Part 9 (1/2)
Fingerposts of Children's Reading. Walter Taylor Field.
McClurg & Co. Gives extensive lists.
Books for Boys and Girls. Brooklyn Public Library, New York.
A carefully selected list of 1700 t.i.tles, 200 of them being especially marked for their value.
CHAPTER VII
_THE RURAL CHURCH AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE_
There was never a greater demand for efficient leaders.h.i.+p in the rural communities than there is to-day. The country has continued for many years past to become richer in farm products and equipment, but it has steadily grown poorer in social and spiritual values. In fact we have unconsciously acquired a distorted idea of values. Hogs are too high in proportion to boys. Beef cattle are absorbing too much interest in proportion to the time and money expended in perfecting the character of girls. It has long been the proud boast of the Middle Western states that they could feed the entire country. And we have continued so long in this way as now to regard big crops and the great abundance of farm animals and other such material possessions as ends in themselves. So it is high time that we ask ourselves what this material wealth is all for.
Looked at from at least one high vantage point, it may be properly regarded as so much enc.u.mbrance unless we shall be able to convert it into a means to some worthy and spiritual purpose.
DECADENCE OF RURAL LIFE
The open country in the Middle Western states has for some time been the breeding place for sterling manhood and ideal womanhood, and the recruiting ground wherefrom have been drawn many men and women to undertake the management of the larger enterprises of the country. The enforced self denial and discipline of work; the continued practice of quiet reflection; the comparative freedom from the evil and degrading influences peculiar to much of the child life in the cities; and many other character-building experiences could be set down on the favorable side of rural child-rearing in the past. But this situation is rapidly changing. The ten-year period just closing has witnessed a decadence of country life, the rural population actually showing a decrease. Large numbers of the best families have moved to the cities and towns, and their places on the farm have been taken by irresponsible laborers and transient renters.
Yes, the wealth of the rural community is still there, lying more or less dormant, and all the other means of a splendid civilization are there. But in the usual instance there is no one to a.s.sume the leaders.h.i.+p in bringing about the reconstruction of the rural life. Now that he has acc.u.mulated such an abundance of material things, the typical farmer needs to be shown how to deal more fairly and helpfully with the various members of his family. Some farmers' wives are gradually being dragged to death with the over-burden of work, which might be obviated if the farmer and his wife were both shown specifically a better way of getting things done. Many boys and girls growing up in the country are being cheated out of their natural heritage of good health, spontaneous play, and the joy of social intercourse, all because of the fact that farm products are too much regarded as an end rather than a means to the higher development of the members of the rural family. So a good soil and excellent crops are essentials for a substantial rural society, but they are not a certain evidence of such thing. It is possible to go into some of the country communities where these material things are acc.u.mulated in great abundance and yet find the people there living a little, mean, and narrow form of life, and that chiefly because they do not quite understand how to use the splendid means at hand in the accomplishment of some high and worthy purposes.
WORK FOR THE MINISTRY
And so we hereby issue a call and a challenge for workers to enter the great fallow field just named and make it blossom with new social and spiritual life. And it is the conviction of some that the ministers of the town and village churches can undertake this work much better than any other cla.s.s of persons, for they are already in many respects trained leaders. Let these ministers be provided if possible with an a.s.sistant, a layman it may be, for both their town and country work.
Then let each of them have a rural appointment to which they may go from one to four times each month; and, inspired by a vision of all the possibilities ahead of them and endued with divine power and guidance, enter earnestly into the great work of rehabilitating the country community. It is evident that the minister who will leave his town congregation with perhaps only one Sunday sermon and go to a country church and preach to the adults, and teach and lead the young, while his a.s.sistant takes charge of the second Sunday service at home--it is evident that such a minister will not only wear longer in the locality in which he is stationed, but that he will find in the rural work just mentioned such a flood of zeal and inspiration as will more than make up for and repay the effort. Many of the town ministers are preaching to audiences that are more or less irresponsive to what they have to say.
Under present conditions they are compelled to preach to the same audiences too much. Their sermons grow stale. But under the arrangement here recommended, such conditions would not obtain. They would come back from the rural appointment so laden with new ideas and ideals as to appear to the home congregation in a most advantageous light.
THE COUNTRY MINISTER
There is at present not a little promise that there may be developed throughout the country a new type of country-dwelling ministers. It is certainly a logical position for the effective religious worker to a.s.sume; namely, that of actually dwelling among those whom he is attempting to serve. He acquires an intimate knowledge of their problems, their point of view, including the status of their individual beliefs and prejudices.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VIII.
FIG. 8.--The fifty-year-old country church at Plainfield.
FIG. 9.--The new country church at Plainfield, Illinois, erected through the inspiration and leaders.h.i.+p of Reverend Matthew B. Mc.n.u.tt.]
As an example of what the country minister can achieve one needs to read an account of the splendid work of the Rev. Mathew B. Mc.n.u.tt of Plainfield, Illinois. Mr. Mc.n.u.tt was called to this charge in 1900 when a fresh graduate from a Presbyterian seminary. At the time of his call there was in the locality a small dead or nominal church members.h.i.+p and an occasional weak, ineffective service held in the little old church of fifty years' standing. This devoted and far-seeing man got down among the people with whom he settled, made a careful survey of the economic, the social, and the religious life of the place, and began his wonderful work of reconstructing all this. The ultimate purpose was the improvement of the spiritual well-being. He organized singing schools, granges, literary and debating societies, sewing societies, and clubs of various other sorts, all as a means of awakening the life of the community and bringing the people together in a spirit of mutual sympathy and helpfulness. After less than a decade of hard work a marvelous transformation of the rural life thereabout was achieved.
Among other notable changes was a new church to supplant the old one.
The new building was erected at a cash cost of ten thousand dollars; has an audience room seating five hundred or more, several Sunday school cla.s.s rooms, a choir room, a cloak room, a pastor's study and a mothers'
room, all on the main floor. In the bas.e.m.e.nt below there is a good kitchen, a dining room with equipment, also a furnace, a store room, and the like. The church members.h.i.+p has grown to one hundred sixty-three with many non-members attending, while the Sunday school enrollment increased to three hundred.
Now there are always a few minds who wish to measure all earthly things in terms of a money value. To such it may be shown that the land values in the vicinity of this new country church have gone up to a marked degree and that the economic conditions are all of a most satisfactory nature.
As further evidence of what a rural community working together may achieve for the spiritual welfare, there may be cited the instance of the little side station by the name of Ogden in Riley County, Kansas.