THE COUNTRY CHIKCH PROGRAMME 171 



" Know your coinmunity '' must become the church's 

 watchword in social service in country as in city. If 

 it be profitable for husbandry to have experts testing 

 and suggestine: methods, may it not be more needfnl to 

 have efficiency studies of rural social and religious life? 

 The churches adopting this agency acknowledge in 

 doing so their past remissness. A recent typical 

 utterance runs : '' The Board of Home Missions 

 of the PresbN-terian Church in the United States of 

 America has been ministering to country parishes for 

 more than a century. It has sought farmers through 

 forests and across deserts. It has built innumerable 

 little white churches on the country crossroads for him 

 to worship in. It has baptized his childreu, taught 

 them, married them, and buried them. It has striven 

 to save his soul — striven earnestly and valiantly, some- 

 times heroically. But never until within this year has 

 it made a thorough, official and scientific study of the 

 country community it has attempted to serve. It has 

 done everything in its power to pave the farmer's road 

 to the celestial city, but it has paid little attention to 

 examining his road to the nearest village church. It 

 has given great sums to alleviate poverty, but given little 

 thought to the cau.ses that make for poverty — the 

 American system of farm tenantry, the robbing of soil 

 of it« fertility and stripping the hillside of its trees. 

 It has pictured the In-auty of the heavenly mansions 

 and taken no account of the buildings in which men and 

 women must spend their lives here an<l now. If has 

 \xH'n a faithful st<'ward in caring for the Klysiaii fields, 

 but it has allowed the riches of blue-grass and corn and 

 wheat-field to U' .xquandere*! with prodigal liiiinl. It 

 has made a glorious and imtiring fight to teach the chil- 



