PREFACE
This little book invites you to read it at a single sitting. If read later, a section at a time, in the light of the whole story, it will give you a better account of itself. It is, I frankly acknowledge, written out of emotion. It does not therefore, I fear, contain all the words it implies—half the time falling into symbols and incidents to force a meaning; half the time taking for granted that you do not care to open or close every side gate along the way.
The view of a layman, as this easily betrays itself to be, may prove something of a shock to the rank and file of the clergy; but it will serve, at least, to show that a section of laymen take religion more seriously after all than they do economics, which forms their daily adventure. Deep in our hearts, many of us know that business is the great masculine sport of the age; and in comparison, the rôle of the priest and pastor and the function of the church lie in the far different realm of the heroic. If I seem in this essay to expect too much of the church and too much of the preacher, my only apology is my inability to read into the Four Gospels, that stand on my desk along with the other tools of life and work, a philosophy of ease or of complacent laissez faire.
Although a confirmed lover of the country, the farm, the farmer and his children, I am none the less a firm believer in the city—its necessity, function, and destiny. Rural social welfare, as I see it, is of utmost concern to the American city. This is why empty churches along the countryside bring tragedy to city and country alike. This is why ecclesiastical statesmen should go to the country and see with their own eyes the havoc wrought upon the farmer’s family by competitive religion among Protestants.
And this is all the little book sets out to do—to take everybody to the rural communities with wide-open eyes, to see the empty churches, the children without God, the farm tenants without religion, the parsons on the run for the city, and the beginnings of a new type of rural church.
I wish gratefully to acknowledge my indebtedness in this essay to the staff of the Institute of Social and Religious Research, New York City, upon whose authoritative statements I have much relied. To the Curtis Publishing Company, Philadelphia, I desire to express appreciation for their kindness in allowing me to reproduce here materials which have appeared in “The Country Gentleman” during the past year.
March, 1925.