THE GOSPEL OF THE FARMERS' INSTITUTE WORK* 



Jaked Van Wagenen, Jr. 



Our Director is nothing if not ecclesiastical and since he has 

 given me an ecclesiastical topic, I presume it is to be treated in 

 an ecclesiastical way. 



So in good preacher fashion I may address you as " My dear 

 hearers " and may tell you that my discourse arranges itself 

 under four heads — to wit, The Work, The Man, his Message 

 and his People. 



The first is the institute work itself. Hear then a parable 

 from the book of Jonah, You will remember — some of you any- 

 way — how Jonah after many adventures came at last into ]N^ine- 

 veli and entered a day's journey into the city and lifted up his 

 voice and cried against it saying: "Yet forty days and Nineveh 

 shall be destroyed." And you will remember again how he went out 

 of the city to the eastward and built him a booth there and sat 

 down under the shade of it and watched the city to see it pass 

 away. And after he had looked a great wdiile and beheld the 

 city was not consumed, he was exceedingly wroth with himself 

 and with the Lord and said : " Did I not prophesy against this 

 city and said I not even thus and so against it wdiile I was yet in 

 my own country." Then the Lord said, " Shall I destroy this 

 great ISTineveh wdicrein are more than six score-thousand persons 

 who discern not their right hand from their left hand and also 

 much cattle." 



And Jonah after all was not so different in his viewpoint and 

 his philosophy from men in our time because they have watched 

 the institute work and have said : " Yet a year or two years per- 

 chance and it will surely die " — and they have possibly been filled 

 with indignation at the law-makers who have let it live. It is the 

 fashion in some quarters to speak condescendingly of the work as 

 a movement which has lost its value — as something which pos- 

 sibly had a place a generation ago but not now — a sort of vesti- 



* Address delivered at Ithaca. N. Y., INIarcli, 1913, at Conference and Din- 

 ner of Institute Workers. 



[1651] 



