48 KUKAL LIFE m CANADA 



with their lot and seek to escape it, with no fine aspira- 

 tion leading them to any other walk in life, there is an 

 absence of the moral incentives which made rural mor- 

 ality so splendid a thing in the past. 



There is the best of testimony to the existence of the 

 moral strain. Professor Giddings writes : " Degenera- 

 tion manifests itself in the protean forms of suicide, in- 

 sanity, crime and vice which abound in the highest 

 civilization where the tension of life is extreme, and in 

 those places from which civilization has ebbed away, 

 leaving a discouraged remnant to struggle against de- 

 teriorating conditions. . . . Like insanity, crime 

 occurs most frequently in densely populated towns on 

 the one hand, and on the other in partly deserted rural 

 districts.""* Dr. H. B. MacCauley, Secretary of the 

 Eastern Division of the Federal Council of the Churches 

 of Christ in America, says : " In my district of thirteen 

 States I have an opportunity of seeing the condition of 

 things in the country in a way that is very broad ; and I 

 am prepared to say that if there is a place anywhere 

 that needs the remedy which Jesus Christ alone can 

 give, that place is in the country."f 



In the connection that obtains between the church and 

 our problem there is a two-fold reference: the bearing 

 of the situation upon the church, and the relation of the 

 church to the problem. 



The bearing of the situation upon the church is mani- 

 fest. The church is sensitively sympathetic to every 

 vital experience of the community. The immediate re- 

 sult of depopulation is the loss of numbers to the church. 

 This has not as yet been proportionate to the decline in 



*F. H. Giddings, "Principles of Sociology," p. 348. 



t " The Rural Church and Community Betterment," p. 38. 



