246 AMERICAN FARMS. 



there were but 150,000 of the population of the State 

 who now attend any place of worship, whereas there are 

 183,000 who never go at all. Another says that a gen- 

 eration of infidels has been reared upon the hillsides of 

 New England, and that they are the worst heathen that 

 he has ever met with.' 



The Rev. Mr. J. S. Buckminster, in the first years of the 

 present century, or when the typical American farmer was 

 a most prominent figure in the affairs of that early period, 

 saw in those farmers the greatest spiritual hope of the 

 Commonwealth. He said : " No situation in life is so favor- 

 able to the establishment of habits of virtue, and powerful 

 sentiments of devotion, as a residence in the country, and 

 rural occupations. I am not speaking of a condition of 

 peasantry (of which, in this country, we know little) who 

 are mere vassals of an absent lord, or hired laborers of 

 an intendant, and who are therefore interested in nothing 

 but the regular receipt of their daily wages ; but I refer 

 to the honorable character of the owner of the soil, whose 

 comforts, whose weight in the community, and whose 

 very exist&nce depends upon his personal labors, and the 

 regular returns of the abundance from the soil he cul- 

 tivates. No man, one would think, would feel so sensibly 

 his immediate dependence upon God, as the husband- 

 man." In the American farmer of his day, he saw the 

 ideal farmer, in fact ; he saw in him the one in whom 

 religious character was of the most likely development 

 from the circumstance among others, that the nature of 

 agricultural pursuits, as he saw them in his time, '* does 

 not completely engross the attention as other occupa- 

 tions. Even then he saw the necessity of entreating the 

 city classes, few as they were then by comparison, to 



' Rev. Mr. Haynes. 



