244 RURAL LIFE IN CANADA 



power of leadership. The whole people should 

 understand that it is vitally important to stand 

 behind the rural church and to help it to become 

 a great power in developing concrete country life 

 ideals. It is especially important that the country 

 church recognize that it has a social responsibility to the 

 entire community as well as a religious responsibility 

 to its own group of people. . . . Any consideration 

 of the problem of rural life that leaves out of account the 

 function and the possibilities of the church, and of re- 

 lated institutions, would be grossly inadequate. This is 

 not only because in the last analysis the country life 

 problem is a moral problem, or that in the best develop- 

 ment of the individual the great motives and results are 

 religious and spiritual, but because from the pure socio- 

 logical point of view the church is fundamentally a 

 necessary institution in country life. . . . This gives 

 the rural church a position of peculiar difficulty, and 

 one of unequalled opportunity. The time has arrived 

 when the church must take a larger leadership, both as 

 an institution and through its pastors, in the social re- 

 organization of country life."* 



It is manifest that there is a great movement in pro- 

 gress for rural betterment, and through movement and 

 need alike, a great call to the church. In Canada that 

 call is still more imperative. Our percentage of growth 

 in population is greater than that of the United States ; 

 theirs was 21 per cent, in the past decade ; ours 34. Our 

 percentage of immigration is greater; 31.9 against their 

 11.5 per cent. The urbanization of population is more 

 rapid with us ; their percentage of rural population has 



* Report of the Country Life Commission, pp. 17, 60. 



