344 PRINCIPLES OF RURAL ECONOMICS 



pioneering churches have too generally followed the plan of 

 harvesting a membership by revivalistic methods and have 

 given too little attention to membership building. A certain 

 pioneer preacher, of picturesque fame, was once reported to 

 have opposed the education of men for the ministry on the 

 ground that there were plenty of well-educated men to be had, 

 and if the Lord wanted an educated minister all he needed to 

 do was to seize upon one of these educated sinners and shake 

 him over the pit until he came to his senses and agreed to 

 preach the gospel. Fortunately this argument did not prevail ; 

 but it has looked, at times, as though some of the more popular 

 churches have relied upon a similar policy for the recruiting of 

 their membership. They seem to have relied more upon the 

 making of converts from among mature reprobates than upon 

 the training of successive generations of boys and girls into 

 good, mutually helpful neighbors ; into productive, efficient, pros- 

 perous farmers ; in short, into good substantial citizens such as 

 build up a community, increase the productivity of its farms, 

 and make it a desirable place in which to live. 



However, things are improving in one respect at least, and 

 the pioneering stage of church activity is giving way to a more 

 permanent and constructive form of church activity. The tran- 

 sition period, however, is a critical one, and in many cases there 

 appears to be an inability on the part of the country church to 

 live through it. 



One serious danger, against which the warning cannot be 

 made too strong, is the snare of a sentimental type of spiritu- 

 ality, a kind of spirituality which wastes itself in mere aesthetic 

 or emotional enjoyment a kind of spiritual Sybaritism. The 

 church which yields to this temptation, and cultivates a form of 

 religious emotionalism as an end in itself, will fail ; and it will 

 deserve to fail because it will be of no use to its members or to 

 the world. The church which realizes that its spirituality must 



