Chapter 2

"Generally revivals occur as they have always done, about three times a year. At these services the method requires that exhorters should be present and perform. Several do so at the same time. The confusion is great but the people breathe an atmosphere that begins to infect them. Sooner or later weeping women are in the arms of some others' husbands begging them to come to the mourning bench. Young girls single out the boys that they like best and affectionately implore them to begin the Christian life. All the time the choir is singing a swinging revival hymn; the preacher is standing over his audience shouting 'Get busy, sinners,' and two or three boys are scurrying back and forth carrying water to the thirsty ones, while little groups of the faithful are hovering over a penitent, smothering sinner, trying to 'pull her through.' During this kind of a meeting which I attended at one time a woman 'got happy' and went around slapping everyone she could get her hand on, and skipping like a schoolgirl."

The pioneer church has not fully passed away. Its one doctrine and its one method have still a place in the more elaborate life of the modern church. Like the rum jug which is preserved for medicinal purposes, the revival has a use in the pathology of modern church life. The doctrine of personal salvation which is of chief concern, in the ministry to the adolescent population[4] of the modern church, is just as vital as ever; though it is not the only doctrine of the church of the husbandman, which has come in the country.

A relic of the pioneer days is the custom known as the "Group System." By this a preacher comes to a church once a month, or twice, and preaches a sermon, returning promptly to his distant place of residence. The early settlers of this country who originated this system were lonely and individualized. They believed that religion consisted in a mere message of salvation, so that all they required was to hear from a preacher once in a while.

But the districts in which the "Group System" is used have grown beyond this religious satisfaction and the "Group System" no longer renders adequate religious service. Religion has become a greater ministry than can be rendered in the form of a message, however well preached.

Like all outworn customs, this one breeds abuses as it grows older. Its value having passed away, it has forms of offensiveness. In sections of Missouri where the farmers are rich they say with contempt, "None of the ministers lives in the country." The "Group System," in a territory of Missouri comprising forty-one churches, organizes its forces as follows: these forty-one churches have nine ministers who live in five communities and go out two miles, ten miles, sometimes thirty miles, in various directions, for a fractional service to other communities than those in which they live. Each of the two big towns has more than one minister and none of the country churches has a pastor. Thus the value of the family life of the preacher is cancelled. After all this organization and division of the men into small fractions among the churches, there are sixteen of these churches which have neither pastor nor preacher.

This "Group System" can be improved, as is done in Tennessee, by the shortening of the journeys which must be made by the minister from his home to his preaching point. Nevertheless, it gives to the country community only a fraction of a man's time. He can interpret religion in only three ways; in the sermon, the funeral service and the wedding. Unfortunately mankind has to do many other things besides getting married, buried or preached at.

The country community needs a pastor. It is better for the minister who preaches to the country to live in the country. There are some parts which cannot support a pastor, but the minister to country churches should know the daily round of country life. Religion can never be embodied in a sermon; and when religion comes to be limited to a formal act it is tinged with suspicion in the eyes of most men. Sermons and funerals and weddings become to country people the windows by which religion flies out of the community. Especially among farmers, religion is a matter of every-day life. What religion the farmer has grows out of his yearly struggle with the soil and with the elements. His belief in God is a belief in Providence. His God is the creator of the sun and the seasons, the wind and the rain. The man who does not with him share these experiences cannot long interpret them for him in terms of scripture or of church.

The policy of the newer territories of the church must be to translate the "Group System" into pastorates. The long range group service should be transformed into short and compact group ministry; the pastor should live in the country community and the length of his journey should never be longer than his horse can drive. A group of churches which are not more than ten miles apart constitute a country parish. Some few active ministers are able to make thirty to forty miles on horseback on a Sunday, among a scattered people. This is well, but as soon as the railroad becomes an essential factor in the monthly visit of ministers to the country, religion passes out of that community.

The service of the country preacher, in other words, is essentially confined to the country community, and the bounds of the country community are determined by the length of the team haul or horseback ride to which that population is accustomed. Within these bounds religious life and expression are possible. Immersed in his own community, the life of the minister and of his family attain immediate religious value. The whole influence of the minister's home, the service of his wife to the people, which is often greater than his own, and the development of his children's life, these are all of religious use to his people.

A recent speaker upon this matter said, "I doubt if even the Lord Jesus Christ could have saved this world if he had come down to it only once in two weeks on Saturday and gone back on Monday morning."

The pastor, then, is the type of community builder needed in the country. The pastor works with a maximum of sincerity, while sincerity may in preaching be reduced to the lowest terms. He is in constant, intimate, personal contact. The preacher is dealing with theories and ideals not always rooted in local experiences. The pastor lives the life of the people. He is known to them and their lives are known to him. The preacher may perform his oratorical ministry through knowledge of populations long since dead and by description of foreign and alien countries. It is possible to preach acceptably about kingdoms that have not yet existed. But the work of a pastor is the development of ideals out of situations. It is his business to inspire the daily life of his people with high idealism and to construct those aspirations and imaginations out of the daily work of mankind, which are proper to that work and essential to that people.

An illustrious example of such ministry is that of John Frederick Oberlin,[5] whose pastorate at Waldersbach in the Vosges consisted of a service to his people in their every need, from the building of roads to the organization and teaching of schools. It would have been impossible for Oberlin to have served these people through preaching alone. Being a mature community, indeed old in suffering and in poverty, they needed the ministry of a pastor, and this service he rendered them in the immersion of his life with theirs, and the bearing of their burdens, even the most material and economic burden of the community, upon his shoulders.

The passing away of pioneer days discredits the ministry of mere preaching, through increasing variation of communities, families and individuals. The preacher's message is not widely varied. It is the interpreting of tradition, gospel and dogma. His sources can all be neatly arranged on a book shelf. One suspects that the greater the preacher, the fewer his books. On the contrary, the pastor's work is necessitated by growing differences of his people. He must be all things to many different kinds of men. In the country community this intimate intercourse and varying sympathy take him through a wider range of human experience than in a more classified community. He must plow with the plowman, and hunt with the hunter, and converse with the seamstress, be glad with the wedding company and bear the burden of sorrow in the day of death. Moreover, nobody outside a country community knows how far a family can go in the path to poverty and still live. No one knows how eccentric and peculiar, how reserved and whimsical the life of a household may be, in the country community, unless he has lived as neighbor and friend to such a household. The preacher cannot know this. Not all the experience of the world is written even in the Bible. The spirit shall "teach us things to come." It is the pastor who learns these things by his daily observation of the lives of men.

The communities themselves in the country differ widely, even in conformity to given types, and when all is said by the general student, the pastor has the knowledge of his own community. It belongs peculiarly to him. No one else can ever know it and there are no two communities alike. In the intense localism of a community, its religious history is hidden away and its future is involved. The man who shall touch the springs of the community's life must know these local conditions with the intimate detail which only he commands who daily goes up and down its paths. This man is the pastor. Except the country physician, no other living man is such an observer as he.

The end of the pioneer days means, therefore, to religious people, the establishment of the pastorate. The religious leader for the pioneer was the preacher, but the community which clings to preaching as a satisfactory and final religious ministry is retrograde. In this retarding of religious progress is the secret of the decline of many communities. The great work of ministering to them is in supplanting the preacher, who renders but a fractional service to the people, by a pastor whose preaching is an announcement of the varied ministry in which he serves as the curé of souls.

The pioneer days are gone. Only in the Southern Appalachian region are there arrested communities in which, in our time, the ways of our American ancestors are seen. The community builder cannot change the type of his people. He can only wait for the change, and enable his people to conform to the new type. For this process new industries, new ways of getting a living are necessary. The teacher or pastor can do something to guide his people in the selection of constructive instead of destructive industry.

In East Tennessee and in the mountain counties of North Carolina lumbering industries are for the time being employing the people. The result will be a deeper impoverishment; for the timber is the people's greatest source of actual and potential wealth. The leaders of the mountain people should teach reforestation with a view to maintaining the people's future wealth.

In a mountain county of Kentucky a minister seeing that his people needed a new economic life, before they could receive the religious life of the new type, organized an annual county fair. To this he brought, with the help of outside friends, a breed of hogs better than his mountain people knew. He cultivated competition in local industries, weaving and cooking; and started his people on the path of economic success of a new type.

In conclusion, the pioneer was individualistic and emotional. These traits were caused by his economic experience. While that experience lasted, he could be made no other sort of man than this. To this type his home and his business life and his church conformed. Within these characteristics the efficiency of his social life was to be found.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "The Agrarian Changes in the Middle West," by J. B. Ross, in American Journal of Economics, December, 1910.]

[Footnote 2: Rev. Norman C. Schenck.]

[Footnote 3: Rev. Norman C. Schenck.]

[Footnote 4: "Youth," by G. Stanley Hall.]

[Footnote 5: Story of John Frederick Oberlin by Augustus Field Beard, 1909.]

II

THE LAND FARMER

I shall use the term land farmer to describe the man who tilled the soil in all parts of the country after pioneer days. He is usually called simply the farmer. This is the type with which we are most familiar in our present day literature and in dramatic representations of the country. The land farmer, or farmer, is the typical countryman who in the Middle West about 1835 succeeded the pioneer, and about 1890 was followed by the exploiter of the land.

In the Eastern States pioneer days ended before 1835. The land farmer was the prevailing type throughout New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania as early as 1800. In the South the contemporary of the land farmer was the planter or slave holder. The modified type in the South was due to an economic difference. The labor problem was solved in the South by chattel slavery; in the North by the wage system. It is true that throughout much of the South the small farmer held his own. These men conformed to the type of the land farmer. But in the South they did not dominate social and political life as the slave holder did. In the Eastern States the whole social economy was, until a generation after the Civil War, dominated by the land farmer.

The characteristics of the land farmer are: first, his cultivation of the first values of the land. His order of life is characterized by initial utility. He lived in a time of plenty. The abundance of nature, which was to the pioneer a detriment, was to the land farmer a source of wealth. He tilled the soil and he cut the timber, he explored the earth for mines, seeking everywhere the first values of a virgin land. As these first values were exhausted, he moved on to new territories. All his ideas of social life were those of initial utility. The rich man was the standard and the admired citizen. The policies of government were dominated by the ideas of a land holding people. Individualism proceeded on radiating lines from any given center. The development of personality is the clue to the history of that period.

The second characteristic of the land farmer was his development of the family group. He differed from the pioneer, whose life was lonely and individual, in the perfection of group life in his period. He differs from the exploiter who succeeds him in the country today in the fact that exploitation has dissolved the family group. The experience of the land farmer compacted and perfected the household group in the country. The beginnings of this group life were in the pioneer period, but there was not peace in which the family could develop nor were there resources by which it could be endowed. The classic period of American home life is that of the land farmer. The typical American home, as it lives in sentiment, in literature and in idealism, is the home of the land farmer.

Third, the land farmer owned his home. He built upon his farm a homestead which in most cases represented his ideal of domestic and family comfort. He built for permanence. So far as his means permitted he provided for his children and for generations of descendants after them. He consecrated the soil to his people and to his name by setting apart a graveyard on his own land, and there he buried his dead.

Fourth, the land farmer had neighbors. His well-developed family group would not have been possible without other groups in the same community and the independence of the family group was relative, being perfected by imitation and economic competition. The land-farmer type came to maturity only when the whole of the land was possessed, when on every side the family group was confronted with other family groups, and neighborliness became universal. The family group is dependent through intermarriage and relationship upon other groups in the community. Family relationships thus came in the land-farmer communities to be very general. Some rough and crude forms of economic co-operation also grew up in this period, as modifications of the competition on which the land-farmer type is based.

"The farmer type produced a definite social life," says Prof. Ross. "The second period, extending from 1835 to 1890, had as its chief objective the enrichment of the group life."

Fifth, the land farmer competed, by group conflict, with his neighbors. Property was regarded by the land farmer as a family possession. Competition was between group and group, between household and household. The moral strength as well as the moral deficiencies of this type of man flow from this competition. He considered himself essentially bounden to the members of his own group by obligations and free from moral obligations to others. The son received no wages from his father for work on the farm and the daughter did not dream of pay or of an allowance for her labor in the house. The land farmer conceived of his estate as belonging to his family group and embodied in himself. Therefore he had no wage obligations to son or daughter and he felt himself obliged so to distribute his property as to care for all the members of his household. This economic competition compacted the family group and formed the basis for the social economy of the country community. The land farmer had no ideal of community prosperity. His thought for generations has been to make his own farm prosperous, to raise some crop that others shall not raise, to have a harvest that other men have not and to find a market which other men have not discovered, by which he and his farm and his group may prosper. It is hard to convince the land farmer, because of his immersion in this group conflict, that the farmer's prosperity is dependent upon the prosperity of other groups in the community.

The presence of the small group is the sign of normal social life. The group is not complete in itself, but is a unit in human association. So that the farmer economy had its social life and its own type of communities. The economy of the farmer period represents the ideals born in the pioneer nation. The community of the farmer is the destination of the life of the pioneer. The farmer still practises a variety of occupations. His tillage of the soil and his household economy are the most conservative in all American population. He uses modern machinery in the fields, but to a great degree his wife uses the old mechanisms in the kitchen and in the household. The laborers employed on the farm are received into the farmer's family under conditions of social equality. The man who is this year a laborer may in a decade be a farmer. The dignifying of personality with land ownership has been such a general social experience in the country that every individual is thought of in the farmer period as a potential landowner.

The institutions of the rural community of the land-farmer type are the country store, the rural school, and the church. The country store deals in general merchandise and is a natural outgrowth of the stores of the pioneer period in which barter constituted the whole of the commerce of the community. In the pioneer store but a few commodities were imported from the outer world. The greater part of the merchandise was made in the community and distributed in the store. But the farmer's rural economy is the dawning of the world economy and the general store in the farming community becomes an economic institution requiring great ability and centering in itself the forces of general as well as local economics.

The general storekeeper of this type in the country is at once a business man, a money lender, an employer of labor and the manager of the social center. He sells goods at a price so low as to maintain his local trade against outside competition. He loans money on mortgages throughout the community, and sells goods on credit. Judgment of men and of properties is so essential to his business that if he can not judiciously loan and give credit he cannot maintain a country store. Around his warm stove in the winter and at his door in summer gather the men of the community for discussion of politics, religion and social affairs. In addition to all else, he has been usually the postmaster of the community.

The one-room rural school which is the prevailing type throughout the country is a product of the land-farmer period. Its prevalence shows that we are still in land-farmer conditions: and the criticism to which it is now subjected indicates that we are conscious of a new epoch in rural life.

It fits well into the life of the land farmer because it gives obviously a mere hint of learning. It has been the boast of its advocates that it taught only the "three Rs." Its training for life is rudimentary only: it gives but an alphabet. The land farmer expected to live in his group. Secure in his own acres and believing himself "as good as anybody," he relied for his son and daughter not upon trained skill, but upon native abilities, sterling character, independence and industry. Of all these the household, not the school, is the source. So that the one-room country school was satisfactory to those who created it.

In another chapter the common schools are more fully discussed. Here it may be said only that the creation of such a system was an honor to any people. The farmers who out of a splendid idealism placed a schoolhouse at every cross roads, on every hilltop and in every mountain valley, exact a tribute of praise from their successors. The unit of measurement of the school district, on which this system was based, was the day's journey of a child six years of age. Two miles must be its longest radius. The generation who spanned this continent with the measure of an infant's pace, mapped the land into districts, erected houses at the centers, and employed teachers as the masters of learning for these little states, were men of statesmanlike power. The country school is a nobler monument of the land farmer than anything else he has done.

The rural "academy" was the most influential school of the land farmer's time. Situated at the center of leading communities, in New England, Pennsylvania and the older Eastern States, it was often under the control or the influence of the parish minister. It generally exerted a great influence for the building of the church and the community. Its teachers were men of scholarly ideals. Its students were from the locality, being selected by ambition for learning, and by their ability to pay the tuition.

The development of the high schools has generally resulted in the abandonment of the academies. A few have survived and have adapted themselves to new times. But it is to be doubted whether the common schools have so far done as much for building and for organizing country communities, for providing local leadership, for building churches, as did the rural academies of New England, Pennsylvania and other Eastern States.

The farmer's church is the classic American type of church at its best. The farming economy succeeded to the pioneer economy without serious break. The troubles of the country church have their beginnings in the period of the exploiter which is to follow, but the farmer developed the church of the pioneer with sympathy and consistency. The church of the farmer still values personal salvation above all. The revival methods and the simplicity of doctrine have remained, but the farmer has added typical methods of his own.