RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE 121 



There are therefore strong a priori reasons 

 why the religious life of our villages should 

 flourish and abound. Nevertheless, few in- 

 deed are there of those who have lived in the 

 country parishes, few even of those who have 

 ministered in the Churches and Chapels, who 

 will not deplore the decadence of religious 

 faith and practice in rural England. 



Here and there are men and women of deep 

 piety, men and women whose first religious 

 impulse has come in most cases from the camp 

 meeting of the revivalist. These are the 

 successors of the early Methodists, who 

 gathered in their thousands on the open hill- 

 sides to drink in the gospel teachings of John 

 Wesley. Theirs is a religion which, narrow 

 and harsh in some respects, is yet an illumina- 

 tion. Their vision has transcended the out- 

 ward things of the moment, and embraced 

 the war of good and evil, the infinite mysteries 

 of sin and its redemption. These men and 

 women, however, are the exception. The 

 normal religious life of the rural world flows 

 in the two deeply cut channels of Church 

 and Chapel, channels whose courses have not 

 altered fundamentally since they were first 

 determined by the great controversies of the 

 seventeenth century. The division between 

 these is not confined to the sphere of religion ; 



