 
 not go to a church man and ask him all about 
 the church. We get lots of information in 
 
78 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 this way, but we also get men who are not on 
 the school board and not school superintend- 
 ents to study school conditions. We can do 
 better work in two or three days than if we 
 had a month. We can get men to give whole 
 blocks of time where we could not get the 
 same amount of time spread out over a 
 month. 
 
 Results: The story of this survey method 
 is in the May number of Rural Manhood and 
 in the November number of The Playground, 
 We give play demonstrations and have union 
 church meetings where possible to promote 
 interest. 
 
 I have a letter from one lad, requesting 
 me to order a volley ball. The secretary 
 writes that the children are delighted with 
 their new games. I have another order from 
 a playground for two basket balls with the 
 request that we get them as soon as possible 
 as they are anxious to commence practice. 
 
 Results one man sent in: Public School 
 Athletic League organized, interest growing 
 on the part of teachers, action is taken by 
 the county medical society to support findings 
 of survey. Favored by the master of the 
 Grange in the county. The ministers have 
 invited us to take up the matter of reporting 
 
METHOD OF MAKING A SURVEY 79 
 
 on health talks through the committee on the 
 health survey and other matters pertaining 
 to the health of the pupils in ten districts. 
 
VIII ^ 
 THE NEW RURAL SOUTH 
 
 James H. Dillard 
 
 President Anna T. Jeanes Foundation and 
 
 General Agent John F. Slater Fund 
 
 Those of us who are working in distant 
 fields get inspiration when we come to New 
 York, which is the center of things, and meet 
 with those who are in the heat of the fight. 
 
 I have very limited space, and I am so 
 much interested in the work of the Jeanes 
 Fund for country schools that it is hard for 
 me to talk about anything else. Perhaps the 
 best thing I can say is something about this 
 work which is interesting and new. 
 
 Before I do that I hope you will pardon 
 me if I say just a word in general about this 
 whole question of country life and country 
 improvement. I do not know that I can say 
 anything that has not been said before and 
 that is not already in your minds, but still 
 
THE NEW RURAL SOUTH 81 
 
 out of the mouths of all of us certain facts 
 may be established. 
 
 I do not believe that anybody has any idea 
 about country conditions and country life, 
 who does not go there and see them. No 
 report in writing tells the story. I took dinner 
 just a little while ago at the house of a sup- 
 posedly well-to-do farmer. We had pork 
 cooked in two ways and not done either way. 
 We had biscuits that were raw in the center ; 
 we had one kind of vegetable, sweet potatoes, 
 which were as raw in the center as were the 
 biscuits; we had an apology for coffee, sweet- 
 ened with molasses and no milk. I asked our 
 host if he did not keep cows. He replied that 
 he had three or four. He did not seem to 
 be certain whether it was three or four. He 
 added that he had not seen them lately. 
 This is not an exaggerated report. What I 
 have described is literal fact. Do not sup- 
 pose that such cooking is all in the South. I 
 have tramped in Massachusetts and let me 
 tell you that I have seen just as poor cooking 
 in the country in Massachusetts as in Ala- 
 bama. It is well to come down to such a 
 specific case. I have asked myself, What can 
 be done for this man and his wife and for his 
 little girl? One thing can be done, we can 
 
82 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 send the girl to a school which will put a dif- 
 ferent spirit in her. What about him and 
 his wife? What influences do they get? 
 What comes to them from the outside? 
 They go to church twice a month. Perhaps 
 if they could have the right kind of religion 
 preached to them, they might see that reli- 
 gion has something to do with this world as 
 well as with the next. They seemed to have 
 no reading matter. The only book I saw in 
 the house was a gaudily bound subscription 
 book entitled "The Sins of Chicago Society." 
 I have come to the conclusion that there 
 are three vital things we must do if we want 
 to build up country life. First, we must make 
 it as easy as possible for the people who are 
 going to till the soil to have their own soil to 
 till and not be tenants. How are we to make 
 that easy? It could be done by a better 
 system of assessment. If the lands were 
 assessed more in accordance with their value, 
 the people who own the great tracts of land 
 would be more willing to sell to those who 
 want to use the land. A vital point, let us 
 not forget, in the improvement of country 
 life is that the man who tills the soil must 
 own the soil. Second, as I have intimated 
 just now, we must change much of the char- 
 
THE NEW RURAL SOUTH 83 
 
 acter of the country preaching. This is one 
 of those reforms that we talk about, and I 
 have no doubt that it has been mentioned 
 here time and time again, but there is urgent 
 need that we try to bring it about. There is 
 not a man in the United States today who 
 holds so much power in his hands in the 
 way of undisputed influence as the country 
 preacher. We must put it into his head that 
 he must preach to the people that their deal- 
 ing with the things all about them in their 
 lives here is a part of their religion. If we 
 could do that it would be a tremendous step 
 forward. Third, it is most necessary to get 
 a better country school, one which will fit 
 country life. We talk about a better country 
 school, but we do not make much headway 
 in getting it. We want a country school that 
 is going to let the pupil see that what he does 
 in school touches the life around him. It can 
 be worked out. We want the pupil to see 
 that school is for something else beside teach- 
 ing what is the southern cape of Madagascar. 
 We want him to feel that school touches also 
 the things that will be a part of the life he is 
 to lead now and when grown up. 
 
 This question of education in the country 
 schools has to do with the work in which I am 
 
84 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 especially engaged. The Jeanes Fund Is 
 interesting In Its work. It was founded by 
 the gift of a million dollars from a lady in 
 Philadelphia for Negro country schools. 
 The first Idea of the method of applying the 
 revenue of this fund was to extend to the 
 country the plan adopted In cities, by which 
 one teacher goes to several schools to teach 
 different forms of manual training and do- 
 mestic science. Then at the suggestion of the 
 superintendent of Henrico County, Virginia, 
 Mr. Jackson Davis, we adopted the Idea of 
 giving the salary for a supervising industrial 
 teacher for a whole county. This plan, 
 known as the Henrico Plan, has worked with 
 success in over a hundred counties In the 
 southern states. What we do Is this. We 
 try to get from such Institutions as Hampton 
 or Tuskegee a trained teacher who Is to 
 work under the school superintendent and to 
 go from school to school In the county. 
 This supervising teacher Introduces simple 
 forms of industrial work, such as mend- 
 ing, sewing, cooking, carpentering, building 
 fences and helps In any possible way to 
 improve the life around these schools, work- 
 ing always with the idea of making the school 
 a part of the child's life. These teachers also 
 
THE NEW RURAL SOUTH 85 
 
 work in the community, sometimes spending 
 a day, sometimes two days and sometimes a 
 week, forming mothers' clubs, getting the 
 men together for school improvement and 
 extension of the school term, and helping and 
 encouraging the local teachers. It is an 
 interesting plan and I predict that it will be 
 generally adopted for country schools, white 
 and colored. Many superintendents, after 
 trying the plan, advocate its adoption in white 
 schools of the county as well as in colored 
 schools. 
 
 In conclusion let me say that I do not know 
 when I have heard of any movement that 
 gave me more pleasure than when, some 
 years ago, I heard about the movement of 
 the Young Men's Christian Association to 
 extend its work into the country. I think it 
 is one of the greatest and most splendid 
 efforts toward the improvement of country 
 life. Everybody is inclined to say that this 
 or that is the greatest need in our present 
 civilization. It is my firm conviction that for 
 our civilization today the improvement of the 
 country, making the country a better place to 
 live in, is the most pressing need. I am 
 speaking of the rank and file of the country. 
 There are rich people in the country, there 
 
86 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 are western farmers who own automobiles, 
 but I know the country In the South and I 
 know it somewhat in New England, and it 
 seems to me there can be no doubt that the 
 most vital of all good activities are the vari- 
 ous movements to improve the country, so 
 that the people will want to continue to live 
 there and not overcrowd the towns. 
 
IX 
 
 RELIGIOUS AND EDUCATIONAL 
 
 COOPERATION WITH COUNTY 
 
 AND STATE FAIRS 
 
 A. C. HURD 
 
 Secretary of the Windsor County, Vermont, 
 Young Men's Christian Associations 
 
 If I may diverge for a moment from the 
 subject assigned me, I want to add just a 
 word to what Mr. Stone has said — another 
 illustration of what teachers are doing in 
 Vermont. 
 
 Some time before our recent State Agri- 
 cultural Exhibit, a teacher wrote us regarding 
 a wayward boy in her school whom she had 
 threatened to dismiss. Before this climax 
 was reached, however, it occurred to her that 
 possibly something in the line of gardening 
 or agricultural work might reach that boy if 
 nothing else would. So she secured some 
 seed and a piece of land and set the boy to 
 work. Presently she wrote us again, saying 
 
88 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 that she would like to bring that boy to the 
 State Agricultural Exhibit, if she could be 
 entertained by our committee. 
 
 For a teacher to come something over a 
 hundred miles at her own expense for the 
 sake of a boy whom she had tried to disci- 
 pline is certainly a promising indication, and 
 there are other teachers who are also getting 
 the vision. They are surely growing in num- 
 ber, and she is but one of many who are really 
 doing things that count. 
 
 I wonder just what your attitude has been 
 in regard to the county fair proposition. 
 Some of us feel that the day of the old 
 instructive agricultural fair is past. We now 
 have some mighty good state fairs, but many 
 of them are far from being what they ought 
 to be. In the case of the agricultural county 
 fairs, there are many agencies able to co- 
 operate with the management of these fairs 
 and help to improve them along various lines. 
 Some of us know of the work carried on by 
 county committees, such as taking over an 
 afternoon for general athletic contests. We 
 know of many similar phases of the work 
 that are entering in. We know something of 
 how the Woman's Christian Temperance 
 Unions have cooperated on the fair grounds. 
 
COOPERATION WITH FAIRS 89 
 
 with their tent and their temperance talks, 
 and the like. I am not in a position to sug- 
 gest what you may do with your fair — I 
 hesitate to throw out any suggestions here for 
 fear that your situation may not be like ours 
 in Vermont. Still, from what I may say relat- 
 ing to our state fair, you may gain some 
 new idea that will help you in your own 
 locality. 
 
 About five years ago the fair began its 
 work in Vermont. Our first visit there con- 
 vinced us that it had overlooked ordinary 
 comforts for the general public, for the 
 fair management, or commission, using state 
 appropriations, had failed to provide even a 
 place to rest. We felt, in that particular 
 instance, we might cooperate as a county 
 committee to supply some of those things 
 until the state fair got on its feet. The result 
 is that in recent years a large tent has been 
 provided. A spacious building is now in 
 sight as an outgrowth of the work conducted 
 during the past five years. An emergency 
 hospital has taken care of something like 600 
 patients — though the plan was ridiculed by 
 some at the outset. One case will illustrate 
 its usefulness. Not long ago, a young fellow 
 while on the fair grounds came down with 
 
90 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 typhoid fever; he was some distance from 
 home, having traveled from Ohio with a herd 
 of cattle. We cared for his herd, secured for 
 him a room In the hospital and a nurse to care 
 for him, attended to the drawing of his pre- 
 miums and other business. How many times 
 he mentioned when he was able to get around 
 "that he had fallen among thieves In some 
 places, but not at the Vermont State Fair 
 grounds." 
 
 The County Young Men's Christian Asso- 
 ciation has proven to be of service even If 
 we had done nothing else than provide for 
 that one man. Our first ambition and 
 thought In providing this social service work 
 was not primarily to take care of men, even 
 though we were a Young Men's Christian 
 Association, but to provide some real com- 
 fort for the mother who came lugging her 
 child If she came at all, and so a free nursery 
 was provided, with twenty-five beds, where 
 three hundred children were taken care of in 
 the playground and nursery. The play- 
 ground equipment with Its supervision has 
 suggested possibilities to school teachers and 
 others, for school grounds. The rest tent, 
 provided as it has been with all ordinary 
 Y. M. C. A. equipment, has really become 
 
COOPERATION WITH FAIRS 91 
 
 the social center of the fair, and we hope, 
 within another year, to have a building there. 
 We have no business to bring crowds of 
 people together for that or any other activity 
 without providing some decent facilities for 
 the care of those people. 
 
 Actually, I was visiting one Sunday-school 
 where you could see by the faces of the chil- 
 dren that they were suffering tortures in not 
 being able to go out to a toilet. We, in our 
 churches, ought to see to it that proper venti- 
 lation and toilets are provided, some place to 
 wash hands, and do not let us forget to pro- 
 vide for that mother who will come in from 
 a country home to the agricultural fair. 
 Make the fair attractive so she will want to 
 come in, so we will be able to influence her for 
 better things. Later the Young Women's 
 Christian Association can take up such work. 
 
 And what has the pageant committee pro- 
 vided for the comfort of the public? Not 
 even a checking room or, in some instances, 
 a place to sit down without paying for it! 
 This we find true of many fairs; everything 
 has to be paid for. In introducing some 
 changes we are going to make it possible for 
 mothers to enjoy seeing the fair while their 
 children are cared for under proper super- 
 
92 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 vision. In my four years of work with the 
 fair I have seen just one man bring the chil- 
 dren. Let us make it possible for the wife 
 of that poor farmer to enjoy the fair with 
 him. We are providing many activities for 
 the men, but how little is provided on the 
 average agricultural fair ground for the 
 comfort of the women and children. It has 
 so influenced the members of one fair com- 
 mission that they are now carrying part of 
 the expenses, and, if I understand the tem- 
 perament of that commission aright, I believe 
 they are going to provide a suitable building 
 for the work. This kind of Christian social 
 service has had its influence. Six or eight 
 other fairs have followed its example. We 
 are glad to see that people are waking up to 
 the fact that all of these activities are neces- 
 sary. So many Old Home weeks, pageants, 
 etc., fail to provide these ordinary essen- 
 tials — a clean place to wash up and rest. Do 
 not forget to provide for the comfort and 
 care of the good farmer's wife. 
 
 Midways 
 
 I might suggest here that a county com- 
 mittee can be of unusual service in cooperat- 
 ing with the fair management in other ways. 
 
COOPERATION WITH FAIRS 93 
 
 Many are Inexperienced In the handling of 
 the midway; many times you can suggest 
 things kindly that they will listen to. Some- 
 times you have to use force; put on a little 
 pressure, as we have had to In Vermont, I am 
 sorry to say. We were able to organize a 
 civic committee among the business men and 
 leading farmers In our section of the state; 
 they took It upon themselves to see how things 
 were being conducted. Now, what Is true 
 of Vermont Is true of other fairs In New 
 England, and you and I who are patronizing 
 these fairs, ought to be ashamed of ourselves 
 that we do not raise our voices against the 
 midway. The average fair Is far from con- 
 tributing what It ought to contribute toward 
 the Improvement of agriculture. Is It not 
 about time that some of us tried to raise the 
 standard if we are going to have these fairs? 
 Let us make them contribute something more 
 than they do. The state and county con- 
 tribute, but how much are they contributing 
 in the way of agricultural Improvement? 
 Bringing so many people together is really 
 worth while if you provide instructive fea- 
 tures and a decent midway. It has taken a 
 good deal of effort and has drained our 
 patience to the last dreg to try to persuade 
 
94 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 one fair commission that they are making a 
 dreadful mistake in influencing crowds of 
 people with the type of midway attractions 
 they have. Still, they throw up at us, "The 
 crowds want the fakirs, they want the cheap 
 shows and all that sort of thing." We are 
 glad to see at the Vermont State Fair a great 
 improvement along this line. We are trying 
 to be patient and trying to secure a fair 
 commission that will cooperate with us. Only 
 the other day one of the commissioners said, 
 "The other fairs have these things, why 
 should not we ?" Now perhaps it was not the 
 business of the County Young Men's Chris- 
 tian Association Committee to mix up in this 
 matter to such an extent, but it had to be 
 somebody's business and we were glad to 
 make this contribution. We feel we have 
 accomplished more good by first working 
 through the public service tent, for they feel 
 our motives are good and that we have the 
 best methods for the improvement of the fair, 
 after we have demonstrated, through a pub- 
 lic service equipment, how the general public 
 can be served. If we are going to have this 
 type of Christian service at one end of the 
 fair grounds, this other work ought to 
 correspond with it. 
 
PLAY A SOCIALIZING FACTOR IN 
 RURAL COMMUNITIES 
 
 E. K. Jordan 
 
 Secretary of the Dutchess County, New York, 
 Young Men's Christian Associations 
 
 I have been asked to give a few concrete 
 Illustrations of the sort of work we have been 
 doing in Dutchess County In the way of play 
 demonstrations. 
 
 About a year ago I was in a small New 
 England town with a friend, in connection 
 with the Men and Religion Movement in that 
 section, and being entertained over Sunday, 
 we went into one of the churches for the 
 morning service and to another one during 
 the Sunday-school hour. It was a very ordi- 
 nary country church; the Sunday-school was, 
 perhaps for that section, a very ordinary one; 
 the pastor was the only man present, and, 
 while talking with him about the school, my 
 friend looked around saying, "The thing that 
 
96 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 puzzles me Is that boys' class over there." 
 It was a class of about four boys. The pas- 
 tor said there ought to be more boys in that 
 class and went on to explain why they were 
 not there. "That isn't the point," my friend 
 replied. "The thing I am surprised about is 
 that there are any boys here at all. There 
 is nothing here to attract them." 
 
 That is something like the problems in the 
 country. When you stop to consider what 
 the country is offering a boy, the wonder is 
 that there are any there at all, or that the 
 boys are there a minute after they can get 
 away. In pursuing one of our plans for 
 improving conditions for the country boy, I 
 started out in the early spring to set up a 
 more or less systematic demonstration of 
 plays and games through the agency of 
 teachers of rural schools. These were carried 
 out first by interesting the four district super- 
 intendents of the county. They were inter- 
 viewed in regard to the matter and were 
 lined up on the proposition with more or less 
 interest; two out of the four developed a 
 good deal of enthusiasm. These superin- 
 tendents helped to put us in touch with the 
 teachers' institutes of the county. During the 
 early spring some of these institutes were 
 
PLAY A SOCIALIZING FACTOR 97 
 
 visited, and talks given to them in regard to 
 the things which we proposed to do in con- 
 nection with play in the schools. A part of 
 one of the programs consisted of the con- 
 sideration of three things: First, discussing 
 with them the value of games. It was not 
 difficult to get their interest and to demon- 
 strate to them that games really ought to be 
 an important part of what was going on in the 
 school. Interesting things were brought out 
 in the discussion. One teacher had dispensed 
 with the recess because the only recreation 
 the older boys knew was to annoy the little 
 ones. 
 
 The second point was putting them in touch 
 with books about games and showing them 
 how usable these would be. 
 
 Third, teaching them a simple calisthenic 
 drill such as any teacher could learn in a few 
 minutes. 
 
 During May and June we undertook to 
 put into practice the plan of meeting with the 
 school children and teachers, using these 
 three different methods. First, we ran a sort 
 of play picnic for a number of schools 
 through the aid of superintendents and 
 teachers, setting up a play day for all 
 the schools within reach, the teachers 
 
98 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 coming with their pupils and in some cases 
 the trustees of the district driving to this 
 central place a team crowded with chil- 
 dren from their school. The pupils from 
 each school brought their lunch and had a 
 picnic dinner. Part of the day was spent In 
 play and the remainder in badge contests. 
 We reached a large number of schools with 
 three of these days. 
 
 Another plan we employed was getting a 
 teacher's agreement to close early on some 
 particular day and let us have the whole 
 school for the rest of the afternoon to give 
 such a demonstration of play as was best 
 suited to the children. An equally good plan 
 adopted was to visit In succession as large a 
 number of schools as possible in one day, 
 giving an hour to each, taking the district 
 superintendent along and notifying the teach- 
 ers ahead that we were coming. We would 
 make some explanation of what we wanted 
 to do, and they would turn the school over 
 to us for an hour. We would then give a 
 demonstration to the teacher and pupils of 
 games that they could use. The teachers 
 were divided Into groups and to each were 
 given certain games best adapted to the chil- 
 dren's ages. In the conduct of all these 
 
PLAY A SOCIALIZING FACTOR 99 
 
 hours, we made it as much a demonstration 
 as possible, by trying to instruct the teachers 
 in the value of games so as to be able to 
 conduct them. From the requests for further 
 information and orders for books and simple 
 apparatus which they have placed with us, 
 we are sure that the thing has taken root and 
 that many teachers are beginning to have a 
 systematic play life in connection with their 
 schools. We have been pleased to find that 
 several of the schools have been purchasing 
 adjoining land for playgrounds. It would 
 seem that one or two acres of land purchased 
 and used as a playground is a step towards 
 making the school a social center. 
 
 What we hope to accomplish another year 
 is something like this. We shall enlarge and 
 develop our previous plan so as to reach 
 people of all ages in the community, then by 
 using some school as a center for the whole 
 township, with the cooperation of the pas- 
 tors of the churches and the district superin- 
 tendents, we hope to be able during the last 
 six weeks of the school year to start a festival 
 in each town in the county. 
 
XI 
 
 THE MORAL AND EDUCATIONAL 
 VALUE OF ATHLETICS 
 
 H. D. Maydole 
 
 Secretary of the Camden County, New 
 
 Jersey, Young Men's Christian 
 
 Associations 
 
 Those of us who have been boys remember 
 distinctly how many times we heard the word 
 "don't." It often seemed as though it were 
 the only word in the vocabulary. Now a 
 boy's nature demands some natural form of 
 expression and athletics seem to be among 
 the very best. 
 
 This topic relates especially to the country 
 community, and my work is largely suburban. 
 However, I feel it to be true that even in 
 country communities our athletics in relation 
 to athletic meets and pubhc school picnics 
 are influenced by our universities and colleges. 
 In our own county the young men are under 
 the shadow of a great university and their 
 
VALUE OF ATHLETICS' '' 101 
 
 Standard of athletics is influenced by this. 
 Their standard of measurement is that of 
 the Pennsylvania Relay Races. This has 
 called for a system devoted primarily to the 
 interest of the star and the prospective 
 specialist in athletics so that the boys and 
 young men who have really needed the 
 training and practice have been disregarded. 
 
 Our problem became acute in the annual 
 athletic meet between the various organized 
 groups for county championship. It finally 
 threatened to kill entirely the proper spirit of 
 this work. This problem was solved very 
 largely for us when Dr. Brown came in with 
 the proposition that we use the 50 per cent 
 badge standard for our meet. 
 
 We were agreeably surprised with the way 
 our business men, who were related to our 
 work, saw this. They immediately recog- 
 nized its efficiency in giving every boy a fair 
 chance. The boys who had been delegated to 
 the side lines to cheer for the stars were to 
 have an opportunity to assert themselves and 
 give vent to the expression which was waiting 
 for its chance. Of course we met with oppo- 
 sition. Immediately the fellows who were 
 the favorite stars and had a trail of support- 
 ers raised a protest. While they were pro- 
 
• fo:f^ * • ^*S '^f HE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 testing the boys in the smaller towns were 
 beginning to get ready and work. Here was 
 the chance to be freed from an athletic serf- 
 dom which had bound them. 
 
 In one of these towns where a group had 
 been organized for only a few months, and 
 where there was almost desperate need for 
 such work, much interest was taken. One 
 man who was closely related to the group as 
 their leader would be met at the train on his 
 way home, night after night, by these boys, 
 besieging him to time them as they ran certain 
 distances measured by telegraph poles. At 
 last he borrowed a stop watch from one of 
 his friends, so he could do the timing prop- 
 erly and give them correct records. 
 
 After our meet was over and we had done 
 about a day's figuring, we found that the 
 Association had won the county champion- 
 ship. Ninety-five and five-tenths per cent of 
 their entire membership had participated in 
 the meet, while the towns with the stars, on 
 account of lack of loyalty, reported with as 
 low as 30 per cent. 
 
 Any town, either country or suburban, can 
 work on this basis with satisfaction. With us 
 it meant that many of our best men were will- 
 ing to cooperate when they saw the advantage 
 
VALUE OF ATHLETICS 103 
 
 in this form. The details were so arranged 
 that five of the best men we could muster were 
 selected and worked with a group of boys 
 during the meet, going with them from event 
 to event, keeping careful records and assist- 
 ing. One of these men was at the head of the 
 Men and Religion Forward Movement in his 
 own town and was tied up with a group of 
 older fellows. He soon began to get into 
 touch with them personally and found out 
 some things about their manner of living, etc. 
 Some boys were telling others how much beer 
 they drank in a dry town. Another man 
 wrote each one of the thirty or more in the 
 group he was with after the meet, commend- 
 ing them for their manly attitude, thus 
 establishing a definite relationship with them. 
 
 In the town that won this championship, 
 when it was announced at their regular meet- 
 ing, one of the boys in speaking about it that 
 evening said to the others, ''Fellows, I do not 
 know what you think about it, but I think if 
 we are going to hold this cup it means clean 
 living and if we are going to live clean, 
 it means for some of us to stop smoking 
 cigarettes." 
 
 There is now a more wholesome respect 
 for clean athletics in this town and it has 
 
104 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 established this organization there. At an 
 appointed time the entire group assembled, 
 with the people of the town present, the cup 
 was presented by one of the leading men of 
 the county and was accepted in a neat speech 
 by a boy thirteen years old. Short talks were 
 given by other men commending the group 
 and emphasizing the value of their loyalty. 
 They were impressed that clean thinking and 
 clean living would be essential to the holding 
 of this cup when it came to the test another 
 year. Some of these boys have taken a stand 
 for the Christian life. 
 
 In other towns, where they lost out because 
 of a selfish attitude and lack of loyalty, they 
 have awakened. One boy who saw his error 
 in opposing it came and said, *'I have seen 
 my mistake and if I can do anything now to 
 train the fellows in our town for next year, 
 I want to do it." 
 
 It meant a re-direction of thought toward 
 these things on the part of some of our men 
 and it has assisted in the formation of a club, 
 which provides golf and every kind of ath- 
 letics without Sunday golf or baseball. 
 
 This form for public schools and Sunday- 
 schools affords unusual advantages for com- 
 ing together in competition, at the same time 
 
VALUE OF ATHLETICS 105 
 
 giving every boy a chance to do his best and 
 get credit for what he does, so that it con- 
 serves the interest of the group. I know of 
 no better system that offers safeguards 
 against the difficulties and objections of the 
 old form. I am not a walking delegate for 
 this particular form, but I am interested and 
 believe in it with all my heart. 
 
 I taught a class of boys in a small Sunday- 
 school in a country community last spring and 
 told them about a corn growing contest. It 
 was fitting and in keeping with the lesson just 
 before Easter and through this discussion I 
 established the most splendid contact with a 
 group of boys. Possibly it was not just 
 exactly orthodox to some, but to me and to 
 those boys it has meant much. Let us not 
 forget that boys are thinking of these things, 
 and that because they are foremost in their 
 minds, through them we reach the real boy. 
 The boy who needs this the most is the one 
 who is backward and indifferent, and we owe 
 him an opportunity to express himself as 
 others do, even though at first he may not be 
 interested. 
 
 Note. — At this point the conference adjourned, 
 and the appointed commission met for consideration 
 
106 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 of the matter that was discussed with a view of pre- 
 paring special papers under specified titles which 
 were assigned to the members of the commission, and 
 which are herewith submitted as the result of the 
 work of this conference. 
 
XII 
 
 THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SOCIAL 
 SURVEY 
 
 T. N. Carver 
 
 Department of Economics, Harvard 
 University 
 
 The whole scheme of a social survey may 
 very well be entitled "What a minister ought 
 to know about his parish," or possibly we 
 might go a step further and say that if to 
 "know thyself" is the height of wisdom for 
 the individual, that also may be true of the 
 community, and the social survey is the means 
 by which the community may come to know 
 itself; but whether we take that point of view 
 of it or not, I would like to suggest the pos- 
 sibility that every graduate of a theological 
 seminary be required, in place of a thesis on 
 a scholastic subject, to write a survey or get 
 up a survey of some typical parish or com- 
 munity. 
 
 I am a firm believer in the doctrine that 
 education in general must be directed more 
 
108 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 and more toward study of the field for which 
 the students are being trained. In our public 
 schools, I think, we are beginning to learn 
 that education is something more than educa- 
 tional psychology. You need to do some- 
 thing before you study the internal workings 
 of the pupil; you need to look over the field 
 and see where men are needed, in what occu- 
 pation they are most needed, what kind of 
 talents are needed and after that has been 
 discovered, then it is time to study educa- 
 tional psychology in order to find out what 
 kind of material you have with which to 
 supply those needs. 
 
 This doctrine of theological education is 
 merely a phase of that general doctrine of 
 education; we must first know the field and 
 what is needed in the field for which these 
 students are being trained. After we have 
 discovered that, then we may look to the 
 psychology of the students and make psy- 
 chology thereafter the basis of our educa- 
 tional theory, so that we may know what kind 
 of materials the theological school is hand- 
 ling in order the better to provide for the 
 field. Likewise study the characteristics of 
 your materials. After you have gotten your 
 plan you must know what kind of a structure 
 
THE SOCIAL SURVEY 109 
 
 you want to build. I have also been im- 
 pressed with the idea that hereafter we are 
 to have a new test of the effectiveness of a 
 church or of the success or the failure of a 
 religious revival. I predict that hereafter, 
 a religious revival will be written down as a 
 failure, no matter how it may increase church 
 attendance or attendance upon prayer meet- 
 ing, or the contributions toward the support 
 of a church, unless it raises the price of land 
 in that community, unless it reduces the death 
 rate in that community, unless it increases 
 the crops of that community. 
 
 Suppose we were as wise on the subject of 
 work as we are on the subject of music. It 
 took the prophet to learn that all good music 
 was religious music and all musical instru- 
 ments were religious. Possibly we will event- 
 ually learn that all useful work is religious 
 work, then we may expect that as a result of 
 a religious revival a doctor may get religion 
 and if he does he will then give himself with 
 a new zeal and enthusiasm to the study of 
 medical science and to the practice of the 
 medical art. That will result in the allevia- 
 tion of human suffering and the lowering of 
 the death rate. Encouraging such religion 
 as that would be a very good way to reduce 
 
110 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 the death rate and any right-minded person 
 must approve such a religion. Whenever a 
 farmer gets religion he will give himself with 
 a new zeal and enthusiasm to the study of 
 agricultural science and the practice of his 
 productive art, then the wider the spread of 
 such a revival, the more good farmers we 
 would have. Encouraging such a rehgion as 
 this would be one good way of solving the 
 high cost of living. So with the business 
 man, when he gets this kind of religion he 
 will throw himself into the subject of business 
 efficiency with a new zeal and enthusiasm. It 
 would mean expansion of business; the start- 
 ing of new enterprises; more employment for 
 laborers and business school graduates. En- 
 couraging a religion such as this will go a 
 long way towards solving the labor problem. 
 When we test the efficiency of a religion 
 by methods similar to those suggested 
 here for the efficiency of a country school, 
 when we can really once apply that kind 
 of a test, we will be supporters of reli- 
 gion in proportion as we are patriotic. The 
 point which Mr. Maydole brought out — the 
 young boys training for athletes concluding 
 that they must give up cigarettes in the in- 
 terest of their contests — suggested to me that 
 
THE SOCIAL SURVEY 111 
 
 when we get a sufficiently broad idea of what 
 religious work is, we may discover that any 
 kind of sin is disloyalty to the community. 
 For that boy to have continued smoking 
 cigarettes, thereby endangering the success of 
 his team, would, of course, have been dis- 
 loyalty to his team. 
 
 Suppose we get this idea of religion; the 
 religious life is the efficient life. It means we 
 are going to do everything better than we 
 did before. Then you can make your appeal 
 to men in general as you could have made the 
 appeal to these boys — but not if you are 
 living a life which interferes with your effi- 
 ciency. Therefore, in proportion as you are 
 patriotic, in proportion as you are loyal to 
 the community, you must be religious, you 
 must give up any of your irreligion or sin, for 
 sin is the dissipation of human enegry and 
 righteousness is the economy of human 
 energy. When we appeal to other men in the 
 community, in the interests of loyalty and 
 patriotism, to live the life which will contrib- 
 ute to the utmost to the success of the com- 
 munity, then patriotism and religion will go 
 hand in hand. Until that comes and so long 
 as people cannot see the connection between 
 religion and patriotism, between religion and 
 
112 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 loyalty, you will find some very patriotic 
 people who have no use for religion. 
 
 The Need of a Study of the Field 
 
 If I were looking for a guide, the first 
 thing I should Insist upon would be some one 
 who knew the country through which I was 
 to be guided. I should also be interested in 
 his character and companlonableness, but, 
 lacking knowledge of the country, these other 
 qualities would count for very little. Or, if 
 I were In need of a physician, the first thing 
 I should be anxious about would be the accu- 
 racy and extent of his knowledge of the 
 nature of the body and the diseases which 
 prey upon it. If he lacked knowledge, I 
 should place very little value upon his moral 
 and social qualities. I should also apply the 
 same test to a spiritual or a social adviser. 
 He who aspires to leadership In social service 
 or religious awakening should expect to be 
 judged by this standard. 
 
 However, every religious educator en- 
 gaged in training men for religious work 
 agrees that knowledge is the first requisite. 
 The only question is, what kind of knowledge. 
 When the subjective side of religion was 
 emphasized by the world at large, It was 
 
THE SOCIAL SURVEY 113 
 
 natural that the chief emphasis in religious 
 education should be placed upon the spiritual 
 nature of man and its relation to the spiritual 
 universe. Now that our Interest is directed 
 toward the objective side of religion, it is 
 equally natural that the chief emphasis 
 shall eventually be placed upon the economic 
 nature of man and his relation to the eco- 
 nomic environment, both material and social. 
 The natural course of training, from this 
 point of view, is a thorough study of 
 economics. 
 
 For the religious worker, particularly the 
 worker In the country, this training should 
 not only be broad and extensive, but it should 
 be focalized and applied intensively to a 
 narrow field. To this end a survey of a 
 parish should be undertaken by every candi- 
 date for the ministry before he is turned loose 
 to practise upon a parish. Instead of a thesis 
 upon some problem of textual criticism or 
 philological exegesis, he should be required, 
 before graduation from a divinity school, to 
 make a thorough study of a single parish, 
 village or township, acquainting himself 
 thoroughly with its history, its social, eco- 
 nomic, moral and sanitary conditions, its 
 problems and its opportunities. The fact 
 
114 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 that he has done this for one parish would 
 be one evidence of his fitness to assume minis- 
 terial responsibilities in some other parish. 
 This should be as rigidly required of the can- 
 didate for the rural ministry or for county 
 work in the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
 tion as a knowledge of human anatomy is 
 required of a candidate for the medical pro- 
 fession. The making of a survey would not 
 be so very unlike, in educational principle, to 
 the dissecting of a cadaver in a medical 
 school. 
 
 After all is said that can be said about the 
 psychology of leadership, the fact remains 
 that, whatever other qualities are necessary, 
 clear and definite knowledge of the field and 
 the work to be done in it are the first requi- 
 sites. We may insist upon vision, but unless 
 the vision includes a clearly defined percep- 
 tion of the work to be done and the way to 
 do it, the possessor of the vision is only a 
 visionary. We may insist upon courage, but 
 unless the courageous person knows the best 
 way to begin a needed piece of work he is 
 only a blind guide. We may insist upon 
 initiative, but unless the initiator knows 
 exactly what he is initiating and why, he may 
 be leading in a circle instead of a straight 
 
THE SOCIAL SURVEY 115 
 
 line. The point to remember is that knowl- 
 edge — not abstract or general knowledge, 
 but concrete and definite knowledge — is the 
 first requisite of a leader. Not only must the 
 knowledge be definite and concrete, it must 
 apply to the specific problems before the 
 community. 
 
 A group of boys had lost their way in the 
 woods. They were wandering about in a 
 bewildered sort of fashion, no one knowing 
 in which direction to go. There was plenty 
 of courage, of initiative and general knowl- 
 edge in the group. The one thing needful 
 was definite knowledge of the way. Suddenly 
 one boy recognized a landmark and said, "I 
 know the way." He had courage, initiative 
 and general knowledge, but no more than 
 many others. He had never been recognized 
 as a born leader, but in this situation he 
 became a leader by the only kind of divine 
 right now recognized in the world, by right 
 of superior fitness for leadership, not leader- 
 ship as such, but leadership out of the specific 
 difficulty of time and place. 
 
 This is the only kind of leadership which 
 counts for much. Many of our rural com- 
 munities are in a bewildered state. They 
 reahze that something is wrong but do not 
 
116 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 seem to know exactly what, nor how to get 
 out of the difficulty. The man, woman or 
 boy who can go into such a community and 
 say, "I know the way," and convince them 
 that he does, will become the leader by divine 
 right. Mr. Booker T. Washington tells of 
 an old colored farmer of the South who, 
 after hearing a lecture on the new agriculture, 
 came up to the lecturer and said, "Mr. Wash- 
 ington, Ah knows what you says is right and 
 Ah wants to do what you says, but Ah don' 
 know what to do fust." It was not until Mr. 
 Washington was able to tell the southern 
 negroes how to begin, "what to do fust," 
 that his real leadership began. The man or 
 woman who can tell any rural community 
 how to begin, "what to do fust," will achieve 
 an equally beneficent leadership. 
 
XIII 
 
 THE NEED OF TRAINED LEADER- 
 SHIP IN RURAL LIFE 
 
 Edwin L. Earp 
 
 Chair of Sociology, Drew Theological 
 Seminary 
 
 The facts that have been brought out by 
 men in the field and the discussions of the 
 past two years have brought us to a recogni- 
 tion of the need of trained leadership in rural 
 life, and we have had ample demonstration 
 of what a trained leader can do; we have had 
 presented to us the problem of coordination 
 of the four great institutions that have to do 
 with rural life — that is, the country church, 
 the country school, the Sunday-school, and 
 the Young Men's Christian Association or 
 its county work department. The county 
 work department is so new I shall speak of 
 the other three only, but it has already 
 entered into the work as an important factor. 
 
 We know, in spite of all that has been said 
 about the Sunday-school, the rural school^ 
 
118 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 and the country church, that all three of these 
 institutions have been in the country districts 
 some of them for over a hundred years. 
 
 Last year I raised the question as to what 
 had been done in all these years in a certain 
 country community, and said that no effort 
 had been made to meet the facts which we 
 had discovered in a short survey. I want to 
 say this to encourage you, that the country 
 preacher of my own denomination in that 
 rural district who had been appointed again 
 for the third year, and of whom the people 
 said he had not "get-up" enough in him to 
 eat their fried chicken, died recently. I sup- 
 pose we do not want to see too many 
 funerals, but we do want to see in that rural 
 life of which we are all a part, because we 
 depend upon it for our resources, some sort 
 of a change in leadership that will awaken 
 us and help us to secure the very best kind 
 of a rural life from the standpoint of eco- 
 nomic success as well as religious and social 
 outlook. 
 
 Coming to the point of leadership; how 
 can we coordinate all the educational forces 
 we have that look towards leadership in these 
 three institutional phases of rural life? 
 Now, most of our teachers for the country 
 
NEED OF TRAINED LEADERSHIP 119 
 
 schools are trained in our colleges and nor- 
 mal schools. We have seen what splendid 
 results can come through one man or one 
 woman having the rural mind and an eco- 
 nomical plan for community life, religious 
 Impulse, and moral vision to see what the 
 community needs. We have learned with 
 Interest how a country church out in Morris 
 County, New Jersey, could have all the para- 
 phernalia and successful display of a depart- 
 ment in an agricultural college. 
 
 A country school in Minnesota that was 
 not organized on the agricultural plan has 
 been giving a short course which we have 
 found only In some of our state Institutions 
 in the East. We have had the same thing 
 demonstrated by two institutions of the 
 three; we hardly expect the Sunday-school 
 to do it, but wherever we have leadership in 
 these institutions the trained leadership of the 
 school, for example, is secured in the colleges 
 or the normal schools. But have we reached 
 the sources of trained leadership in these 
 schools? Are we getting extra biblical 
 material on rural life in our graded systems 
 today? The rural Sunday-schools are not 
 adopting the graded system. They do not 
 know what It means. Can we not see to It 
 
120 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 that the sources of our training for Sunday- 
 schools are under skilled leadership? We 
 are going to use those helps in the country 
 as long as we can raise money enough to get 
 them into the rural schools. We are going 
 to follow verbatim the questions necessary 
 to the system. They are not going to study 
 the lessons independently; once in a while 
 you will find a teacher who will do it, but 
 you go into the publishing houses of some 
 parts of the country and you will see some 
 of these people that make up what we call 
 the "dope." Can we not see to it that they 
 put in some of these factors that lead to the 
 social mind and develop these people in social 
 sympathies? These lesson helps may be 
 illustrated. Dr. Stroup gave us an illustra- 
 tion of four farmers who lived on four 
 corners of a cross road in Ohio. He dis- 
 covered that all four were driving five miles 
 to a milk station every morning carrying 
 two cans of milk each to the secretary, while 
 one man could have carried eight cans of milk 
 with one horse and let the others stay at home 
 and do something else, so that in a coopera- 
 tive way they might have done a lot of work. 
 Now why could not somebody have pointed 
 out to those men the idea of cooperation with 
 
NEED OF TRAINED LEADERSHIP 121 
 
 each other, rather than Individual indiffer- 
 ence? They were not competing. They had 
 been following this course for years and 
 years but did not see that cooperation was 
 worth developing. I am a country bred boy 
 and know what that means. 
 
 Take the rural free delivery — and by the 
 way, an institution which we thought would 
 socialize the farmers has isolated them. 
 They used to go at least once a week to the 
 country store ; we stopped them by delivering 
 their mail at their gates. We have been 
 giving the farmer his religion in a little 
 schoolhouse on the old circuit system, on the 
 R. F. D. plan, instead of establishing what I 
 call the social center system and then If a 
 woman gets a new Easter bonnet, or if a man 
 gets a new side-bar buggy (for even such 
 worldly motives can be sanctified to holy 
 uses) , let them drive to the center where they 
 can show them off, and there you can put in 
 a man who can be supported in such a center, 
 a leader in rural life who will amount to 
 something, rather than putting in a man on 
 the R. F. D. plan and starvation wages. 
 
 The third point is the leadership for the 
 church Itself; I have spoken of Sunday-school 
 leadership, of day school leadership, and now 
 
122 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 for the church itself we must go back to the 
 sources from which this leadership is drawn. 
 
 I have not seen in the curriculum of any 
 theological seminary a course on the rural 
 church and the country problem.* For the 
 first time in the history of Drew Theological 
 Seminary, where I happen to be a teacher this 
 year, I have a seminar of ten men who are 
 studying the country church and the rural 
 problem. The other day a lecturer asked for 
 hands up where the men had been brought up 
 in the country; including our president emeri- 
 tus, one hundred men of us were in a class- 
 room listening to the lecture and eighty-five 
 hands went up out of the one hundred, and 
 yet for all these years (we have had our 
 forty-fifth anniversary) not a course has been 
 given for the training of young men for 
 country work. 
 
 We are coming to it because our denomi- 
 nation is preeminently a rural denomination. 
 It has more country churches than city or 
 village churches. I think I could mention 
 other denominations where, for the first time, 
 they are beginning to give courses for trained 
 leadership in country work. The County 
 Work Department of the Young Men's 
 
 *Oberlin, I am told, is offering such a course. 
 
NEED OF TRAINED LEADERSHIP 123 
 
 Christian Association has men who have been 
 brought up in our churches, trained in our 
 colleges, and have been many of them suc- 
 cessful Sunday-school teachers or they would 
 not have been put on the job, and they are 
 going into these communities and are giving 
 a new impulse to the young life there through 
 all these avenues of service that are repre- 
 sented here today. What a splendid coordi- 
 nation we would have if we could line up the 
 forces of our churches, our Sunday-schools 
 and our day schools in cooperation with this 
 institution which is interdenominational. If 
 you can give it a chance through its summer 
 conferences and through its winter confer- 
 ence gatherings, to bring together these peo- 
 ple in all these centers and to give them that 
 information that we are getting here which 
 gives us the social outlook and creates in us 
 what we need so often even in our profes- 
 sional work, it will develop a broader social 
 consciousness and social sympathies, that will 
 help each man that is on the job to make this 
 a better country for all of us to live in. 
 
 What Makes a Leader? 
 
 In this discussion we are interested par- 
 ticularly in rural leadership, and the answer 
 
124 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 to this inquiry will have reference only to 
 such. It is of course necessary to keep in 
 mind the different vocations in which rural 
 leadership is especially needed: as, for 
 example, in the church, in the school, in the 
 County Work Department of the Young 
 Men's Christian Association, and in all other 
 voluntary organizations for the cooperative 
 action of the whole community for the wel- 
 fare of the people as a whole, as well as for 
 the individual in special need. 
 
 We mean by a leader not merely the man 
 who is ahead of those who are following, 
 for that may be true and yet the group may 
 not be getting anywhere, or even be headed 
 for any definite goal. But we mean rather a 
 man who has experience and vision so that 
 he can not only see the needs of the people 
 and show them a better way, but also a man 
 of practical skill and untiring zeal stimu- 
 lated by a constructive imagination and the 
 dynamic sense of human needs; who actually 
 gets people to do something for their own 
 betterment as well as for the uplift of the 
 whole community. 
 
 The factors of leadership are as follows: 
 ( I ) a chance to express the adolescent im- 
 pulse to do something; (2) ability to sense 
 
NEED OF TRAINED LEADERSHIP 125 
 
 and perceive human needs; (3) a construc- 
 tive imagination; (4) engineering skill or 
 tact in avoiding social friction; (5) a per- 
 sistent purpose to win in a good cause. We 
 will now take up these factors of rural leader- 
 ship and amplify them in the order in which 
 they have been stated. 
 
 A Chance to Express the Adolescent Impulse 
 to Achieve 
 
 I have in mind now a young man from one 
 of the southern states who is acknowledged 
 to be a leader in modern rural life work who 
 started his career at the age of sixteen by 
 being given a chance to teach a Sunday-school 
 class in a country church where the majority 
 of the pupils were older than he ; later he was 
 given the superintendency of the Sunday- 
 school, at the age of seventeen; at the age of 
 twenty-one he went to a preparatory school, 
 and at twenty-eight graduated from college. 
 He would never have developed leadership 
 in any good cause had he not been given a 
 chance in early adolescence to do something. 
 Even at twelve he did a man's work, plowing 
 his six rows of corn in turn like the rest. 
 
 Functional psychology confirms this point 
 
126 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 of view with respect to leadership. As 
 a matter of fact our educational system 
 hitherto, in the rural schools, in the college 
 and in the theological seminaries has edu- 
 cated men away from the rural field, not 
 purposely but as a matter of mental adjust- 
 ment. When we used to go on a 'possum 
 hunt in my boyhood days, as I remember, 
 the leader was always a young man who had 
 been on a 'possum hunt before and by actual 
 experience knew how to lead. So for every 
 department of organized endeavor for rural 
 betterment today, there must be given young 
 men in the country a chance to express this 
 adolescent impulse to achieve and it must be 
 given deliberately in every case, whether by 
 Sunday-school, Church, Grange, Farmers' 
 Club, County Young Men's Christian Asso- 
 ciation or what not. 
 
 Ability to Sense and Perceive Human Needs 
 
 A second factor to be emphasized in this 
 discussion is the ability to know the needs 
 of the community in a sympathetic and 
 intelligent way. 
 
 A real leader in rural life can make a 
 social survey of his community without even 
 
NEED OF TRAINED LEADERSHIP 127 
 
 giving evidence to the casual observer that 
 he is engaged in such a complex undertaking. 
 He can readily see the lack of cooperation, 
 the results of isolation and a suspicious indi- 
 vidualism, the product of generations of such 
 isolation, or lack of community solidarity. 
 He can readily perceive the economic basis 
 of many of these human ills and trace the 
 social and spiritual evils to their most 
 important cause. 
 
 He can not only sense the needs, but. If a 
 leader, he will see through them to their 
 causes, and thus be able to intelligently direct 
 to available resources for their treatment and 
 cure. 
 
 A Constructive Imagination 
 
 A real leader has also the power to con- 
 struct a plan by which men can work toward 
 achievement. He is able to build up a com- 
 munity structure in the minds of the people 
 before they have actually achieved results. 
 Take for example a successful country min- 
 ister who has upon his study walls a map of 
 his parish, with the problems and needs all 
 charted — this man has taken the first con- 
 structive step in showing his people how they 
 
128 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 can get together. So must the leader In 
 rural life today arouse the Imagination of the 
 farmer to see the relative greatness of our 
 rural domain, and its tremendous significance 
 as the resource field for the supply of the 
 populous cities of the world. Thus will be 
 given dignity to the toil of the men and 
 women In our vast rural domain. 
 
 Engineering Skill in Avoiding Friction 
 
 Still another factor that constitutes rural 
 leadership is that skill which enables a man 
 to keep at work with various groups that, 
 because of individualism and class conscious- 
 ness, are often In conflict Instead of coopera- 
 tion. In other words, it is the skill to get 
 team work. I remember once, when a boy 
 on the farm, seeing a great steam thresher 
 drawn by four horses stuck In the mud on a 
 hill, and I remember the skill with which 
 another farmer with his team hitched on and 
 pulled it out and up the hill by getting the 
 eight span to pull steadily together without 
 jerks and without geeing and hawing. 
 
 The rural leader should have the skill to 
 unite for community work the church, the 
 school, the grange and all other organiza- 
 
NEED OF TRAINED LEADERSHIP 129 
 
 tions when some great occasion demands that 
 they all pull together for the benefit of the 
 community. 
 
 A Persistent Purpose to Win in a Good Cause 
 
 The last and not the least factor is per- 
 sistent purpose. Leadership can never count 
 for much unless it really gets the people 
 somewhere. I recall a little country church 
 near a little village surrounded by a fairly 
 prosperous farming district that had closed 
 its doors for a year because of lack of inter- 
 est by the people in paying the salary of an 
 efficient pastor. One young man, a farmer, 
 and the village shoemaker got together and 
 determined to hold a Sunday-school in that 
 church building even if only a dozen people 
 could be persuaded to cooperate. And as a 
 result of persistent effort and a masterful 
 purpose, carried out for a period of two 
 years, that whole community was revolution- 
 ized and nearly a hundred adults were con- 
 verted and made permanent members of the 
 church. 
 
 So with all forms of community leader- 
 ship — to succeed there must be added to all 
 the other requisite factors this indomitable 
 
130 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 purpose to carry to successful issue the cause 
 we have undertaken. 
 
 The time to pull and push hardest is when 
 the load is nearest the top of the hill. This 
 is the supreme test of successful leadership, 
 to get your team to pull the load over every 
 break in the hill of human uplift. 
 
 These, then, are to me the most important 
 factors in the make-up of a real leader in the 
 country community life. How we are to 
 make such leaders would require another 
 paper equal in length to the above. The 
 colleges of agriculture, the County Work 
 Department of the Young Men's Christian 
 Association, the theological seminaries in 
 some instances, and in many states the 
 departments of education and agriculture are 
 seeking to solve this problem and, in a 
 measure, too little known by the general 
 public, are succeeding. 
 
XIV 
 HOME-MADE LEADERS 
 
 D. C. Drew 
 
 Secretary Y. M. C. A. County Work, 
 
 Massachusetts and Rhode Island 
 
 Many different plans are advocated for 
 the solution of the rural problem, but the one 
 element common to every plan is the need of 
 new leaders and of better leaders in the local 
 rural community. The home-made leader is 
 the man in the village or on the farm who 
 accepts some local responsibility for com- 
 munity uplift. The college professor, the 
 home missionary agent, the county and state 
 secretaries of the Young Men's Christian 
 Association and all others promoting rural 
 progress from without the country community 
 are not in this article regarded as home-made 
 leaders. Every plan promoted by these 
 national leaders of rural life must be finally 
 tested for its usefulness by its efficiency in 
 stirring up and guiding these home-made 
 
132 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 leaders. This fact indicates the vital impor- 
 tance of this subject. 
 
 What causes a man to undertake com- 
 munity leadership ? The very same influence 
 which induces a man today to assume the 
 responsibilities of leadership has been work- 
 ing in the hearts of men from the earliest 
 times. The prophets of old gave as their 
 credential for utterance the fact that they had 
 seen a vision. The vision impelled these men 
 to undertake great superhuman tasks in an 
 evil age. The vision which these men saw 
 was that of the need of mankind and how 
 their talents could be used for its uplift. The 
 vision compelled them to accept responsi- 
 bility, or, in the words of Isaiah, "Here am 
 I, send me." The vision of St. Paul also led 
 naturally to the thought, "Necessity is laid 
 upon me ; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not 
 the gospel." Although these men exerted a 
 national and international influence, the very 
 same principle is repeated in the life of the 
 modern man. First comes the vision of the 
 need of the community and the part which the 
 individual may take in meeting the need; and 
 second, the willingness to follow where the 
 vision leads. 
 
 In the great work of the discovery and 
 
HOME-MADE LEADERS 133 
 
 enlistment of unpaid social leaders within the 
 rural community the Young Men's Christian 
 Association has been a pioneer. Church 
 boards and school supervisors have sent men 
 into the community to become leaders, but it 
 remained for the Association to have suffi- 
 cient faith in the men now residing in the 
 small localities to make its whole program, 
 difficult as It is, depend absolutely upon these 
 very men. The county secretary is primarily 
 a discoverer of leaders and is a man with such 
 clear perception of the needs of young men 
 that he communicates this vision to others. 
 Some local men receive almost Instanta- 
 neously the vision of their life interpreted In 
 service to young men. Other men demand 
 many Infallible signs to prove that the work 
 which Is suggested by the Christian Associa- 
 tion secretary is worthy of the personal sacri- 
 fice which it involves. Right here is the 
 critical point In making a home-made leader. 
 If the local man sees a clear vision of the 
 work to be done then the results are satis- 
 factory. 
 
 The experience of T. B. Lanham, County 
 Secretary of Medina County, Ohio, Is dupli- 
 cated by nearly every county secretary. He 
 says: "I know of no better way of enlisting 
 
134 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 men as leaders than that of a personal con- 
 versation with them. This is sometimes 
 slow and tedious, but I believe that it is the 
 best way. For instance, I have one man on 
 our field today whom I tried for four years 
 to tie up as a leader, believing that if we could 
 get this man under our work in the town in 
 which he lived there was no question about 
 its success. We blundered along and kept 
 things going in a manner for this period of 
 time. This man told me repeatedly that if 
 he took on any additional work he would 
 have to give up his job. He is a man who 
 has a very important position and is drawing 
 a salary of $5,000 a year. I never lost an 
 opportunity to drop in and spend a few 
 minutes with him, telling him of the possi- 
 bilities of a leader of young men and boys, 
 and how sadly in need the community was of 
 such leadership. I finally got him to agree 
 to give one night a month, and he accepted 
 the chairmanship of our local board of direct- 
 ors. Today we have the best work ever in 
 the history of this organization, and this man 
 is giving one night a week, besides extra 
 things that he does for the Association." 
 
 If the secretary knows exactly what to do 
 and how to do it, and has the genius to com- 
 
HOME-MADE LEADERS 135 
 
 munlcate the vision in his own heart to 
 another man, he will usually accept the work 
 which he is asked to do. Every volunteer 
 worker who really accomplishes much in his 
 community comes to the point of the Apostle 
 Paul and says, "Woe is me if I do not this 
 thing." The secretaries who have been most 
 successful are those who have conscientiously 
 employed the divine element in their work. 
 O. B. Read, Burlington County, N. J., says: 
 "I have yet to be disappointed in a leader who 
 was enlisted on the basis of its being the will 
 of God for him in service." The loyalty of 
 the hundreds of Association leaders is due to 
 the fact that they are held true by the reli- 
 gious motive. 
 
 Of course it is assumed that a secretary 
 will ask only those men who have the qualities 
 which are fundamental for leadership among 
 young men. H. D. Maydole of Camden 
 County, N. J., looks for men with initiative, 
 some originality, willingness to be led and 
 trained, willingness to sacrifice, loyalty to the 
 work, energy, enthusiasm, devotion to duty, 
 and with love for boys. 
 
 Occasionally, with almost no direction 
 from sources outside the rural community, 
 some individual works out a broad construe- 
 
136 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 tlve plan of work. Such a man was Oberlin, 
 who, without precedents or encouragement 
 from those outside of his mountain hamlet, 
 accomplished a great historic feat. Through- 
 out the country, here and there, exceptional 
 leaders, single-handed, without knowledge of 
 technique, have wrought great things. Such 
 an example is furnished by a woman on the 
 tip of Cape Cod. She saw the vision of the 
 tremendous need among the young people of 
 the community, heeded this vision, and with- 
 out even so much as hearing of the names of 
 Fiske and Hall, developed along scientific 
 lines activities among boys and girls which 
 revolutionized the social and intellectual 
 ideals of the young people. 
 
 If cases like this were the rule, long ago 
 the rural problem would have been solved, 
 but, unfortunately, even those who receive a 
 great vision of need often undertake to meet 
 it by methods which are sure to fail. For 
 instance, in thousands of communities today 
 it may be safely asserted men and women are 
 planning to work out the social redemption 
 of boys and girls chiefly through rooms open 
 nightly for social enjoyment with no thought 
 of an adequate program or the development 
 of leaders. These plans almost universally 
 
HOME-MADE LEADERS 137 
 
 fall after the first year. It is apparent then 
 that something besides an impelling vision 
 and a willingness to work is usually necessary 
 for any guarantee of results. Educational 
 systems have long since discovered this and 
 in many states there is a plan of compulsory 
 supervision of all public schools whereby 
 every rural school is under the guidance of 
 some man who has traveled the path of rural 
 education. The churches have discovered 
 the need of supervision and in those denomi- 
 nations whose system does not demand super- 
 vision for all churches, home missionary sec- 
 retaries are appointed to supervise the rural 
 church. If supervision is necessary for 
 churches and schools which have behind them 
 years of experience and thousands of prece- 
 dents, how much more important it is for 
 unpaid social work in a rural community to 
 have an even more adequate plan of super- 
 vision. 
 
 The county secretary, therefore, gives his 
 attention to the supervision of these workers. 
 This he does by personal visits, giving the 
 information and working plans necessary for 
 intelligent work. This is a tedious task and 
 the results are not uniform, so that periodi- 
 cally county secretaries have thought that 
 
138 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 highly organized courses on the psychology 
 of leadership, conducted by experienced 
 teachers in pedagogy, are necessary in the 
 proper training of social leaders. Few 
 courses have ever been arranged. Conse- 
 quently there is a feeling of depression on the 
 part of some of the employed officers that 
 they are not living up to their responsibilities 
 of leader training. There seems to be a 
 decided movement against this conception 
 today. Experience in county work has 
 proven that the most effective way of leader 
 training is the intimate contact of the leader 
 with a secretary and the conferences of the 
 various leaders in the county doing similar 
 work. 
 
 Read of New Jersey says, "One of the best 
 remedies for an indifferent or discouraged 
 leader is to take him over to visit another 
 group where the leader is delivering the 
 goods." F. S. Knapp of Hillsdale, Michi- 
 gan, says, "I believe that nothing can take 
 the place of fellowship with men doing simi- 
 lar tasks in keeping up a spirit that will 
 bring sure success." Close contact with the 
 other leaders in the county and with the 
 county secretary will help keep a fresh vision 
 of the work. W. Gospel of St. Joseph 
 
HOME-MADE LEADERS 139 
 
 County, Michigan, says, *'The best way to 
 keep a man on the job is to supply him with 
 the material by which to make his meetings 
 successful." 
 
 Right here is where most of the secretaries 
 have failed. Better than any highly organ- 
 ized theoretical knowledge, then, is first of 
 all the imparting of the vision to local men; 
 second, the assigning of a definite task; third, 
 presenting in a concrete way the methods 
 which will insure success in the task; fourth, 
 by giving such general inspiration through 
 conferences, personal contact, suitable books 
 and pamphlets as will enable a man to be 
 successful. 
 
 We have to this point considered the effect 
 which a secretary may exert upon an indi- 
 vidual in a country community. It is now 
 important to consider how the effort which 
 is thus promoted be made a part of a larger 
 plan for community uplift. Too often men 
 have undertaken work among boys or young 
 men as a purely private enterprise, with little 
 or no reference to the attitude of the com- 
 munity. Men have undertaken work with 
 boys in precisely the same way that they 
 might start in raising chickens. When prob- 
 lems arose and they had gone to the extent 
 
140 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 of their knowledge they gave up the work 
 precisely as they would give up the chicken 
 business if it was inconvenient or unprofitable. 
 
 For this reason it is very important that 
 whenever the Christian Association secretary 
 enters a community he first receive the good 
 counsel of those who intimately know the 
 community life. Whether or not a board of 
 directors be definitely organized is not so 
 important, but every effort for the community 
 which an outside party inaugurates should 
 have the approval of the pastors, school 
 teachers and influential people in the com- 
 munity. This is the only way of keeping 
 work perpetual in a town. This also serves 
 as a distinct guide for any leader, for he 
 now has the judgment of other men. It also 
 makes the work which a leader may start a 
 permanent factor, for he may through sick- 
 ness or other emergencies be unable to con- 
 tinue ; but if the work which he has attempted 
 is a part of the program of the community, 
 his successor is chosen and the work proceeds. 
 
 There is another reason also why the more 
 progressive forces of each community should 
 be definitely committed to the plan of the 
 Young Men's Christian Association, and that 
 is in order to supplement the work of the sec- 
 
HOME-MADE LEADERS 141 
 
 retary. In process of years an Intelligent 
 committee of a town should be able to look 
 out for the individual efforts of men serving 
 on committees and taking special responsi- 
 bility with groups of boys. As these local 
 committee men develop in strength the sec- 
 retary has more time to develop other 
 activities. 
 
XV 
 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN 
 COUNTRY LIFE 
 
 M. A. HONLINE 
 
 International Secretary, Religious Work 
 Department 
 
 Man a Religious Being 
 
 Few subjects have received more attention 
 in recent years than that of religious educa- 
 tion, and today it is being studied from 
 practically every standpoint, and while very 
 much still remains obscure and uncertain, 
 great progress has been made and the lines 
 for further advancement have been clearly 
 marked out. We have already gone far 
 enough to be convinced that "man is a 
 religious animal," endowed with religious 
 instincts, equipped with the capacity for 
 becoming religious and has a natural tendency 
 toward a religious life. 
 
 That every child born into this world of 
 ours brings with him certain religious in- 
 
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 143 
 
 stincts and capacities as an integral part of 
 his original endowment, is just as apparent as 
 the manifestation of those other inherent 
 powers which have their seat in his intellec- 
 tual nature, and are equally definite and 
 strongly marked. For years educators have 
 been telling us that the chief business of edu- 
 cation is to develop aright all inherent capaci- 
 ties. Now religion is one of those inherent 
 capacities, for man possesses the latent 
 power to become religious and to live a reli- 
 gious life. Therefore the right development 
 of the child's religious instincts and capacities 
 must necessarily be an essential part of the 
 educational process. 
 
 The fact that man comes into this world 
 bringing with him a religious faculty or 
 nature as a vital part of his original endow- 
 ment, carries with it the possibility as well 
 as the need of appropriate training and 
 development. Every new-born child enters 
 this life potentially perfect, no matter on 
 what part of this planet he first sees the light; 
 nothing is added during the years he may be 
 permitted to live beyond the original endow- 
 ments bestowed upon him by nature. It 
 would be no more possible to add a new organ 
 to his body than to add a new faculty to his 
 
144 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 soul. Religion is not an external process, 
 something grafted on to the soul in later life, 
 it is there at birth; it is neither an incident 
 nor an accident, it is the most universal and 
 persistent fact in human history. Helen 
 Keller, deprived of the senses of sight and 
 hearing, tells us that God spoke to her many 
 times, long before she knew His name or had 
 been made conscious of His existence by 
 those who sought to teach her. Religion is 
 truly the "life of God in the soul of man." 
 Science is in exact agreement with the state- 
 ment of the Apostle John that there is a 
 light which lighteth every man coming into 
 the world. At no time since man made his 
 appearance on this earth has God left Him- 
 self without a witness in the heart of human 
 beings. 
 
 This doctrine that religion is one of man's 
 primary endowments finds many ardent advo- 
 cates outside the so-called "religious schools." 
 The historian, Guizot, said that if education 
 was to be truly good and socially useful it 
 must be fundamentally religious. Benjamin 
 Kidd in "Social Evolution" declares religion 
 to be "the central feature in the development 
 of human society." Equally strong is the 
 statement of Professor Alfred Marshall in 
 
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 145 
 
 his "Principles of Economics" when he says 
 that "The two great forming agencies of the 
 world's history have been religion and eco- 
 nomics." The framers of the Northwest 
 Ordinance of 1787 believed that "Religion, 
 morality and education are necessary to good 
 government and the happiness of mankind." 
 
 The history of any people is largely a 
 history of their religion. The modern 
 writers of ancient history devote a very large 
 portion of their texts to a careful survey of 
 the religious beliefs of these early peoples, 
 for they have come to realize that a people's 
 religion is the most potent factor in their 
 entire national life. The great temples, 
 tombs and pyramids of ancient times are but 
 silent witnesses to the religious spirit which 
 virtually dominated those departed civiliza- 
 tions. Art, literature and music, in every 
 stage of man's upward march in civilization, 
 have received their inspiration from religion. 
 Some one has said that "Medieval art is 
 medieval theology fossilized." For the last 
 eighteen hundred years the Christian religion 
 has been one of the chief propelling forces 
 in the development of the Germanic races. 
 
 Now if this is all true, if the child has a 
 religious nature, endowed with the capacity 
 
146 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 to live a religious life, and if education is a 
 unitary process whose chief concern is to 
 develop aright all innate powers which the 
 individual brings with him into this world, 
 to whom are the youth of this generation in 
 America to apply for religious training and 
 development which the educator tells us is 
 so imperative in any system of education? 
 
 In every civilized country three great edu- 
 cational agencies are to be found — the home, 
 the state and the church. Here in America 
 specific religious instruction is banished by 
 law from our public school system, due, very 
 largely, to our exaggerated idea of democ- 
 racy on the one hand, with a multiplicity of 
 Protestant religious denominations on the 
 other, thus reducing us to an educational con- 
 dition practically unknown to any other Chris- 
 tian nation in the world, with the exception of 
 the Republic of France. In our country the 
 state does not, and possibly cannot, include 
 religious training in its program of studies. 
 The home, because of certain factors which 
 have entered into our family and community 
 life, is neglecting this most important phase of 
 education. Professor Walter S. Athearn 
 has well said that "The American home tends 
 to become a cheap tavern where father. 
 
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 147 
 
 mother and children meet to sleep and eat, 
 and then go their separate ways, each finding 
 comradeship away from home. From the 
 early homes where everything was done with 
 the cooperation of the children, we have come 
 upon homes where very little is done for or 
 by the children." The average American 
 home is doing very little today in the way of 
 religious training of its own children. 
 
 The state cannot include rehgious training 
 in its program, and the home does not include 
 it in its widely increased program of numer- 
 ous activities, therefore the Church must 
 include it. That part of the Church which 
 has set itself the task of religious education 
 is the Sunday-school. . The facts are, the 
 religious instruction of the youth of this 
 country is in the hands of the Sunday-school 
 teacher. It is said on good authority that 87 
 per cent of all persons who join the Church 
 today come as a result of Sunday-school 
 teaching, and that 85 per cent of that number 
 unite with the Church during the "teen age." 
 
 The Sunday-school an Educational Institution 
 
 We should never fail to recognize the fact 
 that the Sunday-school is a real s-c-h-o-o-1. 
 Like the public school its problems are edu- 
 
148 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 catlonal problems. Its field of instruction, 
 its courses of study, its text-books, questions 
 of organization and administration, time and 
 place of meeting, all these are educational 
 problems and must be considered in the light 
 of recognized educational principles. 
 
 1. Its Function, As an educational insti- 
 tution its function is to teach, not to preach; 
 to instruct, not to amuse and entertain. It is 
 not intended primarily for worship, although 
 worship should have a very important place 
 in all its services. Its true task is instruction, 
 and if it fails here it can never fulfill its high 
 calling or justify its right to exist. The spe- 
 cific task of every school, no matter on what 
 day of the week it holds its sessions, consists 
 in imparting right information, forming 
 worthy habits, discovering latent powers, 
 arousing desirable interests, discouraging evil 
 tendencies and inspiring high ideals. System- 
 atic development rather than formal in- 
 struction should be the aim of every school, 
 regardless of its place or time of meeting. 
 
 2. Its Subject. Its subject is religious 
 truth, not dogmatic theology, philosophy, 
 physical science or even sociology. These 
 things are all exceedingly helpful as illustra- 
 tive material, in the hands of a teacher suffi- 
 
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 149 
 
 clently familiar with them to utilize them in 
 such a way as to contribute to the one end in 
 view, but after all they are only secondary 
 material and must be treated as such. In 
 religious instruction that which is natural 
 ought to precede that which is spiritual, for 
 truth becomes a real asset in knowledge just 
 in proportion to its assimilation. In other 
 words, the pupil must come into possession of 
 religious truth through an intellectual pro- 
 cess, before the truth can come into posses- 
 sion of him with sufficient power to become a 
 dominating factor in his life. In presenting 
 these truths the teacher must never forget 
 that the child's mind, as well as his body, 
 demands nourishment, and that these de- 
 mands are orderly because they follow laws 
 which the Creator of us all has seen fit to 
 implant within the child's nature. His pre- 
 sentation of truth must fit into this divine- 
 human program. 
 
 3. Its Text-book. The Sunday-school 
 text-book is the Bible, not a lesson quarterly, 
 helpful as that may be. The teacher should 
 never substitute the quarterly for the Bible, 
 the function of the quarterly is to aid the 
 teacher in answering questions which Bible 
 study raises but does not answer. The quar- 
 
150 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 terly is for use in the preparation of the les- 
 son; it should then be left at home and the 
 Bible taken to the class for use during the 
 recitation period. 
 
 The permanent source, guidance, and in- 
 spiration of all religious education is the 
 Bible. It is the abiding belief of many who 
 are competent to judge that Christianity, in 
 the centuries to come, will stand or fall with 
 the teaching of the Bible to the young of this 
 present generation. Whether or not we 
 believe the state should engage in systematic 
 biblical instruction, the fact remains to con- 
 front us that it is not doing it at the present 
 time, and it is not likely that the future will 
 witness any very radical changes in our public 
 school program of studies. The only insti- 
 tution in America today engaged in teaching 
 the Bible to the masses is the Sunday-school. 
 
 4. Its Object, The object for which the 
 Sunday-school exists is threefold in its 
 nature : 
 
 a. The conversion of the pupil. 
 
 b. The development of Christian char- 
 acter. 
 
 c. Training for, and enlisting in, Chris- 
 tian service. 
 
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 151 
 
 The Sunday-school is to attain this three- 
 fold object through: 
 
 a. Religious instruction in general. 
 
 b. Biblical study and instruction in par- 
 ticular. 
 
 c. Adequate knowledge of the pupil. 
 
 d. A knowledge of right principles in 
 teaching. 
 
 e. Proper Sunday-school equipment, or- 
 ganization and administration. 
 
 Inherent Weaknesses in the Present Sunday- 
 school System 
 
 While the religious instruction of the youth 
 of this country is almost exclusively in the 
 hands of the Sunday-school, that institution 
 is failing to qualify its own pupils to become 
 competent teachers. This failure grows out 
 of certain inherent weaknesses in the present 
 Sunday-school system. The average Sunday- 
 school devotes less than thirty minutes each 
 week to the teaching of the Bible, which 
 means but twenty-four hours a year. The 
 child who attends both Sunday-school and 
 public school receives twenty-four hours' bib- 
 lical instruction in the Sunday-school and in 
 the public school during but nine months of 
 
152 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 the year receives one hundred and twenty- 
 four hours' instruction in arithmetic, or five 
 times the number of hours in arithmetic that 
 he receives in biblical instruction. When we 
 come to compare the time spent in the actual 
 study of these two subjects, the comparison 
 becomes almost painful. What must be the 
 conclusion of the child regarding the relative 
 importance of these two subjects? Will he 
 not feel that his parents and those who teach 
 him regard arithmetic as of far greater im- 
 portance than Bible study? If not, why 
 devote more than one hundred and twenty- 
 five hours to the one and only about twenty- 
 four hours to the other? To solve the prob- 
 lem of religious education, the church must 
 provide more time for actual Bible study and 
 Bible teaching. 
 
 Untrained teachers are another very 
 serious weakness to be found in the American 
 Sunday-school. We insist today on a trained 
 ministry, specially trained choirs, and trained 
 missionaries; to be consistent, why not lay 
 equal emphasis on a trained teaching force 
 for our Sunday-school ? The young man con- 
 templating work in the foreign field is ex- 
 pected, yes, even required, to devote several 
 years in preparing himself to teach the 
 
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 153 
 
 heathen beyond the waters, and yet how will- 
 ing we are to intrust the religious instruction 
 of our own boys and girls to persons who 
 have made no special preparation whatever 
 for that kind of work. Is one to infer from 
 this attitude of both the church and the home 
 that we look on the religious training of the 
 heathen as of more consequence than the 
 training of our own American children? I 
 am not criticising the work of foreign mis- 
 sions; I am only recognizing our own incon- 
 sistencies. 
 
 For years the Sunday-school, through its 
 system of uniform lessons for all departments 
 of the school, has been trying to adapt the 
 child to the lesson instead of seeking to adapt 
 the lesson to the child; it has seemed to ig- 
 nore the fact that the immature nature of the 
 pupil with its limitations and its possibilities, 
 and not the lesson material, was the one thing 
 which called the school into existence and 
 made education possible. Too long we have 
 been victims of false educational methods; 
 we need never hope for adequate results so 
 long as we persist in employing inadequate 
 methods. 
 
 Poor and incomplete equipment is another 
 serious handicap in many Sunday-schools. 
 
154 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 What tremendous protests would go up from 
 the parents of any community If the public 
 school teacher should be reduced to an equip- 
 ment as inadequate as the equipment of the 
 Sunday-schools in the same community. 
 They will insist on the public school teacher 
 being provided with the very best equipment 
 that money can buy, and yet how willing they 
 are that the poor Sunday-school teacher 
 struggle along with nothing more helpful 
 than a three-cent lesson quarterly. Most 
 Sunday-schools are provided with charts 
 showing how many heathen there are in 
 Africa without a preacher, but in very few 
 of them can one find so much as a map of 
 Palestine for teaching their own boys and 
 girls. 
 
 Let us Christianize the heathen world as 
 rapidly as possible, and in doing so let us 
 spend a little more time and considerably 
 more money in looking after "the lost sheep 
 of the house of Israel." 
 
 The Hopeful Outlook 
 
 Properly trained teachers, lesson material 
 adapted to the pupil, adequate equipment, 
 organization and administration operating in 
 harmonious combination will go very far in 
 
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 155 
 
 overcoming the weaknesses Indicated above. 
 All these are available and may be had In any 
 school In the land. The outlook Is not dis- 
 couraging but most hopeful. The Sunday- 
 school of today Is 50 per cent better than the 
 Sunday-school of fifteen years ago and Is 
 steadily Improving each year. As an insti- 
 tution It has begun to recognize its own 
 defects and has set itself the task of correct- 
 ing them. The marks of greatness In any 
 organization lie In its ability to locate its own 
 weakness coupled with a corresponding abil- 
 ity to correct that weakness when discovered. 
 The Sunday-school is beginning to demon- 
 strate to the world that it possesses these 
 characteristics of greatness. It has at last 
 discovered Its true task; it is beginning to 
 realize that It Is an educational, as well as 
 religious, Institution ordained of God for the 
 promulgation of religious truth ; it has found 
 its true mission In the earth, and is beginning 
 to assume as never before the gigantic re- 
 sponsibility of religious education and bibli- 
 cal Instruction. When I stop to consider the 
 enormity of her task, the material with which 
 she has to work — Inadequate equipment, un- 
 trained and unpaid teachers, ungraded lesson 
 material, voluntary attendance on the part of 
 
156 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 both pupils and teachers, parental indiffer- 
 ence, together with the counter attractions of 
 the world — I am really amazed with the 
 results already accomplished. It is by all 
 odds the greatest department of the Chris- 
 tian church, for it gives to the church eighty- 
 seven out of every one hundred of its 
 converts. 
 
 When I survey this field, with its possi- 
 bilities, its opportunities and its responsi- 
 bilities, I am convinced beyond all question 
 that the Sunday-school is by far the most 
 potent force for righteousness in America 
 today. What may we expect in the years to 
 come with chairs of Sunday-school pedagogy 
 in all of our denominational seminaries; when 
 our equipment becomes as perfect as that of 
 the day school ; when the lesson material shall 
 be thoroughly graded to meet the growing 
 needs of child life ; when every teacher shall 
 be a trained teacher — an expert in his par- 
 ticular department; and when parents and 
 church members shall be regular attendants 
 at the Sunday-school? The Sunday-school is 
 saying, "Give us the equipment, the teachers, 
 the money, and the parental cooperation 
 which you give to the public schools of this 
 country and we will give you results far 
 
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 157 
 
 superior to anything the public school has 
 ever done. Give us the means and the raw 
 material and we will return to you the fin- 
 ished product, 'furnished completely unto 
 every good work.' " 
 
XVI 
 
 THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE COUN- 
 TRY PASTOR TO DIRECT 
 SOCIAL ENTERPRISES 
 
 Chas. O. Bemies 
 
 Pastor of the Presbyterian Church of 
 McClellandtown, Pa. 
 
 The rural pastorate is a definite and 
 specialized calling, requiring a man in the full 
 possession of all his powers and the utmost 
 variation of manly and Christian faculties, 
 in order to meet the necessities of all phases 
 of rural life with their entanglement of com- 
 plex problems. There is a seeming simplicity 
 about rural life and a country community, 
 but it is in reality nearly as complex as the 
 individuals in it. As a rule, the rural 
 churches have gone backward or remain 
 undeveloped through various causes not 
 necessary to mention here ; there has been an 
 increasing proportion of a lower class of 
 people left in the country, lower in every 
 
OPPORTUNITY OF THE PASTOR 159 
 
 plane of life, a class harder to reach through 
 their lack of ambition in all directions and a 
 contented indifference to progress, presenting 
 a vast need and opportunity in inspiring rural 
 life at every point — religious, social, intellec- 
 tual, economic, recreative, political — and in 
 promoting community welfare. The greatest 
 home missionary field in the United States is 
 the average country community. The man 
 going into a rural charge should regard it as 
 of equal importance to a foreign mission field. 
 A young theological seminary man could find 
 no better opportunity to develop all the quali- 
 ties which make up the full rounded preacher, 
 pastor and social service worker than in the 
 country. 
 
 Take one line, for instance : the rural pas- 
 tor's opportunity to direct social enterprises 
 of the community is without limit. He and 
 the church ought to stand as the greatest 
 factor in the real social life of the parish; for, 
 literally, the Christian life is nothing if it is 
 not social. The old individualistic idea of the 
 Christian life consisting chiefly of private 
 prayer, Bible study and meditation, a selfish 
 relationship to God, is rapidly disappearing. 
 Although these private devotions are neces- 
 sary, they are simply a basis from which to 
 
160 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 express the Christ spirit in every phase of 
 daily life; and without any other manifesta- 
 tion than a pious look he might as well be 
 under the mystic spell of Nirvana. In view 
 of the all too prevalent idea that the Church 
 ought not to concern herself with anything 
 but the so-called spiritual side of a man's life, 
 it seems necessary to briefly outline the prin- 
 ciples underlying the scope of the Church's 
 work in the world. 
 
 We cannot serve God directly, for He 
 needs nothing. He does not suffer pain, 
 hunger or homelessness. The universe is 
 His and all things contained therein. He is 
 self-sufficient in all things. Our private devo- 
 tions are not classed under service, as they 
 are simply acts of worship and dependence. 
 No man can serve God by segregating him- 
 self from others of his kind. Christianity is 
 eminently a social religion animated by the 
 spirit of the Master. The church that is 
 only "spiritual" is not fulfilling its mission. 
 For we are not spiritual beings yet, but a com- 
 bination of spiritual, physical, intellectual; 
 with a diversity of faculties, appetites, 
 impulses, ambitions; living in the midst of 
 conflicting environment in our imperfect 
 world of economics, business, production, dis- 
 
OPPORTUNITY OF THE PASTOR 161 
 
 tribution, politics, government, education, 
 morals, living and working conditions. Into 
 this pot-pourri of our mixed natures and 
 complex surroundings the essence of Christ 
 must be cast and thoroughly stirred, until all 
 the relations of life, private and public, are 
 permeated with the same spirit. There is no 
 such thing as saving a man's spiritual nature 
 in this world apart from his many phased 
 nature. The whole man is saved or not at 
 all. Old things have passed away, all things 
 have become new. The church which does 
 not project her direct influence into her many- 
 sided community life may be said to have no 
 influence, and therefore to be ignorant or 
 unmindful of her great mission to gradually 
 transform this earth and all its contents into 
 a smoothly running, equitably prosperous, 
 righteously governed Kingdom of Heaven, 
 with the living spirit of Christ as the animat- 
 ing and powerfully leavening principle. The 
 Church, which is the body of true believers, 
 serves God only by serving others and by 
 building up this Kingdom. 
 
 To come to a concrete locality, and to take 
 one phase of social service, which is a broad 
 term, let us confine ourselves to answering 
 the question, "What can a country pastor do 
 
162 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 to spiritualize what is commonly called the 
 social life of his community?" For no church 
 is a power unless she is social. In the first 
 place, he is directly responsible to God for the 
 character of the social life of his parish, for 
 it is a part of his business to put Into opera- 
 tion ways and means to develop it towards 
 the highest ideal ; to produce a hearty whole- 
 someness in every department of church and 
 community life. Furthermore, he has the 
 natural opportunity to direct social enter- 
 prises, as the very heart of the gospel is 
 essentially social, and the people expect and 
 demand that the church atmosphere shall be 
 cordial, as also that the parish social life 
 shall be uplifted. It is not always necessary 
 for the pastor to make a flying leap every 
 Sunday from the pulpit to the front door 
 after the benediction to shake hands with 
 every one before the man In the back seat can 
 get to the door. It means vastly more that 
 he should be hearty in his manner in the 
 pulpit, speaking to the people and not at or 
 over them. That self-important ministerial 
 dignity which some preachers assume fools 
 no one and is a positive barrier between the 
 pulpit and the heart In the pew. Direct per- 
 sonal address establishes a bond of unity. 
 
OPPORTUNITY OF THE PASTOR 163 
 
 His presence among his people, before and 
 after service or at any church gathering, 
 should radiate a sincere cordiality. All fawn- 
 ing effusiveness, a condescending unbending 
 and the "chessie cat" grin or the "seraphic" 
 smile, are abominations in the minds of the 
 people. He must be at heart a real lover of 
 his kind without partiality. If he is not this 
 he ought to get out of the country ministry or 
 get converted all over. Just as soon as a 
 pastor quits being selfishly minded he can 
 become social. He must by various persistent 
 means develop his people into hearty friend- 
 liness with each other and with strangers 
 while in the church on any occasion. The 
 social feeling and atmosphere is a necessity 
 to successful church work on any and all lines. 
 His Sunday-school officers, teachers and 
 scholars must have the cheerful earnestness 
 which is attractive to all ages if it is to pros- 
 per. The pastor is primarily responsible for 
 the growth of this atmosphere, and if it is 
 lacking there is something wrong with him, 
 either with his heart or his methods or both. 
 Everybody will finally melt down and 
 together under a persistent social pastor. 
 The young people's society and every organi- 
 
164 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 zation of the church must be saturated with a 
 satisfying fellowship. 
 
 In the pastor's visits to the homes he 
 should have that genuine feeling of good will 
 to all, from the baby to the grandmother, 
 which makes the people say, "He seems like 
 one of the family and we're all glad to see 
 him come at any time." He ought to talk 
 interestingly with the men and women on all 
 subjects and ought to sit or stand around with 
 the men, in moderation, at the store, post 
 office, blacksmith shop, public sales or picnics, 
 and enter into familiar conversation with 
 them on any subject from politics to hogs. 
 He can develop by various means that old- 
 time neighborliness between the people in 
 sickness and in health. One helpful way is 
 for the different committees of the Sunday- 
 school, young people's society, ladies' aid and 
 missionary society or other organizations to 
 meet around at the different homes. Choir 
 meeting or singing school is a splendid social 
 means, as is also the literary society, the 
 rightly conducted play party, other socials, 
 dinners, festivals, home talent plays and con- 
 certs and the general observance of the regu- 
 lar and the special days of the year. 
 
 The opportunities of the country pastor to 
 
OPPORTUNITY OF THE PASTOR 165 
 
 direct social enterprises are legion and 
 teeming with life at every point. 
 
 The preacher is naturally an inventor, as 
 it is a most important part of his mental 
 equipment for sermon work, and any minister 
 who pretends to be alive can easily apply or 
 invent the methods by which he can develop 
 the people into a hearty unit of cordial 
 friendship, with the church as its center, and 
 the Spirit of Christ as its healthy life. 
 
 Note. — As the result of the work of the com- 
 mission, some resolutions were deemed timely to 
 crystallize the general expression of this commission 
 which are herewith submitted. 
 
RESOLUTIONS 
 
 1. We recommend that the subject of 
 Rural Life be adequately presented at the 
 summer conferences and at state and county 
 conventions at other seasons of the year; 
 
 2. That courses In Rural Leadership be 
 adopted as part of our Bible study program; 
 
 3. That colleges, theological seminaries, 
 colleges of agriculture and normal schools 
 provide courses on Rural Life in their 
 curricula ; 
 
 4. That publishers of Sunday-school 
 literature be requested to make special pro- 
 vision for the needs of rural life; 
 
 5. That churches and other religious 
 organizations be urged to give attention to 
 the teaching of choral music through the use 
 of religious hymns and forms of martial 
 music in rural communities. 
 
 Signed, 
 
 T. N. Carver, 
 Edwin L. Earp, 
 
 M. A. HONLINE, 
 
 Charles O. Bemies, 
 D. C. Drew, 
 Henry Israel. 
 
DELEGATES TO THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 CONFERENCE, NOVEMBER 14, 1912 
 
 BALDWIN, B. J. Columbia University. 
 BOARDMAN, JOHN R. Good Will Home Association. 
 BRAUCHER, H. S. Secretary Playground and Recreation 
 
 Association of America. 
 BUCHMAN, FRANK N. D. . Pennsylvania State College 
 
 Young Men's Christian Association. 
 CARVER, DR. T. N. Department of Economics, Harvard 
 
 University. 
 COPELAND, C. M. Territorial Committee, Ontario and 
 
 Quebec. 
 
 DILLARD, DR. JAMES H. Russell Sage Foundation. 
 
 DOLE, ARTHUR A. Business America. 
 
 DYKEMA, PETER W. Ethical Culture School. 
 
 FELTON, RALPH A. Department of Church and Country 
 Life, Presbyterian Board of Home Missions. 
 
 GILBERT, J. L. Business America. 
 
 GOODMAN, FRED S. Religious Work Department, Inter- 
 national Committee of the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
 tions. 
 
 GRANGER, DR. W. A. President, Baptist Missionary Con- 
 vention of the State of New York. 
 
 HANMER, LEE F. Russell Sage Foundation, Division of 
 Recreation. 
 
 HAYS, HON. W. M. United States Department of Agriculture. 
 
 HERRING, REV. HUBERT C, D. D. Congregational Home 
 Missionary Society. 
 
 HONLINE, DR. M. A. Religious Work Department, Inter- 
 national Committee of Young Men's Christian Associations. 
 
 HOWARD, JOHN R., JR. General Secretary, Thomas Thomp- 
 son Trust. 
 
 JOHNSON. PROF. WM. H. Lincoln University. 
 
 LANGDON, WILLIAM C. Russell Sage Foundation. Writer 
 and Student of Pedagogy. 
 
 LATSHAW, DAVID G. Community Extension Department, 
 International Committee. ■■■■» 
 
 McALPINE, REV. CHARLES A. Baptist Missionary Con- 
 vention of the State of New York. 
 
 MANN, PROF. A., R. Secretary, Registrar and Professor of 
 Agricultural Editing, Cornell University. 
 
 MARLING, ALFRED E. Chairman of the International Com- 
 mittee. 
 
 MONAHAN, HON. ARTHUR C. Department of the Interior, 
 United States Bureau of Education. 
 
 MORGAN, E. L. Community Field Agent, Massachusetts 
 Agricultural College. 
 
 MORSE, H. N. Department of Church and Country Life, 
 Presbyterian Board of Home Missions. 
 
 MORSE, RICHARD C. General Secretary of the International 
 Committee. 
 
 MUNN, DR. JOHN F. Member of the International Committee. 
 
 NATSCH, HENRY. 
 
 PAYNE, BRUCE R. George Peabody College for Teachers. 
 
 RICE, DR. EDWIN WILBUR. American Sunday School 
 Union. 
 
168 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 ROSE, WICKLIFFE. Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, 
 Southern Education Board and the Peabody Education 
 Fund. 
 
 SANFORD, DR. E. B. Corresponding Secretary, Federal 
 Council of the Churches of Christ in America. 
 
 SETTLE, T. S. State Board of Education of Virginia. 
 
 STEINER, IVAN. Chilmark Farm, Ossining, N. Y. 
 
 STONE, HON. MASON S. State Superintendent of Educa- 
 tion, Vermont. , „. . 
 
 TAFT, MISS ANNA B. Assistant Department of Church and 
 Country Life of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions. 
 
 WELLS, REV. G. FREDERICK. Pastor of the Federated 
 Church, Tyringham, Mass. 
 
 WESTERVELT, FRANK. Reformed Church Sunday School, 
 Spring Valley, N. Y. . . . . , 
 
 WHEELER, R. W. Playground and Recreation Association of 
 
 America. 
 
 Theological Seminaries 
 
 BERG, PROF. J. FREDERIC. Theological Seminary of 
 Reformed Church. 
 
 BOYNTON, DR. C. H. Professor of Homiletics and Peda- 
 gogy, General Theological Seminary. 
 
 EARP, PROF. EDWIN L., Ph. D. Director Drew Theological 
 Seminary, Department of Sociology. 
 
 GEER, PROF. CURTIS M., Ph. D. Professor Hartford Theo- 
 logical Seminary. _ 
 
 FISKE, DR. G. WALTER. Junior Dean of Oberlm Theo- 
 logical Seminary. 
 
 FISMER, A. W., Ph. D. Professor of Practical Theology, 
 German Theological Seminary. _ . 
 
 GESNER, PROF. ANTON T. Professor Berkeley Divinity 
 School. 
 
 GREENE, PROF. WALTER L. Professor Alfred Theological 
 Seminary. 
 
 HORR, DR. GEORGE E. Newton Theological Institution. 
 
 LEWIS, DR. FRANK G. Crozer Theological Seminary. 
 
 MERRIAM, PROF. ALEXANDER R. Dean, Hartford Theo- 
 logical Seminary. 
 
 RAU, DR. ALBERT G. Moravian Theological Seminary. 
 
 ROCKWELL, PROF. WILLIAM W. Union Theological 
 Seminary. . „ . , 
 
 SNEATH, PROF. E. HERSHEY. Yale Divinity School. 
 
 STARRATT, PROF. FRANK A., D. D. Colgate Theological 
 Seminary. _ . , 
 
 WASHBURN, PROF. HENRY B. Episcopal Theological 
 School. . , „ , , 
 
 WOOD, JOHN A. Bible Teachers Training School. 
 
 Rural Pastors 
 
 AUGUSTINE, REV. R. H. M. Pastor Hanover, N. J., Pres- 
 byterian Church. ^, 
 
 BEMIES, REV. CHARLES O. Presbyterian Church, Mc- 
 Clelland town. Pa. .. _ . 
 
 BRAUNSTEIN, REV. RICHARD. Ashland Methodist Epis- 
 copal Church, Ashland, N. Y. 
 
 BROCK, REV. T. S. Burlington, N. J. ^ 
 
 CHAPMAN, EDWARD M. Old Lyme, Conn. 
 
DELEGATES TO THE CONFERENCE 169 
 
 DUMONT, REV. AND MRS. W. A. West Coxsackie, N. Y. 
 
 GILL, C. O. Hartland, Vermont. 
 
 HARRIS, REV. FRANK B. First Methodist Episcopal Church, 
 Delphi, N. Y. 
 
 LOOLOIAN, REV. M. H. First Presbyterian Church, Tan- 
 nersville, N. Y. 
 
 LYALL, REV. J. E. Millbrook Reformed Church, South Mill- 
 brook, N. Y. 
 
 PARKER, C. A. Hampton Falls, N. H. 
 
 TAYLOR, ^ CHARLES F. Second Congregational Church, 
 Greenwich, Conn. 
 
 WYCKOFF, REV. A. C. Reformed Church, Spring Valley, 
 N. Y. 
 
 County Work Delegates 
 
 BAXLEY, W. H. County Secretary, Young Men's Christian 
 Association of Westchester County, N. Y. 
 
 BROWN, JOHN, JR., M. D. County Work Secretary, Inter- 
 national Committee of Young Men's Christian Associations. 
 
 CAMPBELL, W. J. State County Work Secretary of Penn- 
 sylvania. 
 
 CONVERSE, H. B. Assistant County Secretary, Young Men's 
 Christian Association of Greene County, N. Y. 
 
 DAVIES, W. EDWARD. _ Assistant County Secretary, Young 
 Men's Christian Association of Windsor County, Vt. 
 
 DREW, D. C. State County Work Secretary of Massachusetts. 
 
 FREEMAN, F. B. State County Work Secretary of New 
 Hampshire. 
 
 GOLD, GUY D. 
 
 HATFIELD, C. C. County Work Secretary, International 
 Committee of Young Men's Christian Associations. 
 
 HILL, F. M. State County Work Secretary of New York. 
 
 HURD, ARCHIBALD C. County Secretary, Young Men's 
 Christian Association of Windsor County, Vt. 
 
 ISRAEL, HENRY. County Work Secretary^ International 
 Committee of Young Men's Christian Associations. 
 
 JORDAN, E. K. County Secretary, Young Men's Christian 
 Association of Dutchess County, N. Y. 
 
 JUDD, E. TAYLOR. County Secretary, Young Men's Chris- 
 tian Association, Monmouth County, N. J. 
 
 MAYDOLE, H. D. County Secretary, Young Men's Christian 
 Association, Camden County, N. J. 
 
 MORAN, J. S. 
 
 PIPHER, C. H. County Secretary, Young Men's Christian 
 Association, Delaware County, N. Y. 
 
 READ, OTIS B. County Secretary, Young Men's Christian 
 Association of Burlington County, N. J. 
 
 ROBERTS, ALBERT E. County Work Secretary, Inter- 
 national Committee of Young Men's Christian Associations. 
 
 SHAPLEIGH, F. E. 
 
 SMITH, HARRY HEDLEY. County Secretary, Young Men's 
 Christian Association of Gloucester County, N. J. 
 
 STONE, CARLOS H. Member of Orange County, N. Y., 
 Committee. 
 
 VAN VALKENBURGH, CYRUS W. Member of Greene 
 County, N. Y., Committee. 
 
 WILCOX, F. B. Member of Greene County, N. Y., Committee. 
 
 WILCOX^ Z. L. County Secretary, Young Men's Christian 
 Association of Orange County, N. Y. 
 
170 THE COUNTRY CHURCH 
 
 Young Women's Christian Association 
 
 ALLEN, MISS MARY LOUISE. Editor The Association 
 
 Monthly. 
 CHAPPEL, MISS NEVA. Secretary, N. E. Field Committee, 
 
 National Board. 
 HOLMQUIST, MISS LOUISE. Department Executive, 
 
 National Board. 
 ROELOFS, MISS HENRIETTA. Executive Secretary, 
 
 National Board. 
 SEABURG, MISS ANNA. Office Executive, National Board. 
 
 State Young Men's Christian Association 
 Secretaries 
 
 CLARK, BYRON N. State County Work Secretary of 
 
 Vermont. 
 COBURN, CHARLES A. State County Work Secretary of 
 
 New Jersey. 
 HEARNE, EDWARD W. Representing State Secretary of 
 
 Massachusetts and Rhode Island. 
 

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 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
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