THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES .-yl ' EDITED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA THE NEW HOME MISSIONS N. B. Special helps and denominational mission study literature for this course can be obtained by corresponding with the Secre- tary of your mission board or society. RKY. T. O. DOUC.LASS, OK IOWA Veteran home missionary statesman and administrator THE NEW HOME MISSIONS AN ACCOUNT OF THEIR SOCIAL REDIRECTION BY HARLAN PAUL DOUGLASS AUTHOR OF "CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTH" NEW YORK MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 1914 Copyright, 1914, by MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA ;BV TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER CONTENTS Preface xi I Home Missions as the Geographical Expansion of the # Church 3 II From Social By-product to Social Aim 31 cj III An Adequate Program for the Country 61 IV The City and the Stranger 93 5? V Social Knowledge and Social Justice 129 in VI A Social Restatement of Race Problems . . . . 157 o VII The Social Reaction of Home Missions upon the Church 191 VIII Social Realization of Christianity in America . . . 225 cJ Bibliography 251 Index 259 O O 00 ui ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Rev. T. O. Douglass Frontispiece Horse Power and Hand Power 12 The Itinerant 26 Rev. Peter Cartwright 32 A Strong Village Church 72 Le Moyne Institute, Memphis, Tennessee 82 Rural and Urban Population 94 Labor Temple 102 Bulletin-Board of a Down-Town Church, New York . . . 106 Total Immigration by Decades no Rev. Josiah Strong 132 A Group of Chinese Children, San Francisco 162 Young Men of a Japanese Mission, Portland, Oregon . . . 166 An Overchurched Rural Community 200 Rev. Charles L. Thompson 208 Secretarial Council on the Commission of the Church and Social Service of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America 216 PREFACE Home missions as understood by this book are a group of activities attempting to Christianize the United States, and carried on by the Churches as such. There are manifold other agencies working for the same end, but not ecclesiastically organized. Such are the great national non-sectarian allies of the Church like the Young Men's Christian Association; such are the multitudinous philanthropic agencies of general scope. These grow out of but do not di- rectly represent the Church. Home missions on the contrary are the churches themselves at their task of redeeming our nation. Home missions, again, operate as agencies of the churches collectively. This contrasts them with the activities of single parishes, which though similar are unrelated to each other. The home missionary units may be city, district, state, denomination, or nation, but they are always ecclesiastical group-activities car- ried on through agencies of which the Mission Board is the type. Naturally, agencies in which the churches act col- lectively will concern themselves primarily with gen- eral problems rather than local, and particularly with ri xii PREFACE problems of national significance and dimension. Most typically then home missions express the social and spiritual consciousness of the churches in matters of nation-wide concern which can best be handled col- lectively by churches acting in larger units, as when the board has some national responsibility for its denomination. All this is necessary for precision, but is simply a long way of saying that home missions mean very largely the Christian work of the denominational mis- sionary boards operating in the United States. The importance of discrimination within the realm of agencies operating for the redemption of America is seen at once when it is expressed in terms of the division of financial support. Thus the officially re- ported benevolent giving of a representative denomi- nation (apart from the home expenses of local par- ishes) approximates $2,400,000 annually. This total roughly divides as follows: To foreign missions carried on through general Church agencies 25 per cent. To home missions carried on through general Church agencies 25 per cent. To other benevolences under denominational aus- pices, chiefly local 25 per cent. To other than denominational benevolences 25 per cent. A book on home missions in the broadest sense might tell the story of the three fourths of the above total which is devoted to the redemption of our own country. In the narrowest sense it would have to PREFACE xui confine itself to the one fourth which is officially rec- ognized as the work of boards of general jurisdiction. As a matter of fact this book takes a middle course. It is not confined strictly to the activities of mission- ary boards, but considers them in connection with the large movement of the social application of Chris- tianity as inspired and in the general sense directed by the Church. On the other hand, it does not pre- sume to claim for home missions as such the vast social consequences of American Christianity. The seepage and flow of the Christian spirit through the underground crevices and channels of society is beyond charting or measurement. Home missions name a particular set of pumps and engines, which raise and distribute this flow through a particular sys- tem of pipes and sluices upon particular areas, using a technical, intensive method. They do not convey all the water which gets to these particular areas. Some rains down out of the general atmosphere of Ameri- can Christianity ; other is pulled up by capillarity and its moisture conserved at the surface by methods of moral cultivation of which home missions are only one. Once its flow is turned upon the land it mixes immediately with all the waters. The harvest is the result of all the forces operating. Home missions are thus but part of a greater proc- ess and this is the assurance of their success. We may, however, note their precise methods and areas, and the superiorities of results where the social spirit is directed by home missions over those which depend 3dv PREFACE on the meteorological accident of Christianity as the general moral climate of America. Certain crops grow only under missionary irrigation and the yield is always greater for all crops when home missions assist in their cultivation. In other words, home mis- sions are an efficient and dependable process of social salvation in which the social spirit has become definite, purposeful, adaptive, and accurate. Not only does this book not confine itself to the social service activities of the home missionary agen- cies as such, but it is not primarily concerned with activities at all. It does not so much treat of the new things which are being done as the expression of the social spirit, as of the new spirit in which all things are being done. Its deepest interest is in ten- dencies and their interpretation, not in describing par- ticular facts. Consequently it omits from formal treat- ment a great many interesting and important phases of social home missions. Only enough are introduced reasonably to illustrate and amplify the general move- ment in its chief fields of expression. Finally, the book strives to give a unified impres- sion of the great process whereby home missions are being made over again inwardly without interference with their old functions. This is the most marvelous aspect of their social redirection. It is like the building of the new Grand Central Station in New York City. Its miracle is not that it finally stands complete a gigantic feat of engineering and archi- tecture but that it was built without interruption of PREFACE xv traffic. On this spot stood a vast material creation do- ing a million-handed work of moving human beings and goods. Now its place has been taken by a ten times vaster one different in every detail. There was a new motive power, electricity; a new social tech- nique of admitting and discharging the human ebb and flow of a metropolis; new problems of subter- ranean engineering, and new ideals of civic beauty. All these were wrought into this mighty pile through a series of years yet all the while its trains kept run- ning. In and out they dodged and twisted, hundreds upon hundreds every day, and day after day, past stone heap and under massive girder, not without makeshift and inconvenience, but always on the tracks. The station kept on serving while experiencing com- plete reconstruction. It was the Grand Central all the time from old to new. This same fact of radical transformation without interruption of traffic is the clue to the home missionary story as the following pages try to tell it. The old home missions have be- come the new home missions and the work has gone right on. New York, N. Y., June 3, 1914. HARLAN PAUL DOUGLASS. HOME MISSIONS AS THE GEOGRAPHICAL EXPANSION OF THE CHURCH CHAPTER I HOME MISSIONS AS THE GEOGRAPHICAL EXPAN- SION OF THE CHURCH "The Regions Beyond." Some thirty years ago a child was growing up in a minister's home of the Mis- sissippi Valley into some such understanding as this : Home Missions are a process which begins in New England and ends in the "regions beyond." Here we are in the Central West ; a little while ago our church was receiving missionary aid ; that is, somebody "back East" sent money through the board to help pay the preacher's salary. We tried as hard as we could to come to "self-support" in order that people "back East" might be free to send more of their money to the "regions beyond." After a little our state would be able to help all the weak churches in it, and the people "back East" might send all their money to the "regions beyond." Later we ourselves would be send- ing money to the "regions beyond." Then the regions just beyond would doubtless repeat the process. Finally the church and Sunday-school would be every- where and presumably the job would be done. Expansion Westward. Now this child's naive under- standing of the "regions beyond" scarcely escaped be- 3 4 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS ing profound, for the consciousness of them was the clue to his nation's history of that time. Home mis- sions were an aspect of national expansion westward. They were the religious version of the geographical occupancy of the continent. They were migrant Chris- tianity ever camping on the trail of empire and con- quering for ideals what the pioneer conquered for the nation ; redeeming from materialism and vice what he redeemed from forest, swamp, empty prairie, and roving savage. Significance of the West. The West was a state of society, not an area. It was the bending of old insti- tutions and ideals under the influences of free land, the remolding of habits by free environment. It was the breaking up of custom and its reestablishment with a difference. The West was not the frontier, but rather the chaotic state left just behind an ever-retiring frontier and the effort to organize it. As fast as this was done the West passed on, leaving a belt of population suddenly aged and like older parts of the nation; yet always leaving also an ampler and freer spirit. Thus "decade after decade, West after West, this rebirth of American society has gone on, has left its traces behind it and has reacted on the East." l Less by imitation than by domination and free adapta- tion, the West has been assimilated to the nation and assimilated the nation to itself. Landmarks of Western Expansion. It will be a sufficient initial background for our study of the home 1 Turner, "Problem of the West," Atlantic Monthly, 78: p. 289. MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH 5 missionary movement, to recall the chief landmarks of westward expansion before 1830; (i ) the organiza- tion of the national domain west to the Mississippi under the ordinance of 1787, and its vast enlargement by the Louisiana purchase (1803) and the Florida purchase (1819); (2) the westward movement of population which increased the scarce 100,000 people of the trans- Alleghany states of 1790 to over three and a half million by 1830, making them a large quar- ter of the nation and giving Ohio alone more people than Massachusetts and Connecticut combined; (3) the pressing back of the Indians by war and treaty and the facilitation of settlement by the building of roads and waterways, by the use of the steamboat on west- ern rivers, the opening of the Erie Canal and by the liberal land policy of the government; and (4) the admission of states, Kentucky 1792, Tennessee 1796, Ohio 1803, Louisiana 1812, Indiana 1816, Mississippi 1817, Illinois 1818, Alabama 1819, and Missouri 1821. The Crucial Dates. Between 1830 and 1835 a re- markable group of forces came to focus. The West of that time was politically in the saddle through the election of Andrew Jackson as President; the first rail- road was building; settlement had touched the Missis- sippi River in the Northwest ; the Webster-Hayne de- bates had formulated the sectional policies of the North and South; the agricultural differentiation of the Northwest from the empire of cotton was estab- lished; prairie farming and the agricultural revolu- 6 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS tion in the North through machinery were just at hand; and the definite reservation of the whole na- tional domain for the genuine settler scarcely a dec- ade away. Finally the era of actual colonization in the Pacific Northwest was beginning, and with it the consciousness that the entire continent was destined to be covered by American homes. 1 These mighty and all but coincident changes mark the period after 1835 as essentially different from the preceding one. Two Phases. This date divides also the two eras of the older home missions. Since the West was never long in one place and since the later West enjoyed the results of advancing civilization, and could now attack the wilderness with machinery rather than with the ax; and since it shared the development of the nation, particularly in its diverse sectional evolu- tion, religious evolution naturally divides into two phases: (i) a preliminary or pioneer phase com- pleted while the frontier was still substantially homo- geneous, and (2) a characteristic phase in which home missions minister to the home-making and com- munity-building farmer. His type, moreover, subdi- vides with the economic and sectional diversification of American life. Preliminary Phase. The object of the preliminary home missions was the pioneer; their agent, the it- inerant preacher ; their method, the revival. The pio- neer was a man who attempted single-handed or in small groups the conquest of the Western wilderness 1 Schaf er, History of Pacific Northwest, 145. MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH 7 a task which could only be accomplished thoroughly and finally by a considerable population using ma- chinery and advanced organization. A Surviving Pioneer. One understands him best by going to see him. One finds him persisting in the Southern Appalachian or the Ozark highlands. There one may visit one of his "contemporary ancestors" a farmer, he calls himself. He lives in a log cabin in a clearing of perhaps two acres on a stony Ozark hillside. His equipment consists of a hoe, an ax, and a gun. He owns no work animal, possesses no farming implements, farms without wheels. Forest and stream still help largely to furnish his larder. With his ax he clears his land, builds his house, and makes most of its meager furniture. A hundred years ago thousands of men like this one thronged the Na- tional Highway from Pennsylvania westward, goods packed on horseback or drawn in a single cart, and stopped where a wheel broke or a horse died; while the better-provisioned pressed on toward the sunset in their heavy canvas-covered wagons drawn by four or six horses. * With many pioneering became a habit. They could not breathe with the smoke of another's house in sight and so pressed ever west- ward, the advance couriers of a civilization which they abhorred. Pioneer Traits. The struggle with the wilderness wrought into the earlier pioneer's mind a set of dis- tinctive characteristics which have often been de- 1 Turner, Rise of the New West, 80. 8 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS scribed. Lonely and out of touch with society, com- pelled to be sufficient unto himself for such rude sub- sistence as he could get, he lost capacity for group action and became an extreme individualist. Away from books and culture and with no one to enforce moral demands upon him, he became rude and wild; resentful, when society again caught up with him, of all interference with his actions. He took the law into his own hands or rather kept it there. He re- verted in the direction of the Indian with wkom he fought, and from whom he learned. The perils of the wilderness and the savage forced his life against a background of fear. The frontier got on his nerves and he became excitable, reckless. Whisky became his passion, solace, and inspiration. His religious restraint gradually fell from him, and he became wildly emotional in religion. Its fires flared fitfully under the exhortation of the itinerant preacher and blazed out in the great revival of 1800. The Early Revival. This frontier revival made a temporary social impression by achieving like-mind- edness in a highly individualistic population. It got their common response to the motive of fear. The Indian had already forced the pioneer to occasional cooperation. The terrors of hell and of the Indian became the chief socializing forces of the frontier. Of institutional strength the early revival had noth- ing. It lacked constructive social principles and in its inevitable reaction seemed destructive to the more stable types of religious organization. But it held MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH g the frontier for the gospel till other forces and better motives could appear. How Religion Spread. Religion in the earliest West was propagated with very little ecclesiastical guidance. To be sure Methodism was already follow- ing its high instinct as essentially a missionary sys- tem; and the Methodist was everywhere along the frontier. But so was the Baptist, who multiplied without the slightest church machinery. The first praise thus belongs to men of religion lay preachers largely who were of the Western movement itself, who incarnated its motives, took its risks, lived as their neighbors did, preached under responsibility to the Lord alone, and who made faith in its rude forms in- digenous to the frontier. The missionary found and shepherded these men but the Lord created them. A Famous Missionary Survey. How frontier re- ligious conditions looked to the eyes of the older sea- board states appears in Mills and Schermerhorn's fa- mous report of their tour of missionary exploration in 1813. Sent out by the Massachusetts and Connecti- cut Missionary Societies they crossed the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania, passed through what is now West Virginia and the Western Reserve of Ohio, traversed Kentucky and Tennessee, traveled with Jackson's troops to Natchez, thence reached New Orleans by flatboat. They found Presbyterian ministers chiefly settled in the towns, supporting themselves by school- teaching or vocations other than the ministry. Such few missionaries as the General Assembly and Cum- io THE NEW HOME MISSIONS berland Presbytery had were sent out for periods of six or eight weeks only, and their fruits fell to the Methodists and Baptists. Everywhere they reported most appalling religious destitution. As we would put it to-day, Christianity was neither numerically strong nor socially effective. What they chiefly cata- loged were the vices of the frontier the profanity and Sabbath-breaking of Ohio; horse-racing, dueling, and gambling in Kentucky and Tennessee. They found no Bibles in Louisiana, and to their Puritan minds New Orleans was a city of unparalleled wicked- ness. More sin, they reported, was committed there on Sunday than in all the rest of the week. They were shrewd enough, also, to discern beneath some of the sectarian vagaries of the frontier the mental quirks of their own New England. Their report con- stitutes the first original, comprehensive, and states- manlike home missionary survey of Western conditions ever attempted. The First Boards. Behind Mills and Schetmer- horn stood a group of agencies which first conceived home missions as a general, organized, and permanent method and enterprise of national evangelization. Nat- urally they represented the more developed and com- mercial sections of the nation, specifically New Eng- land and the middle states. Denominationally they were Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Dutch Reformed. Almost simultaneously, about the begin- ning of the nineteenth century, these churches organ- ized home missionary movements, sometimes under MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH 11 state designations, but substantially with like intent, to follow the frontier with the institutions of religion. By 1826 the strongest of these agencies, the Con- necticut Missionary Society, had sent out 200 mis- sionaries and organized 400 Presbyterian and Con- gregational churches. The characteristic method was that of somewhat transient service, the missionary laboring briefly in a given community, then pressing on to preach to others. Essentially the same method was more systematically employed in the early Metho- dist itinerancy. Fundamentally it was not a matter of denominational polity but simply the inevitable method of the first frontier. From Forest to Prairie. By 1830 the "conquest of the great forest" which covered the eastern third of the continent was completed, and settlement was just venturing upon the vast prairies of the Mississippi Valley. So long as pioneering was done in the forest it remained substantially the same as it had been in the colonial period. Upon the prairies it took new forms, was reen forced by new resources, and was followed by that characteristic phase of home missions comprehended within the experience of the middle- aged of the present generation. The Second Phase of Home Missions. In contrast with the preliminary phase of home missions for the pioneer, this second and characteristic phase had for its object the farmer, and for its method the com- munity church with its settled pastor. It dates roughly from 1835 to 1890. Of course there were farmers 12 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS before 1835. Though the earlier settlement of the West had attracted diverse elements, the actual home- seeker had always been in the majority. But the con- quest of the entire continent had not yet become the objective of American religion which it was from De Tocqueville's time on, and the farmer was not yet the conscious agent of national expansion. This came coincidentally with an agricultural revolution the like of which the world has never seen. From Hand to Horse Power. "In 1833 practically all the work of the farm except plowing and harrow- ing was done by hand. Though there had been minor improvements in hand tools, and considerable improve- ment in live stock and crops, particularly in Europe, yet it is safe to say that, so far as the general character of the work actually performed by the farmer was concerned, there had been practically no change for 4,000 years. Small grain was still sown broadcast, and reaped either with a cradle or the still more primitive sickle. . . . Grain was still thrashed with a flail in 1833, or trodden out by horses and oxen, as it had been in ancient Egypt or Babylonia. Hay was mown with a scythe and raked and pitched by hand. Corn was planted and covered by hand and cultivated with a hoe. By 1866 every one of these operations was done by machinery driven by horse-power, except in the more backward sections of the country." * It was in men thus suddenly equipped with new imple- ments of conquest, and reen forced by a more favorable 1 Carver, Principles of Rural Economics, 84, 85. HORSE POWER AND HAND POWER MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH 13 public land policy and by the railroad, that the passion to subdue nature flamed out into the vision of the "nation's continental destiny." Shrewd, bold, and in the end grasping, the farmer hastened across the prairies to seize all the natural wealth of America that could be seized by men working with horse-power in family groups. He became the central figure of our history for more than a half -century. The Farmer. Agriculture is essentially a domestic industry. Unlike business or manufacturing, it is car- ried on at home and its work shared by all the mem- bers of a family. The head of the family is self-em- ployed. He takes orders and receives wages from no man. He thinks of himself and makes others think of him as independent. His relations with others outside of the family group reflect this independence. He owes them nothing beyond the simple duties of neigh- borliness. Unlike the pioneer, however, he has neigh- bors and lives in permanent communities within driv- ing distance of the country store, school, and church. But social development stops here. Most of the rela- tions between farmer families are competitive. As landowners, or potential landowners, they feel their essential equality and do not realize their poverty in the more intricate social ties. This generalized state- ment does not fit all farmers, but it fairly pictures the type, The Church of the Farmer. The farmer's religion reflects his character. It is individualistic, centering in personal salvation. It is conservative, seeking to 14 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS protect the family group from disintegrating vice and to conserve the virtues of thrift and purity. It warns therefore against gambling as the enemy of thrift, and intemperance as the enemy of the home. The farmer seated his church with family pews, but saw no ob- jection to dividing the community between many churches if the interests of personal salvation were only provided for. He continued but toned down the pioneer's revival, and added the peculiar institutions of the family group, the Sunday-school, and the prayer-meeting. He tended to have a settled pastor, frequently himself a farmer. He received missionary aid and learned traditionally to contribute to missions. And his women organized sewing circles. Appropriate Missionary Methods. As the farmer appeared in the older states, the existing home mission agencies began to sense his peculiar needs and vision as contrasted with those of the pioneer, and to provide for them. Thus in 1825 a senior in Andover Theo- logical Seminary, Andover, Massachusetts, reading an essay before the student Society of Inquiry said: "We want a system that shall be one one in purpose and one in action a system aiming, not at itinerant missionaries alone, but at planting, in every little com- munity that is rising up, men of learning and influ- ence, to impress their character upon these communi- ties a system, in short, that shall gather the re- sources of philanthropy, patriotism, and Christian sympathy throughout our country into one vast reser- MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH 15 voir from which a stream shall flow to Georgia and to Louisiana, to Missouri and to Maine." l Organization with National Vision. This was symp- tomatic of the growing appreciation of changed con- ditions, which issued in 1826 in the organization of the American Home Missionary Society, with the pro- gram of establishing a permanent ministry throughout the West under "national direction." Its organizers were 126 delegates representing thirteen states and denominationally divided between the Presbyterian, Congregational, Reformed, and Associate Reformed bodies. Not only does it mark the beginning of mis- sions as a comprehensive national enterprise, but it undertook the task with surprising disregard for sec- tarian considerations in the broadest spirit of Chris- tian statesmanship. Action and Reaction. Its more intimate motive re- peatedly shines through the routine of frontier preach- ers' reports as spread on the pages of the missionary magazines of the day : Our own children have moved to the wicked and careless West. We must hasten to provide them with the same religious environment that they had back home. Socially interpreted, the oft-cataloged sins of the West were just the abandon- ment of the old religious habits. With this clue to duty home missions as originating in the East were rather anxiously conservative than consciously alert to lay hold of the new moral forces which were wak- ing in the West, or to direct their positive destinies. * Quoted by Joseph B. Dark, Leavening the Nation, 60, 61. 16 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS Repeatedly the men at the front had to agonize with their Eastern backers to get them to understand the socially formative significance of the Western churches. Home missionary vision grew as some of the West- erners themselves came to occupy the directing seats of the national organization. And throughout their characteristic period the most fruitful and innovating of home missionary ideas sprang from missionary ground. By this give and take process home missions became balanced and nationalized instead of being merely the religious subjection of one section to an- other. General Tendencies and Differences. The limits of this chapter do not permit detailed narration of specific denominational movements in home missions. Certain general ecclesiastical and sectional differences however require pointing out as essential to social interpretation. Church Polity and Missionary Organization. First, strongly organized Churches did not find the same need of separate and specific home missionary or- ganization as did those of weaker polities. It was very easy for those who shared some form of episco- pal organization to discover that the Church itself was a missionary agency. This principle was an- nounced in almost identical language by the Metho- dists * in 1820 and the Episcopalians 2 in 1835. On the other hand denominations of congregational pol- 1 Buckley, Methodism, 650. *Burleson, The Conquest of the Continent, 48. MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH 17 ity had no ecclesiastical agencies to do the collective work of the churches and were therefore compelled to create voluntary societies. Since these and the kindred boards of the Presbyterian bodies bore the name of "home missionary" and created separate his- tories, it is much easier to trace and judge their work than that of denominations in which home missions form a more integral part of ecclesiastical develop- ment. The home missionary movement, therefore, was far broader than the home missionary name, and justice requires that this be remembered in estimating the contributions of the several Churches to it. The Denominations and the People. Second, the denominational results of home missions were largely conditioned by the character of the population emi- grating by successive waves to the West. The pio- neers who conquered the great forest before 1835 were predominantly Southern. Evicted from the sea- board states through the invasion of their inland coun- tries by the cotton kingdom with its slave-economy, "the free farmers were obliged either to change to the plantation economy and buy slaves, or to sell their lands and migrate. Large numbers of them, particu- larly in the Carolinas, were Quakers or Baptists, whose religious scruples combined with their agricultural habits to make this change obnoxious. This upland country was a hive from which pioneers earlier passed into Kentucky and Tennessee. Now the exodus was increased by this later colonization. The Ohio was crossed, the Missouri ascended, and the streams that 18 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS flowed to the Gulf were followed by movers away from the regions that were undergoing this social and economic reconstruction." 1 Settlers from the South. Even in Ohio which was first settled by New England colonies the Yankee was soon distanced, and the Southerner crowded close upon the emigrant from the nearer middle states. "The Illinois legislature for 1833 contained fifty-eight from the South (including Kentucky and Tennessee), nineteen from the middle states, and only four from New England. Missouri's population was chiefly Ken- tuckians and Tennesseeans. ... It was the poorer whites, the more democratic, non-slaveholding element of the South, which furnished the great bulk of the settlers north of the Ohio." 2 With the spread of this population went the expansion of its familiar churches, those which had attached themselves to it and ex- pressed its pioneer moods in the Southern uplands. This means that in its raw bulk the human material of the West was chiefly Methodist and Baptist not by reason of the peculiar polity of either denomina- tion, for they were diametrically opposed but by virtue of their previous relation to and affinity for the population. Two Dominating Types. Third, the social organi- zation of the Western population was largely the work of two highly specialized types, the Scotch-Irish and the Yankee. The Scotch-Irishman was the natural * Turner, Rise of the New West, 54, 55. 'Ibid., 77- MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH 19 leader of the pioneer days and the peculiar conqueror of the forest for social institutions. He was individu- alist of individualists in his Calvinism yet his clan spirit was stronger than this theology and he migrated in patriarchal bands. The movement of such a band from Tennessee to Illinois in 1816 is typical. A Scotch-Irish Church. "They had enjoyed in some measure the ministry of the famous Dr. Gideon Black- burn of Nashville. Nearly all the adults of it were members of the church; and every morning and eve- ning on the way they had family worship, Grandfather McCord, the patriarch and lay preacher, usually con- ducting the service. After reaching the borders of Illinois they began to look for a suitable place for settlement, but they journeyed on and on until they reached the heart of the territory and were crossing streams which made their way westward to the Mis- sissippi River. Finally one morning the old patriarch, looking out from his encampment upon a broad prairie, dotted with groves, and evidently supplied with liv- ing streams, said: 'This shall be our place of rest; and Bethel shall be its name,' and Bethel was the name of the place for many years, and it is the Bethel Church to this day. . . . Their house of worship in 1827 was a log cabin, in size twenty by twenty-five feet. The pulpit was a box made of split clapboards. The house was seated very well, for the time. A seat made of split puncheons or slabs was in those days considered quite comfortable. Then, in the winter, that the house might be warm enough for pioneers, a 20 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS plan was adopted that would freeze out any modern congregation, but which in those days answered a very good purpose. A space about six feet in diame- ter, right in the middle of the house, was left without flooring, securing thus an earthen hearth ; a bushel or two of charcoal was laid there and set on fire. This made the house quite comfortable on cold days." l At the end of thirty years members of the Bethel Church swarmed to a new location in southern Wisconsin fifteen being transferred in a single year. Here in a more mixed community they still responded to the patriarchal leadership of one of the McCord stock, and expressed marked clan-cohesion for another gen- eration. Fitness for Community Leadership. This capac- ity for bringing forth strong and compelling com- munity leaders and for establishing social and spiritual permanence around them was the Scotch-Irishman's immense gift to the West. It is more than half of the secret of the staunchness and dependability of the Presbyterian Church to which he traditionally be- longed. And as Dr. Warren H. Wilson has shown, it made him the typical farmer of the older period. The Yankee. Still more potent for social organiza- tion was the New England migration. The New Eng- lander came late upon the Western scene. After its first expansion into western New York and Ohio immediately after the Revolution, this section had been busy with fisheries, had developed extraordinary 1 T. O. Douglass, Autobiography, 9-14. MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH 21 commercial activity, and had successfully used its surplus population in establishing infant manufac- tures. But after the destruction of the carrying trade by the war of 1812 and especially after the completion of the Erie Canal, the Yankee swarmed westward, bringing culture and capital, a developed institutional sense and a machinery of social life which no other section or stock possessed. His advantage in these respects rested back upon his distinctive system of original land tenure. Land, Town, and Church. "In the early days in New England it was not customary to make grants of land directly to individual settlers. . . . The ear- lier towns were practically settled as church commu- nities ; that is to say, the formation of a town amounted practically to the organization of a church congrega- tion and then settling as a congregation upon a tract of land and calling it a town. When a town was settled, all members who were admitted to citizenship were given grants of land." * Community Life and Moral Discipline. Upon this basis of landholding New England developed two dominant traits which by 1830 had become its dis- tinctive marks, namely, its community life and its moral discipline. Observers from other sections were impressed by its "clustering of habitations in vil- lages," its spires of white churches marking to the eye each separate hamlet, its comfort and thrift. They were not slow, also, to sense and often to resent that 1 Carver, Principles of Rural Economics, 66. 22 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS focusing of moral sentiment upon individual conduct which made every man his brother's keeper. The Schoolmaster of the Frontier. In his most typical migration the New Englander picked up his church and community organization bodily and set them down in the midst of the wilderness intact. He expanded his idea of moral discipline till he became his brother's keeper at large in the New West, its school- master and moral reformer, and he backed and financed this tendency through the national missionary societies of which he was the chief projector. States whose original population was predominantly South- ern took the social stamp of New England and succes- sively called themselves the "Massachusetts of the West." Laws, institutions, and ideals were made by this aggressive Yankee minority. To-day the typical church of New England, the Congregational, is numer- ically and sometimes even relatively stronger in the Western states, which were socially organized by New England, than in New England itself. Sectionalism. Fourth, the development of diverse agricultural economies by the North and the South, which were at the roots of their social and political sectionalism, ultimately directed the westward move- ment of home missions into parallel streams which remained separate throughout the period and until increasingly reunited by the newer social aspects of their tasks. West versus East. The earliest sectional feeling was that of West versus East, as if Mason and Dixon's MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH 23 line were stood on end. The whole frontier, from North to South, was essentially a unit against the older seaboard states or sections. This sectionalism was acutely evidenced first within certain states, for example, in the struggle for political ascendency be- tween the tidewater and the upland sections in Vir- ginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. 1 Each of these states was sharply divided by nature into two agricul- tural provinces: the coastal plain, with its plantation system, based on slavery ; and the forested mountains, fit only for frugal pioneer farming. Between them lay the piedmont, a debatable ground. King Cotton. The story of the enormous economic effects of the cotton industry, after the invention of Whitney's gin, is familiar. Already in 1818 it had made the exports of South Carolina and Georgia worth half as much as those of all the rest of the nation. Cotton increased its average sixfold between 1830 and 1860. It invaded first the interior valleys and more accessible uplands, driving the Southern small farmer into the mountains and beyond, and as we have seen, increasingly north of the Ohio river. Against his single-handed opposition and even against the stubborn clan-economy of the Scotch-Irish the plantation system was victorious. The plantation was a little world in itself with its self-contained econ- omy; its grouping of slave cabins around the "great house"; its industrial discipline; its division of labor between skilled mechanics, house servants, and field 1 Turner, Rise of the New West, 52. 24 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS hands ; its systematic sanitation and frequently system- atic religious instruction. In its westward march across the broad Southern plains it exhibited an effec- tive method of occupying and organizing new country. It provided highly specialized ability and strong natu- ral leaders. It gave the South an advantage scarcely balanced by the manufacturing gains and internal im- provements of the North. Cultivator versus Hoe. The transient character of this advantage appeared with the agricultural revolu- tion following 1833 which gave the North machinery to release human labor. The slave could hot use these machines. There followed the war of the cultivator against the hoe, which could have but one outcome. Add to this the facts that immigrants who now rushed in from Europe avoided the South because unwilling to compete with slavery; and that the physiography of the South limited its improved lands to plots and patches while the prairie states could be farmed solidly from border to border, and one has a clue to the result of the Civil War profounder than the marching of armies. Scarcely staggered by the losses of war the Northern farmer pressed westward, improving his implements, followed by his "granger" railroads, add- ing empires to his acreage and billions to the value of his product, till checked and forced into a new economy by the semi-arid section of the far West. Denominational Sectional Divisions. The division of the stronger and more national denominations into sectional branches on the question of slavery is better MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH 25 viewed in its larger social aspect. It was really a re- flection of the divergent types of agriculture between the sections. The church reflected the farmer. Dif- ferent types of farmers required different churches. The ground of separation was economic as well as and perhaps more than political or moral. Home mis- sions became necessarily sectional, representing the geographical expansion of religion with the migration of the Northern or Southern farm types. Achievements of an Era, Thus with minor diverg- encies of method but with essential universality the task of the geographical expansion of religion has been fulfilled. As the central missionary interest and typi- cal missionary method of the Church it culminated by about 1890. It was but a rough preliminary con- quest compared with present social tasks, but it was a conquest. There had been diversities of gifts but the same spirit, and it was a masterful one. The area to be covered was vast in unparalleled degree. For the first time in human history a nation with an im- perial domain to evangelize was to try the experiment of a voluntarily supported Church, which would go nowhere except as the devotion and colonizing genius of its people should carry it. As a sequel, religious opportunity, as measured by the presence of the Church, has been marvelously equalized the newer states fast becoming as privileged as many of the older ones. The five great sections into which the census now divides the nation vary surprisingly little in the ratio of church-members to population. In 26 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS brief, the voluntary Church in American life is every- where and is accepted as inevitable. As bound by virtue of home missions to go wherever national ideals go, it constitutes one of the prime factors in that "Americanization of the world" of which Mr. Stead wrote. Heroes in Review The Indian Missionary. The pageant of our national movement westward has often impressed the imagination. Its great types follow one another trapper, frontiersman, farmer, manu- facturer and workman. Each has his religious double first, the Indian missionary. Often the settler found his log chapel among the teepees of the prairie. The missionary was there first. The other day, on a newly opened reservation, a missionary reported the first religious service for the handful of settlers who gath- ered from beyond the horizon to a sod house in the midst of an empty prospect. There was nothing be- fore it of Christian history except thirty years of lonely labor for the souls of the Sioux. On a neigh- boring reservation a man was ministering whose grandfather before him preached the gospel to the savages. These were they who first and sometimes with their blood consecrated the soil of this land to the social uses of God. The Itinerant. After them came the itinerant. One day the music of our grandfather's ax in the clearing was broken in upon by the clatter of hoofs and the hail of a mellow voice. The preacher had come, wet with swimming the streams, bearing news of two MISSIONS AS EXPANSION OF CHURCH 27 worlds. He went but came again, till he had gathered out from the crude elements of the frontier stern and inflexible groups of Christians, who set up vigorous rules of life against pioneer profligacy, intemperance, perchance against the enslavement of human beings. He made the hearthstones of our grandfathers the altar of our fathers' faith. The Pastor. Our uncles and our fathers were breaking the tough prairie sod behind steaming horses, when there came striding across the gray furrows a stranger manifestly from the East, who announced that church would be held next Sunday. He had a missionary's commission in his pocket and had come to stay on $300 from the board and what the people could raise. He had also a state constitution and the plans of a college in his head. After that there was church every Sunday. Soon came a colony, with its land patents, its surveyor, doctor, and school-teachers, bearing in the midst of its "prairie schooners" like the ark in the midst of Israel a chest with books for a library and a communion service from the old home church. College and State. In due time the state and the college appeared. In the one, thousands of the most virile men of this generation were born ; in the other, trained. The stamp of home missions was upon both. A generation grew to manhood without seeing a legal- ized saloon. The doors of college classrooms bore the names of New England churches that had fur- nished the desks at which we sat. Our library was 28 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS the books of dead preachers our laboratory the cast- off apparatus of Eastern institutions. But the East sent us men of first quality, and we began to raise them ourselves. They gave us high and austere views of life, sound attitudes toward scholarship, and fo- cused our faith and duty upon the "regions beyond.' They made us what we are men with something to hold and much to learn. Our day shows other, per- haps better things to do. Yet theirs was a great task well done. God help us to do ours as well! FROM SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM CHAPTER II FROM SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM A Preview. The first chapter sought to tell the story of home missions before 1890 as a geo- graphical process, interpreted by its economic back- ground and with its social expressions incidentally noted. It will be the purpose of this chapter to con- sider the chief of these expressions with respect to their permanent social values, to show why all of them together are not broad enough to furnish a program of collective religious service for to-day, and to sum- marize the characteristics of the new home missions which issue from our wider social vision and deeper social consciousness. Men Larger than Their Theories. The older home missions defined their aim in terms of personal salva- tion, and their conservative instinct drove them to or- ganize religious institutions on old patterns, which safeguarded the home and reflected a simple social economy. But manifestly such a formulation of the case is inadequate to explain such a man as Manasseh Cutler. He began his life in Massachusetts and ended it there as a Congregational pastor. In his seventy years he was by turn pioneer, storekeeper, lawyer, 32 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS physician, army chaplain, and author. His career made him state legislator, and member of Congress; and he declined Washington's commission as Judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio. As agent of the Ohio Company and organizer of the Marietta Colony, he was trader, politician, and statesman enough to hold up the great land bargain which opened the national domain to settlement till freedom, education, and re- ligion had been written in the organic law. However he would have phrased it, such a mind was profoundly interested in the colonization of the West as a social process, and there were social potencies in his life undreamed in his theology. Equally, all along their successive frontier lines, home missions wrought so- cial effects, which officially must be set down as by- products. Many of the men who wrought them, however, had the exact equivalence of the modern so- cial spirit, a spirit as suited to their day and task as our best mood to ours. On Virgin Soil. The conditions under which they wrought conspired to give home missions strategic social value. They drank of the vigor of the new West. Migration to a frontier necessarily means rapid social change. It selects the active and eager, and puts them into a society largely free from social stratification; it releases and quickens individual en- ergy, awakens ambition, and creates "go." Home Mis- sions, therefore, may have found transportation hard, money scarce, and minds preoccupied ; but, when once arrested by the challenge of the spiritual life, there REV. PETER CARTWRIGHT Called a backwoods preacher SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 33 were optimisms, courage, and vision which gave re- ligion tremendous advantage. Call for Leadership. The West was a state of so- ciety profoundly dependent upon leadership. The dis- solution of older social tradition by migration, the gathering of many sorts of men on the frontier, the resulting conflict of ideas and sentiments made some sort of new leadership inevitable. Peter Cartwright flailing the rowdies of the Kentucky camp-meeting was a symbol of men who must arise for all the higher constructive tasks of civilization. It is something to find sheep without a shepherd, for then perhaps they will follow you. Under these conditions home mis- sions became one of the chief organizing factors of American society. We have now to enumerate some of their methods, and to appraise their chief results. I. The Transplanted Community. The previous chapter has already indicated the transcendent im- portance of that method of Christian colonization which brought the Church community from the older regions intact. Thus the Pilgrims had brought their Church from Holland and set it down on these shores. Thus in successive journey ings the Church moved west, bringing with it full social organization of the community type, efficient leadership, and, frequently, economic capital. This method made the transition from old to new with the least social loss, and had great advantage in social power over more frag- mentary migrations. It escaped, in large part, the 34 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS period of frontier disintegration, and was able to organize and impress great masses of plastic popula- tion of other types. Thus the famous Dorchester Church migrated from Massachusetts, seventy-five years after the landing of the Pilgrims, to South Caro- lina; and thence fifty years later to Georgia, continu- ing its name and organization, and leaving its stamp upon three states. Western Reserve Example. As typical of this process, Dr. Josiah Strong describes a colony on the Western Reserve: "Founded by a far-seeing and de- voted home missionary. He had become convinced that he could do more to establish Christian institutions on the Reserve 'by one conspicuous example of a well- organized and well-Christianized township, with all the best arrangements and appliances of New England civilization, than by many years of desultory effort in the way of missionary labor.' The settlers were care- fully selected. None but professing Christians were to become landholders. As soon as a few families had moved into the township, public worship was com- menced, and has ever since been maintained without interruption. A church was organized under the roof of the first log cabin. At the center of the township, where eight roads meet, was located the church build- ing fitly representing the central place occupied by the service of God in the life of the colony. Soon fol- lowed the schoolhouse and the public library, and there, in the midst of the unconquered forest, only eight years after the first white settlement, the peo- SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 35 pie, mindful of higher education, and true to their New England antecedents, planted an academy." l Christian Colonization. So perfect a case of Christian colonization was necessarily somewhat rare, but the general method was so common that a widely used and recent school text-book on civics 2 begins its interpretation of social organization in America with a study of a Western church community. The stimula- tion of Western migration by missionary promoters, the guidance of its group movements, and their prompt organization into church communities went on ex- tensively especially under New England auspices. Strangely enough it is Mormonism which furnishes the most complete example of religious colonization. While going sadly wrong in doctrine, this movement pre- eminently manifested social capacity and the ability to assimilate alien elements. Some of the more pre- tentious efforts at orthodox Christian colonization failed because of speculative entanglements; others like Jason Lee's splendid Oregon company, gathered in the interest of Indian missions, builded better than they knew, and became centers of new common- wealths. 3 Other Applications. Such a method does not differ at its roots from the social settlement, which to-day colonizes the "city wilderness" ; and it would make a perfectly sound basis for the modern development 1 Our Country, 196. * Dunn, The Community and the Citizen. ' Schafer, History of the Pacific Northwest, 169. 36 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS of a rural community, say in connection with an irri- gation project. It is not a method to be abandoned, but one to which we shall return. 2. The Missionary Pastor. Recipient of a meager stipend and of cast-off clothing, traditionally rearing his family on pumpkins and milk, socially considered, the home missionary was a strategically placed, supe- rior man. The plastic West yielded itself to the in- itiating energy of strong personality, which sociology recognizes as among the primary social forces every- where. Of course not every missionary could be a Gideon Blackburn, with states for his parish, but there were mighty and constructive men among them almost without number. Simple goodness too has its own efficiency. The letters of one of the indomitable laymen who molded states refer most affectingly to his mild missionary pastor as "John the Beloved." Not alone the big-fisted frontier preacher, but such leader incarnations of spiritual grace have power to move the mystic who lurked always at the bottom of the Scotch-Irishman, or to focus the deeper forces of the Yankee community. To catalog the home mis- sionary in all his varieties is to catalog an army. The itinerant's physical endurance and spiritual travail but one passage can describe. "In journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils from my countrymen, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in labor SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 37 and travail, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." l t A Commonwealth Builder. What then shall be said of the reserve resources and staying powers of a man who died in 1910 after a continuous pastorate of sixty-five years west of the Mississippi River; a man who started with the beginnings of things and lived to see his portrait hung in the capitol building of his state as one of the chief makers of the commonwealth; and what of thousands of this type, who wrought out community results, under the ideal of permanence, results which modern social con- structiveness cannot surpass ? And, whatever his type, the central fact in home missions was the missionary. 3. Together. The most constructive application of the ideal of permanence was in the group-apostolate or Band. Such home missionary groups went out from Eastern theological seminaries to successive frontiers Illinois, Iowa, the Dakotas, Washington all in the spirit of the famous eleven of the Iowa Band, "Each to found a church and all together a college." Such bringing of highly trained men to the task of institution building, in the plastic period of the West, constituted a social technique of the high- est order. No method could be more effective if ap- plied now to complex social situations. 4. The Sunday School. Sects still persist in America to whom the Sunday-school is an unorthodox social innovation, along with missions and the prayer- '2 Cor. xi. 26, 27. 38 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS meeting. They reflect the ideal of the most primitive frontier, before safety and neighborliness permitted the intensive religious process of the home-making farm group. The Sunday-school preceded the organ- ized church in frequent practise and, perhaps even more than the regular pastorate, is the typical religious institution of its time. It supplemented the home; it expressed community organization on the elementary level ; it could be operated under humble circumstances by the average layman. It was thus peculiarly adapted to pioneer conditions. From 1824 union agencies, and later denominational ones, sent out organizers of Sun- day-schools. Of course Sunday-school missions redi- rected by pedagogy continue as one of the great de- partments of present-day home missionary work. The most enlightened program for rehabilitating the coun- try community looks to the modernized Sunday-school as a central factor. Child welfare is a most crucial point of modern social emphasis. With the broaden- ing of their field to include the whole scope of religious education (including missionary education) and with the development of a higher type of experts, Sunday- school missions discover a new task fundamentally involved in the intellectual readjustment and social leadership of the Church. In a world which is becom- ing increasingly a child's world their essential service will wax rather than wane. 5. Literature. Narrowing the survey, as our defi- nition of home missions requires, to that literary out- put which bore the imprint of denominational pub- SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 39 lishing houses, or was directly promulgated for pur- poses of missionary propaganda, not much is left to impress the critic or historian of American letters. Yet whoever has seen Sunday-school literature in the hands of a rural community has seen the seeds and may have watched the development of vast forces. The story of Lincoln's boyhood or the memory of any one's Western grandfather will illustrate the frontier's poverty in books. Mills and Schermerhorn kept exclaiming, "No Bible south of the Ohio River," and they might have added, "Nor any other book!" It was not strange therefore that they were making a second trip within two years with a supply of Bibles, and that the most outstanding result of their revela- tion of frontier conditions was the consolidation in 1816 of earlier agencies into the American Bible So- ciety. In 1825 followed the American Tract Society, to produce and circulate a more general Christian literature. These two now venerable union agencies of home missions, supplemented by denominational presses and societies, have put staggering millions of printed pages into national moral development and covered the continent with good books. Why Books? Some of our present moods incline us to see in all this a pathetic overemphasis on literary methods, characteristic of Yankee reforms in general. But the actual situation gave it its deep wisdom. Thus a Wisconsin missionary in 1836 pushed across the Mississippi, preaching the first sermon and organizing a Sunday-school in an infant settlement of the Black 40 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS Hawk strip. "I proposed," he reports, 1 "if they would raise $5.00 I would furnish $10.00 worth of books; and they immediately collected $11.50 and paid it over, and I have forwarded the library." Now the sociol- ogizing mind might raise the question whether the Black Hawk strip did not first need some more imme- diate element of civilization than books. But the mis- sionary goes on to explain, "They urged me to come again. But there are six or eight places on this side [of the Mississippi], equally important, that I have not visited for many months." In brief, books econo- mized men and in the hands of the frontier Sunday- school teacher were powerful leaven. Behind this consideration there lies also the deepest social implica- tion of Protestantism, namely, that all men must be educated to be able to read the Bible under standingly. Of this conviction, however far it takes one, the book was the symbol. Almost everywhere the Sunday- school library was the first publicly accessible collec- tion of books. Traditional its literature may have been or prosy, but home missions were the first Carnegie of the nation. 6. The Church School. Precisely this background is necessary for a genuine evaluation of the church school. Recent historians of American education are inclined to emphasize the fact that in its original en- vironment the church school was professional founded "to raise up a learned and goodly ministry" ; and aristocratic always dominated by the ideal of 1 Home Missionary, September, 1836. SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 41 "ye university"; also that denominational ends could not include a complete democratic system or a demo- cratic adjustment of education for the entire people. It is more to the point, however, to contemplate the actual function of the church school as tempered by the spirit of the West to its own uses. Thus the most characteristic church school, the academy, was the ex- press image of Western democracy in its best ideals. The Academy. In contrast with the class-cleavage idea reflected in the college and grammar-school sys- tem, the academy directly reflects the rise of the char- acteristic American middle class. It is "one of their glories that they were in the earliest days so bound up with the higher interests of the common people." * Thus the constitutions of the two historic Phillips Academies make no mention of college preparation as the object of their founding. The academies spread westward as exponents of the kind of education which was fittingly open to all aspiring youth under condi- tions of frontier equality. Most of the so-called West- ern colleges were merely academies at first and shared their ideals. They furnished the frontier with its teachers ; they originated general education for women ; they mediated between the culture of the civilized world and the inchoate West; they made our fathers and mothers what they were. The College, The fundamental educational needs of the frontier being provided in the academies, home missions were profoundly right in their instinct to 1 Brown, Making of our Middle Schools, 229. 42 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS raise up leaders for the new civilization through the colleges. When the Iowa Band resolved, "each to found a church and all together a college," it was be- cause they believed in themselves, in the contribution to society to be made by such fully trained men as they. The outcome of their faith, and of faith like theirs was that the destinies of American higher educa- tion up to the Civil War were virtually in the hands of the church school and that institutions of such ances- try and type, still educate two thirds as many students as are found in the thronging public universities. As everybody knows the stronger of the early church schools have quite outgrown their ecclesiastical control and almost entirely their denominational affiliations; have become universities, and are the most highly favored recipients of benefactions from men of great wealth. Harvard and Yale have long ceased to be thought of as belonging to the churches which founded them. Church schools of middle size are in great danger of becoming prosperous class institutions for the children of the well-to-do; centers of sound schol- arship indeed and of a certain culture, but standing a little apart from the main current of democratic as- piration and service; or else of being crowded to the wall by the none-too-gentle pressure of trust methods in education. The former danger is the more serious and subtle. From no standpoint of social efficiency can defense be made for the effort to maintain thirty or forty colleges, such as denominational zeal has founded in some of the states of the Middle West, SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 43 and nobody to-day tries to defend it. On the other hand nothing should dim the fact that most of the large colleges have been small colleges through most of their history and that consequently the small college has done more, as it perhaps can still do, for demo- cratic opportunity in higher education than any other type. 1 Newer Types and Needs. Public education is at the bottom a matter of taxable property. Where re- sources for its adequate support do not exist, as in many thinly settled and backward areas of the na- tion, the church school, adapting the academy ideal to modern educational demands and supported by mis- sionary money, will have a long future of indispen- sable service. New forms of the church school sug- gested by the International College at Springfield, Massachusetts, will reflect the needs of new popula- tion for assimilation to our civilization. In the de- velopment of the backward races its place is still cen- tral. An adjustment between Christian education and the state university is bound to be found. All these mean the continuance of an old though modified home missionary method. 7. Constructive Legislation and Moral Reform. The home missionary was so much a social former that it was not his first task to be a social reformer. When laws and institutions were in making he was on the ground and had possession of the machinery. 1 Thwing, Education in the United States Since the Civil War, '44 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS He sat in constitutional conventions and wrote planks into political platforms. His deepest interest was in safeguarding the home and its thrift. Therefore he was the aggressive agent of temperance and the in- veterate foe of gambling, particularly of the legalized lottery. In the sectional conflict, the home missionary lived along the firing line of national righteousness as he understood it. The time came when "every Metho- dist preacher was regarded as an abolition agent." l During the struggle for Kansas, one wrote : "Stirring times at Tabor now. Pastor John Todd has a brass cannon in his haymow, and another on wheels in his wagon shed. He also has boxes of old clothing, boxes of ammunition, boxes of sabers, and twenty boxes of Sharp's rifles stowed away in the cellar." 2 With such a tradition behind them it is not surprising that some of the earliest expressions of modern so- cial militancy were in home missionary institutions of the central West. To men far from cities and the noise of industrial battle, sitting among the sheep- cotes of strictly rural states, came echoes of social strife which kindled old reforming fires. This tradi- tion of devotion to reform remains part of the perma- nent equipment of home missions for their task. 8. Special Social Adaptations to the Backward Races. Writing as late as 1900 on religious move- ments for social betterment, Dr. Josiah Strong nar- rated chiefly the institutional activities of exceptional 1 Helm, The Upward Path, 232. * Douglass, Pilgrims of Iowa, 130. SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 45 parishes and could find little to include under "organ- ized denominational effort for social betterment" but missions to Negroes and Indians. 1 In these realms home missions made some fundamental social experi- ments, the results of which hold good for all time. These included such conspicuous failures as the at- tempt to handle the national Indian policy by assign- ing the reservations to the charge of denominational boards, 2 and such highly original and fruitful suc- cesses as the application of vocational training to racial uplift, as worked out at Hampton and elsewhere. But both failures and successes pioneered the way to the newer social insights and service, and their agencies abide among the most useful of the present day. Some- thing of their story will be suggested in other con- nections. 9. Influence on Ecclesiastical Organization. The West made the nation what it is. Its Eastern con- sciousness has always been hampered by the "persist- ent presence of the frontier," and its most vital process has always been the give and take of the sections. Similarly home missions have made the American Church what it is. Whatever its creed or form of polity, its main business in America hitherto has been geographical expansion and its organization has reflected this necessity. Whether by board or by bishop, its extension agencies have been ecclesiastically 1 Strong, Religious Movements for Social Betterment, go. 'McKenzie, The Indian in Relation to the White Population, 14 ff. 46 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS formative. Thus they have been the chief tie between the local churches of congregationally organized com- munions, which denied all centralizing authority. At the other extreme they brought the Protestant Epis- copal Church to adopt the revolutionary device of the missionary bishop sent out by the Church at large. 1 Indeed the missionary task is likely to become the main organizing principle of American Christian- ity. The rapid and revolutionary changes in polity now going on in several of the great denominations are all in the confessed interest of working efficiency in missions as socially broadened and redirected. 10. Initiative. Our national humor lets us appre- ciate the observation that any chance meeting of three Americans spontaneously organizes with chairman, secretary, and a man to second motions. This tend- ency leads to sinful overorganization. On the other hand it is a testimony to social resourcefulness born of pioneer conditions. The frontier was the mother of initiative. That a thing had never been done be- fore was no reason for not trying it now. It made the reforming spirit adventurous and adaptive. Home missions in this atmosphere got zest for experiment. This is a profound variation from the ordinary con- servatism of religious institutions. It remains an es- sential of the spiritual equipment now that the Ameri- can Church stands on the frontier of social experience. Social experiment under the principle of voluntary organization will throng its new regions with incipient 1 Burleson, The Conquest of the Continent, 60. SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 47 sects, with varied cure-alls. But newly acute prin- ciples of selection are at work, which, with the growing scientific temper, may be expected to weed out the unfruitful more quickly than in former years ; and out of this multiplicity of experiment the clear portents of a better day will soon break. Such ad- venturous alertness, such resourceful initiative are the priceless heritage of the home missionary spirit. Is the Past Adequate? Thinking back now over the whole social heritage of home missionary history, it is an insensate soul which does not thrill with rev- erent pride and satisfaction. And if such a soul chances to inhabit a body and use a brain which reached maturity before 1890, it is at least an even chance whether it may not say within itself, Is not such a heritage sufficient? Isn't the mighty past adequate to give a missionary program to the present? Are there any novelties which are more than novel, which constitute essential additions to all resources and methods? To meet this mood it is only fair to con- sider some of the inadequacies of the older home mis- sions to their own day and increasingly to ours. The Shortcomings of Our Fathers. Thus in 1844 a home missionary reported : "The cause of the delay of this report is the existence of the smallpox, in an epidemic form, in our village. We have been, and are being, most severely and dreadfully scourged with it. It commenced in this village on October 28 in a very mild form, and continued such for a considerable length of time, so that four weeks elapsed before any 48 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS of our physicians discovered its true character, so as to venture to call it by its true name; and another week passed away before they could all be persuaded of it. From its commencement no death occurred by it until December 6, since which it has been very fatal. As a consequence, all business is at a standstill; the schools are suspended; and the places of worship nearly deserted. Many are sick, and they must have attendants. The whole village is affected with the disease. . . . Fifteen, who a few days since were among us in all the buoyancy of spirits and of life, now lie beneath the turf. What the end will be, God only knows. The disease stole in among us in so mild a shape that almost the whole community were fully exposed to its contagion before they were aware of the danger. And when the alarm came it was too late to flee, or to take measures in self-defense. And when resort was made to vaccination, it was found that we had imposed upon us a vitiated, if not spurious, vaccine virus, which proved to be no pro- tection, yea, much worse than none. God meant to scourge us; he did not intend that we should be able to escape or elude it. And we feel but the just expres- sion of his wrath. May Heaven dispose this people to profit by this severe judgment." * Then and Now. One hardly knows which to ad- mire least, the sanitary stupidity which failed to dis- continue church services during the epidemic or the theological stupidity which ascribed an uncontrolled 1 Quoted by T. O. Douglass, Autobiography, 23, 24. SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 49 epidemic to God. Manifestly the fifteen who died were members of the community and church in a sense not comprehended by the current home missions. Increase this membership to hundreds of thousands using a common water supply or sewerage system in a great modern city and religion clearly must at once take more inclusive and more intricate forms to match the fact or to control its malign possibilities. Out-of-Datc Morals. In 1913 a Southern state en- acted legislation intended to eradicate the cattle tick and so gain a Northern market for its cattle which had previously been excluded by rigid quarantine. Dipping tanks were provided in all towns. The moun- tain men back from a certain railway line organized night riders and dynamited a dozen tanks in a single night. Their chief use for cattle was to haul lum- ber. They raised none for market, had no concep- tion of the relation of the cattle industry to the pros- perity of the state, nor that of the price of beef to the cost of living. Their outlook was that of the earliest frontier; their social morality belonged back of 1835. Transitional Problems. The social inadequacy of the typical farmer's morality is explained by Dr. War- ren H. Wilson: "The transition from the older economy to the new is illustrated in the dairy in- dustry which surrounds every great city. The dairy farmer has ideas of right and wrong which are purely individualistic. He believes that he should not cheat the customer in the quantity of milk. He recognizes that it is wrong, therefore, to water the milk, but he 50 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS has no conception of social morality concerning milk. He gives full measure; but he cares nothing about purity of milk. He is restless and feels himself op- pressed, under the demands of the inspector from the city, for ventilation of his barns and for protection of the milk from impurity. I have known few milk farmers who believed in giving pure milk and I never knew one whose conscience was at ease in watering milk. That is, they all believe in good measure and none believes in the principle of sanitation." * The conditions which excused this limited outlook had gen- erally passed by 1890. The End of an Era. The census of that year an- nounced the disappearance of the frontier line in the Pacific Ocean. The first rough conquest of the con- tinent was completed. True, there remained much land to be possessed, but it was in general land on which little rain fell land unconquerable by the farmer homesteading by single families, or by any of the ordinary resources of the farmer economy. A new physiographical province and a new order of society demanded new home missions. Of current religious movements, only the high social organization of Mor- monism was equal to it. How it must be conquered generally is the lesson taught by the irrigation pro- jects of California. In their first stage they were co- operative, small groups of settlers acquiring a water- supply and constructing irrigation works by their own labor. But to conquer any considerable area from the 1 The Evolution of the Country Community, 174, 175. SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 51 desert required far more capital than such groups could secure. In their second stage therefore irriga- tion projects were taken in hand by corporations which floated vast amounts of bonds, employed expert engineers and built magnificent works, all resulting in a very high average of failure and great loss to in- vestors. At last it was evident that the task was too great for any one but the state itself or the Federal government Only the state could wait long enough for returns, could control the monopolists and justly distribute water, a matter so fundamental to any civilization that the Almighty ordinarily keeps it in his own hands. 1 In brief the physiography of a large third of the American continent ordained that the farmer economy should cease. To the triumphant stream of Western expansion the desert said, "Hith- erto shalt thou come, but no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." The Remaining Frontier. A modification of this generalization is made possible by the development of dry farming, which is pushing the line of profitable cultivation farther westward. Within a year the au- thor has seen the opening of a northwestern Indian reservation for settlement. The tiny claim shacks spring up like magic. Somebody has sold the lumber- yard at the end of the railroad a carload of blue building paper. Every shack is hastily covered with it. A single strand of barbed wire is quickly strung to outline each claim. Prairie water-holes are lo- 1 Carver, Principles of Rural Economics, 142. 52 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS cated or shallow wells dug. A load of coal is hauled weary miles and dumped unprotected before the shack door. With feverish energy man and beast bend themselves to the task of breaking the soil. They will give it over only at the last moment and in time to sod up the cabin before winter closes in. Sturdy Ger- man-speaking Russians most of these settlers are. There is something vastly impressive in the primitive strength and dignity with which they stretch their blue line of civilization against the winter and the desert and wait the fickle moods of next season's rain. Yet even in this case the old forms of farm economy are inwardly changed. First across the line after the "opening" was an automobile containing a tent and a safe and the first institution of the new area was a bank. The railroad grade was ahead of the settler. Pioneering was done with capital and advanced so- cial resources rather than with bare hands before the opening excursion trains brought thousands to the land lottery by which the claims were assigned. After several days' association with them one felt that speculators greatly outnumbered genuine home-seekers. They were more interested in lottery than in land. The old spirit had passed and the frontier is involved in new issues, social to the core. Transformed Tasks. The task of extensive home missions therefore can never be completed, because it has vanished. There are unoccupied regions into which people must be followed by the Church. There will still be heroic missionary service for scattered SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 53 communities in thinly settled regions. It will demand many men and cost much money, especially when such regions are peopled with foreigners, who have to be pursued in order to be assimilated ; but it will be inter- esting rather than typical, and the social emphasis must dominate and furnish its main constructive prin- ciples; while in the characteristic processes of con- quering the semi-arid (or swamp) regions the most immediate factors will be the thickly settled communi- ties of consciously interdependent people and the ac- tive agency of the state in meeting their basic needs. Problems of intricate social organization will be in- stantly compelling. There will be nothing to corre- spond to the long pioneering of our fathers. Old things have passed away for the parts of our land which still remain to be populated. New Application of Religion. The religion which saves the newest frontier must prevent the epidemic, sanctify the dipping vat, provide pure milk as well as full measure, and pure politics as well as pure milk, besides controlling the monopolists by law as well as from within their own conscience and taking pastoral care of the dry farmer by automobile. And all this does not begin to take account of the revolutionary inner change which has overtaken the older countryside from Vermont to Oklahoma, nor of the inert rural millions of colored folks, nor of the nation's cities thronged with strangers, nor of the clash of industrial classes all of them among the dominant elements of the America in which we live. 54 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS The New Home Missions. All this demands new and socially redirected home missions and compels one to pronounce upon the old home missions Jesus' ver- dict upon the best man of a departed age : "Among them that are born of women there hath not arisen a greater than John the Baptist: yet he that is but little in the kingdom of God is greater than he." The last quarter century has seen the gradual trans- formation of home missionary aims and methods until their social aspects are now the dominant ones. To describe and interpret these is the chief task of this book. Education has coined the term redirection in order to express the parallel experience which it has been undergoing. It has been made manifest that the redirection of home missions tends not to destroy but to fulfil home missions of the older type. At the same time there are fairly sharp differences. The old was extensive; the new is intensive. The old thought it sought individual salvation chiefly ; the new knows that it seeks social redemption equally with in- dividual salvation. The further characteristics of current home missions as socially redirected will ap- pear in the successive chapters. For the present it will be sufficient to indicate them briefly. i. Contrast Between Old and New. The new home missions are conscious of enlarged moral realms in which the gospel is to be realized. This enlargement comes by the rapid annexation of new moral fields, but also by the complication of moral issues in all fields, as the brain's surface is increased SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 55 by the deepening of its convolutions. The demand that one generation should not waste the natural resources of another, should not devastate the forests of pos- terity nor burn up their coal, would have seemed far- fetched to our fathers ; still more would it have seemed remote from religious concern. They knew no such far-reaching questionings as ours, say, concerning the equitable distribution of wealth ; but their greater sur- prise would have been to discover how many other moral issues this one involves, as the modern con- science senses it. Their charity was the giving of alms : ours is the constructive statesmanship which re- duces the death-rate of nations and adds years to the average of human life. Their human relationships were few, simple, stable. Ours are many, complex, and changing. Consequently their goodness was near, direct, and obvious, while ours is remote, necessarily devious, sometimes obscure. This greatly complicates duty for the good man of to-day. His is a sky-scraper morality. Not only must he be good on every floor four stories below ground and fifty above but up and down from floor to floor run elevator shafts, elec- trical connections, mail chutes, telephone wires, and vacuum cleaning tubes. His moral structure is not only higher, but more highly organized inwardly. His religion must be the attempt to realize the program of Christianity with all it implies both as to bulk and to complex relationship. Home missions are expanding to match and serve these enlarged moral realms. 2. New Moral Values. Current home missions are 56 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS conscious of new moral values, particularly of the value of socially depressed or obstructed men. On the vigorous and untrammeled frontier men were unequal in muscle, health, and skill, but they were equal in status and potential opportunity. Or at the least they felt equal and more nearly regarded each other so than before or since. Now conscience is compelled to concern itself more profoundly with second comers with those who arrived after all the free land and most of the natural advantages were occupied by others ; with primitive possessors who were shouldered aside; with exploited peoples former slaves or more recent ones; with landless men, tenants, and wage- earners; with emigrants and depressed city masses. The human values within these social ranges are newly sensed by the Church to-day. 3. Concern the Entire Church. Current home mis- sions address themselves to the entire Church. Formerly they were considered as expressing the lib- erality of the well-established churches to the feeble frontier ones. But the social frontier is everywhere. New elements in our civilization shake the foundations of the strongest churches. The richest are frequently the least effectively attuned to their present task and most in need of social salvation. There are no exempt religious classes to whom home missions need not minister. The boards now represent an appeal to the collective social conscience. Vast sums of money are being spent, not to help the religiously needy in the frontier sense, but to reeducate the most SOCIAL BY-PRODUCT TO SOCIAL AIM 57 venerable elements and sections of the Church. There ought to be home missions to theological seminaries, to endowed churches, to prominent city pastors, and there are. The profounder social task universalizes the process. 4. Use Scientific Method. Current home missions are the inheritor of that great clue to duty, the scien- tific method. The discovery that rigid collective tests of goodness ought to be made, which may serve as guides to millions and prevent their millions of mis- steps, has made all things new in the realm of morals. No specific proposal to social conscience can evade the necessity of submitting to such tests. The sec- tarian extension of needless duplicatory and rival churches, for example, cannot now continue, primarily because the scientific spirit is so widespread and so clearly presents the social consequences of such a pol- icy. All Christian strategy presupposes preliminary investigations and suggestions of this spirit. 5. Call for Expert Leaders. Concerning specific social issues as they do, current home missions have developed a type of expert leaders who may fairly qualify with experts in other realms. They have taught the sociologists; they have taught the statisti- cians. Before teaching they had to learn from both. The new leader is more of a specialist, and (though true prophets are scarce) not less of a prophet than his predecessors. The social engineer tends to supersede the ecclesiastic as the typical church leader. 6. Secure Better Team Play. Because with such 58 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS an approach to duty and under such leadership they cannot be fundamentally sectarian or sectional, cur- rent home missions are demanding and getting better team play between communions than ever before. Leaders in home missions have the daily habit of work- ing together. That this is not exceptional but ordi- nary is another omen of the new day. 7. Necessitate Profounder Religious Sanction. And finally, current home missions are compelled to find profounder religious sanction and support than the older type. It is no disparagement of the religion of the past to say that we must have more religion than it had to meet the complexities and interrelations of duty to-day. The intensive in method requires the inten- sive in experience. We cannot get nearer to God than our fathers did, but we can bring God nearer to more points of life and more grades of men. To do this will take not less but more of the power which wrought in Christ and now works in us to raise society to new- ness of life. Social by-product has thus become social aim. Home missions henceforth have free course to the goal of social redemption for the land of our love. AN ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR THE COUNTRY CHAPTER III AN ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR THE COUNTRY The Vanishing Farmer. The first step toward an adequate home missionary program for the country is the discovery that the old one is inadequate. It is inadequate because the man it was suited to serve no longer exists. Like the Indian and the trapper who preceded him the farmer is gone a vanishing race. True, there are five million more Americans on the soil than there were ten years ago, and nine people have been born in the country or moved thither for every- one who came away. Yet those who stayed have suf- fered inner change and those who came have brought or received another heritage than that of yesterday. The open country is peopled with a new type which home missions, first of all, must understand. The frontier line has been drowned in the Pacific Ocean. Nearly all of America's free land which can profitably be conquered by single families has been taken up. Homestead ing is no longer a significant resource for surplus population. Now we are adjusting ourselves to the consciousness that somebody has preempted nearly all the farm land there is. And, because millions still 61 62 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS crowd in who want it, it has become immensely valu- able. Rising Land Values. Rural churches seeking aid from the board of which the writer is secretary must answer the question, "How much have land values increased in your community in the last five years?" A recent answer read, "250 per cent." The most frequent answer is from 25 to 50 per cent. And 25 per cent, would be the answer even in many sections of the older farming states. For the country at large land values increased 100 per cent, between 1900 and 1910. One day the farmer waked up to the discovery that, under such conditions, while one might make a living or a little better by working hard, one might become wealthy by doing nothing. Indeed he could scarcely avoid becoming wealthy if he owned a signifi- cant amount of land. Following this clue, he found himself facing three alternatives : either to borrow money and buy more land for its rise in value, or else to rent the farm and wait for its rise in value, or finally to sell the farm and buy a larger amount of cheaper land in order to profit by its rise in value. The End of the Old Order. Choosing any of these alternatives makes the farmer a speculator; the sec- ond makes him also an absentee landlord; the third makes him also an emigrant. All focus attention upon rise in land values instead of upon farming. All quench the inner moral light of the true farmer, namely, his attachment to the land as a homestead, a place whereon to build a home, and substitute an at- ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 63 titude which regards the land as something to make money from and chiefly unearned money. When these motives operate sharply, the kind of man whom home missions chiefly dealt with up to 1890, whom they knew how to help and save, whose typical insti- tutions they largely created, simply ceases to be. The life goes out of the old order of rural life. New Factors. Before determining her new pro- gram, the Church must understand the concomitants and consequences of this epochal change both the harmful and the hopeful. It must measure the de- cline of rural civilization, of its population, its birth- rate, its landownership, its civic and private virtue; the decline of its schools, its rural social centers, and the dying off of the country churches. It must get a broad-minded and ardent appreciation of the new sources of rural strength of its new physical re- sources like good roads and the gas engine, its techni- cal resources in scientific agriculture, its political re- sources in the taxable enthusiasm of a mighty people, its sufficient economic resources in the present and prospective profits of farming. Moral and Social Elements. Particularly must the Church sense the moral and esthetic resources of coun- try life. Dr. Warren H. Wilson argues hopefully that the sifting of population between city and coun- try is a division of the nation between equally good stocks, each selecting its fitting environment; and not, as some have made us to fear, the leaving behind in the country of the inert and inefficient. At any rate, 64 THE NEW HOME "MISSIONS there is a tremendous leaven in the open country of strong, sound folks who are there because they pre- fer to be there who have followed the soil for its lure and have hallowed it with their love. Nor are the city man's back-to-the-country tendencies alto- gether to be despised, even though they may get ne further in the first generation than the suburbanite's rather ineffective garden. There are a hundred Chi- cago boys in the Illinois College of Agriculture, and more to follow. The New Farmer. But the country's best moral resource is the young working farmer of this genera- tion, who with his complete education and his mind fully open to the advantages of the city, has deliber- ately chosen the life of the countryman for his lot. Along with his knowledge and enthusiasm he often cherishes a unique because newly enlightened pride, tenderness, and devoutness toward the life of the farm. This idealistic note in the young farmer is unmistakable, to develop which, with all its finest im- plications, is the high task of religion. Patience for Reconquest. For so long lingering with factors preliminary to the specific work of the Church in the country, the apology, if it needs one, is that it has been in search of the only clue to duty which the Church pretends to possess. She knows she must approach all her problems humbly through pre- cise social knowledge. On the old ground of her chief missionary triumphs she turns to a patient doing-all- over-again in a profounder sense. She grew up with ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 65 the farmer. She followed him through forest, over prairie and desert, to the utmost sea. She thought at times that her work would be done when its geo- graphical expansion was complete. She now sees that it is God's way that the Church should never be out of a pioneering job anywhere. Social change has broken down many of the seeming successes of the past; it has also brought forth the forces of a better reconstruction. Rural humanity is to be cultivated over again for salvation's sake with improved ma- chinery. Intensive moral husbandry is to be applied. There is to be wider appreciation of the social inter- relations of souls. A keener conservationist con- science is to sense the values of humbler men. Good seed will yield thirty if not an hundredfold. In spite of somewhat diminishing returns the fields are white unto harvest. No program of the Church's specific duty could possibly be adequate which did not faith- fully count all resources, trace all relationships, scien- tifically appraise all factors, and lovingly visualize the totality of rural life with which religion is concerned. Rural Leadership. The first direct contribution to rural life by which the Church purposes to make her service adequate is leadership. This was her oldest contribution to the nation. Home missions were essen- tially a far-sighted plan to supply strategically placed superior men to the plastic society of the West. Now that its first plasticity is over, now that the task is largely one of remolding old institutions, now that mere goodness and good sense are no longer infallible 66 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS guides to right results, it is required that the supe- rior man shall be an expert. The Church must fur- nish the rural life expert The Layman's Part. The only agent is not neces- sarily the ordained minister of religion. The employ- ment of lay expert service by the Church is increas- ing in most of its fields of service. With all excep- tional rural groups negroes, foreigners, mountain- eers the Christian school must supplement the church, and indeed precede many of its organized ac- tivities. This fact calls for thousands of lay mission- aries with adaptation to work in the open coun- try. The Sunday-school worker has in the country a field peculiarly his own. Almost everywhere the rural social settlement would be a mightily apt agency of betterment. Stripped to its essence, this would simply mean that a family or two of Christian farmers, who can farm, should move into a community for the sake of the community and go into profitable and permanent farming, taking gradually the natural place of leadership to which community forces should call them. The first denomination which has wit and courage enough to supply such leaders as part of its home missionary program will touch the center of the rural life problem. At the same time the expert rural leader which the Church will and ought chiefly to fur- nish is the minister of the gospel. He must be pre- pared, placed, paid, and made permanent. Preparing the Ministry. Except the theological seminary repent and become rurally minded it cannot ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 67 prepare such a minister. And its antecedents and pres- ent environment are a great barrier to repentance. We know that it occasionally puts rural economics into its curriculum, and holds country-life conferences; but these will not suffice. For, in the first place, the semi- nary's atmosphere is non-rural; it has been getting most of its students from the church school, which is a recreant institution country-wise. Located generally in the small town, the church school has been steadily engaged in impoverishing the country by educating its natural leaders away from it, and adding insult to injury by boasting of this triumph. When its cul- ture has been modern at all it has been obsessed by so- cial problems interpreted in city terms. In the great rural states, country-mindedness in education has ex- isted chiefly in the publicly supported universities and agricultural colleges. Unless the theological seminary then can revolutionize both its source and itself, it can- not adequately serve the country-life program. New Theological Centers. Perhaps the practical solution lies in the development of a new type of training-school for the rural ministry in connection with the state universities. Many of the denomina- tions have already discovered that the bulk of their youth are going, not to the denominational college, but to the public institutions. They are therefore be- ginning to found church houses and Biblical chairs ad- junct to the universities, to establish university pas- torates and the like. Now Madison, Wisconsin, and Champaign, Illinois, being among the chief centers of 68 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS agricultural learning, ought naturally also to be among the great theological centers of the nation. The semi- naries located in Chicago could do much worse than to send their prospective country ministers to these places for their senior or postgraduate years. They could get their theology in the denominational house and their rural economics in the university, meanwhile drinking in an atmosphere charged with the sense of responsible and resultful rural service to entire states. In the East, Drew Theological Seminary, at Madison, New Jersey, might ally with the neighboring Rut- gers College, at New Brunswick, New Jersey; Rochester Theological Seminary, Rochester, New York, with Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; while one of the superfluous urban seminaries of New England might glorify itself by establishing itself as a connecting and completing link between Amherst College and the Massachusetts Agricultural College, at Amherst, Massachusetts, and becoming an exclusive agency for the training of rural pastors. Placing the Minister. Granted his preparation by some adaptation of agencies yet to be perfected, the country minister has next to be placed. There can be no social adequacy in conditions which place him in a competitive church which divides a rural community rather than unites it. To place the minister strategi- cally from the standpoint of public welfare, there must be team-play between the denominations. In this mat- ter the difficulty of the situation is largely expressed by the old rural formula, "One's afraid, the other ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 69 dassent." We know that the leading denominations have comity principles to which their missionary boards are committed, that they are employing the survey method in whole groups of states as the basis of Christian strategy, that they are rapidly adjusting cases of overlapping and duplication between local churches. The representatives of eighteen communions have voted that the era of extension is over in certain trans-Missouri regions, and have united upon a rural church commission to advise what intensive program comes next. On the other hand, local surveys gener- ally show that rural people are only negatively and traditionally sectarian. Rouse a healthy community spirit on agricultural matters and they will get to- gether religiously whenever they know that their leaders will let them. An adequate program of plac- ing the rural leader will simply assume and act upon the new resources of denominational cooperation and self-sacrifice, just as it assumes and uses the new science and technique of the farm. Paying the Minister. Any agricultural situation which can support the farmer adequately can also support the preacher adequately, but it ought never to be able to support a superfluous preacher. The country needs to conserve its resources, and has no money to waste on churches. For a community church, really serving the higher life of a successful farming group, it can afford to pay well, and it should be made to do so. Home missionary policy will be very foolish if it does not insist on an adequate salary 70 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS for the rural minister, and it ought to enlist in this behalf some of the forces which have so successfully advanced other rural interests. Better prices for farm products ought to mean better pay for country preachers. The church is modest in asking for herself but she does think that the agricultural colleges, the rural politicians, and the social experts generally should get behind a campaign of education for the adequate support of the great voluntary institutions which must furnish rural leadership in the highest things. This opportunity of cooperation she oilers them in her great task. Keeping the Minister. After the church gets its rural leader it must keep him. This she has largely failed to do in the past. The choice young minister has been willing to serve a rural apprenticeship but not to live a rural li'fe. In 1890 the Yale band of six young men went to Washington. Now two are mis- sionary secretaries, one a city pastor, one a social worker in Chicago, while a fifth preaches in a town of ten thousand. But one remains in Washington and he is a college president. The kingdom of God is doubtless richer but surely the state is poorer for their going. But now, if there is anything in vocational guidance, it would have been better to give Washing- ton a type of men permanently suited to rural leader- ship. And if the rural population is indeed equal to the city population, but temperamentally different, it will be wise in the rural minister to perfect the rural type. Give him the same fundamental education with ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 71 the city youth as broad, as generous, as modern then let him specialize on rural life and go to the country to stay. Country life in its best interpre- tation is big enough in economic possibilities, esthetic satisfactions, and moral enthusiasm permanently to fill any life which is fundamentally attuned to it. Such a man will find the spheres of his promotion in the superintendency of country churches, in rural bishoprics, in rural social organization, in the con- solidated school and the extension work of the agri- cultural college. If he can make the moral conquest of the small town, causing it to serve the country rather than ape the city, he will have done a service of unparalleled social import for the nation. Thus rural leadership which is adequately prepared, placed, and paid may become permanent. Developing Community Spirit. Such leadership will then address itself to the outstanding deficien- cies of the country life, such as the lack of community spirit. Rural America was settled by independent family groups in competitive economic relations, who have never been brought adequately into community experiences and relations. The old rural community, such as it was, was too small. Team-haul distance over poor roads, which constituted the limits of the rural community, did not include enough or enough kinds of people to save life from pettiness and inbreed- ing of ideas. People knew or imagined too much about one another. Good roads increase the team- haul distance and enlarge the community. The auto- 72 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS mobile both enlarges and enriches it. For the true correlative of community is variety. The accessible range of rural life is to include both more and more varied elements. One must think largely of it, for- getting its old poverty and fragmentariness. Instead of the country store which it has lost to the mail-order house, the newly mobile farm population is to possess itself of a considerable center, with its co- operative store and creamery, its consolidated school, its well-equipped church, and ultimately its community bank. The actual farm population is not to be or to be felt inferior to the folks who work in these insti- tutions, for the farmer will own them all. Because of their more varied relations, and especially because they are no longer merely competitive family groups, coun- try people will draw more effectively together and will achieve the conditions of community life. United Through the Church. As has already been agreed, the church cannot serve such a community by being a divisive rather than a uniting institution, and the sectarian temper makes it divisive, whether it burdens the situation with actual rival churches or not. The church must become community-minded. It cannot repair the damage of community division by any saving of souls, since the divided community can- not so organize its resources as to conserve and utilize saved souls. Without the community spirit, saved souls must either flee to the city for usefulness or else fall from grace. The Gospel of Cooperation. As a community A STRONG VILLAGE CHURCH ID a population of Q;I this church enrolls about .125 people, and provides for the social and religious life of the community ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 73 agency, the church will concern itself primarily with forms of cooperation civic, economic, educational, and religious. Roads and schools, the chief civic as- sets of the country community, will be its twin re- sponsibilities. The grange and the market will be its allies. Its gospel will concern these spheres of religion. They will be the concrete subject-matter of preaching, interpreted in terms of community sin and salvation. Worship and Play. Again, rural leadership, through the church, will address itself to the crying needs of worship and of play. Those two words be- long together. The affinities of worship are not with work; its place in religion is not the same as that of work. There is no actual service of God but work. Worship is something else a second, equal good. It is the play of the spiritual life. It idealizes and summarizes its most significant points, its highest joys and deepest solemnities, like birth, death, the sense of sin, the relief of salvation. But its function is the function of play. It is necessary to urge this stub- bornly, because the rural mind, while devout as to prayer, is not ordinarily devout as to local history, nor as to the season's crops, nor as to children's games, nor as to beauty in garb and manner. Because it is not devout in these matters, its young life aban- dons it for the city, which does idealize life in steel and stone, in the civic spectacle, in libraries and gal- leries, in baseball games, moving pictures, and even in milliners' windows. The country, too, must be 74 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS given its parade, in which life is admired and made to glitter. And how rich its materials for idealiza- tion! The pageant of its founders and their deeds, the anniversaries of the Christian year, especially the seed-time and the harvest festivals which Chris- tian got from Jew and Jew from pagan, the local fair, the corn and tomato club and other children's contests, community athletic teams, Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, the singing school and the school entertainment all these the church will foster and promote as its own because they are the community's, and because only when life in all its reaches is ideal- ized, played upon by the imagination and played at through some recreational expression, can its totality be significantly summed up in the worship of God. Emancipating the Individual. Again, and to make its country life program finally adequate, the church must address itself to individuality which has been crushed in the excessive solidarity of the farm family. The farm family had in excess the cohesion which the farm community lacked. As an economic and moral group-unit, it was so closely knit as to forbid play to personality. It cramped the self-expression, particu- larly of the wife and children. "I feared my father; I dared not love him" is the too frequent confession of the country-bred man. The country home showed the worst vices of unregulated production. No fac- tory legislation socialized its methods. It exacted work and paid no wages. Its hours of labor were un- limited. It employed child labor, not with equally ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 75 harmful effects as those of industry, but in the same exploiting spirit. John Brown lived and fought in Kansas, but Professor McKeever has had to face the farmers of that state with the startling challenge, "Do you own your daughter?" The West in general has housed its stock better than it has housed its men. Rural life has still to be rendered into the fundamental terms of human well-being. Its methods must be re- vised to get the fullest value for the individual life. Farm Mothers and Farm Children. Now the church is against all exploitation, all harmful overwork of women and children, all grinding labor. She stands for education, specialization, a fair chance for in- dividual talent within, and not at the cost of run- ning away from, rural life. The farm boy and girl must have room for initiative, a garden or a poultry yard of their own, some ready money, a weekly half- holiday. The farm mother must have machinery in the kitchen, some definable right in the family purse, time for her visiting and her club. The coun- try church must enrich her life by organization for all ages and sexes. Doubtless the disintegration of family life and the division of its members' inter- ests have gone too far in the city. In the country how- ever they must be carried further than in the past. So long as town spells individual freedom and country spells bondage, the forceful boy or girl will not be slow to choose. The Church has first to free and then to socialize the individual units of rural society. The Things That Are Caesar's. All the foregoing 76 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS is to confess that the Church is not to furnish technical leadership in agricultural processes. This the state is prepared to supply in rich abundance. It is the church's cue to specialize in the fields which she au- thoritatively commands, those of religion and funda- mental social organization. But nothing is more cer- tain than that without her authority in these fields the entire program of rural betterment is blocked. Twenty years ago scientific agriculture in America was in its infancy. Its intellectual outlook was vitiated by crude conclusions from misunderstood Darwinism. Its interests were narrowly technical, its spirit materi- alistic, its exponents one-sided in culture. They were despised by the classical colleges, called "dungists," and some of them justified the appellation. Then came the wonderful burst of new agricultural knowledge and an avalanche of financial resources for the sup- port of research and popularization. Next dawned the consciousness of the high social mission, of the statesmanship, of rural rehabilitation. The Question of Motive. All went well till the rural betterment movement came to the question of motive. Then technique and taxes alike felt suddenly inadequate, paralyzed with a sense of moral bank- ruptcy. One saw the humorous spectacle of previ- ously self-confident experts scurrying to the Church and theological seminary to find some one who com- manded the sources of motive some one who could make the people of rural communities cease gossip- ing and begin to work together in the light of a new ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 77 day. One saw also what was not humorous at all but solemnly joyous, namely, the technical experts them- selves often struck pious by the sense of the need of an adequate power to fill and thrill the great resources of their securing. Some of the most genuine, devout, and practical Christian messages of to-day are com- ing from the agricultural colleges and the rural econo- mists. They fully appreciate and confess the central place of the church in rural life. They call for the situation calls for a profound and adequate pro- gram of rural evangelization in intimate and mutually inspirational fellowship with the great economic and technical program of the state in behalf of the open country. Average Conditions. The current program of ru- ral betterment is wonderfully complete and attractive. It by no means compasses, however, the needs of vast areas of America on which people are trying to live from the soil. It assumes rather land of sufficient natural fertility to support rural population of aver- age density, as well as a population of average intelli- gence and capacity to utilize American advantages, to whom the great resources of the state and nation for rural betterment are equitably extended. Under such conditions, the better methods and disposal of re- sources, agricultural, social, and religious, which con- stitute our adequate program, may be trusted to issue in a high degree of happiness and prosperity. Home missions then will consist only temporarily and inci- dentally in extending financial aid to rural churches. 78 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS Professor Carver's challenge may be fully accepted: If Christianity means better farming, as it should, the better land will inevitably get into Christian hands, which in the long run will be amply able to sustain their own churches. Poor Populations on Poor Lands. But on the vast areas where these conditions cannot pertain rural home missions must continue to mean something quite different and more expensive. Where, for example, there is a heavier population than the land can sus- tain in decency, degraded conditions of life are bound to result, typified for instance in the highlander of the Southern Appalachians. Here are sterile mountain counties with as many people per square mile as live in the fruitful prairie states. From the standpoint of the economist the people should leave the land and come away to some place where they can make a de- cent living. Yet, strangely, they love their wild and barren acres as home. While they stay, home mis- sions must stay with them. Moral victories may be won even on a field which is economically untenable. Survey of a Mountain Community. Where one of the narrow southernmost spurs of the Appalachians penetrates a seaboard state lives to-day a community of 78 souls under essentially pioneer conditions. These .78 constitute 13 families. There are two other house- holds, composed in the one case of a widow dependent on a Confederate pension and the community's single spinster, and in the other of two missionary teachers. There are three orphans, one child cripple, and one ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 79 illegitimate among them, two aged couples, and one bachelor hired man the only wage-earner of the group. All the rest make their living, such as it is, in family groups under economic independence. Prac- tically all of them own land (which is worth from two to ten dollars per acre), and all of them subsist par- tially by its cultivation. Yet but one of the thirteen families really farms for a livelihood and that one only by the renting of hay-land in the valley below to supplement the meager acres which the mountain af- fords. Five do this farming entirely without wheels, each with a single work animal for which they cannot produce sufficient feed. Hewers of Wood. Seven of the thirteen families live chiefly by the forest itself. Its first wealth has been appropriated by the lumberman long ago. Such rare lumber tracts as remain are exploited by capital with machinery and trained men. It is left to these seven mountaineers to go lonely into the depleted for- est with saw and ax to cut tie timbers for the railroad. The smaller trees they sometimes turn into fire-wood for neighboring village people. One man splits the rarer cedar or poplar into shingles. Nothing more complicated, more akin to the great world's busy in- dustry, is attempted than this. Other Occupations. Besides being hewers of wood, three heads of families perform the function of trans- portation for the rest, hauling ties to the railroad and supplies to the mountain. One of these is also the community's only approach to a capitalist. He owns 8o THE NEW HOME MISSIONS four or five yoke of oxen and employs the aforemen- tioned hired man. A profane and forceful Scotch- Irishman from another state, he married a wife well educated in the missionary school, half kindly and half cruelly keeps an orphan child, and represents the embryo exploiter of his neighbors. Two more fami- lies supplement their living from the soil by keeping the community in touch with the outer world ; a man as mail-carrier, a woman as postmistress. The post- office is the sole indigenous community center, but it is soon to be abolished and the livelihood of two fam- ilies cut in two by the extension of rural free delivery. Then both families say they must move away. Literacy, Health, Morals. The adults of four of the thirteen families are fairly literate, but none of these is native of the mountains and but one of the state. Of the 52 children of the community 28 are of school age according to local interpretation, and 22 of these are enrolled. There are four months of school term to be provided with $200 of public funds, but these have usually been supplemented with three or four months more of mission school term. The health of the community is good. There is little tuberculosis (the crippled child probably has it), and no typhoid locally originating. Eyes are in fair con- dition and hookworm not suspected. The children are usually bright. It is not clear whether the few cases of excessive dulness are due either to mental defect or to saturation in tobacco from infancy. Most of the women dip snuff. Drunkenness is rare. The ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 81 single case of illegitimacy within memory was punished by the relentless ostracism of the woman. Family groups persist loyally, as under pioneer conditions they must. On the other hand a boy of seventeen married a girl of fifteen and to-day at nineteen is the father of two children. Survival of Primitive Religion. Denominationally speaking the community is first of all "hard-shell" Baptist, then Methodist and missionary Baptist. But none of these churches has ever had permanent or- ganizations or maintained stated services. Just now the only acutely religious people are the Holy Rollers who have come up from the mines and converted the three or four remotest families of the community. Their characteristics are the claim of sanctification, the gift of tongues, and religious emotion expressed in physical paroxysms. They meet in a mountain cabin. Suddenly babel breaks forth. The lights are extinguished. They throw themselves together on the floor and roll till exhausted. Recently a woman per- sisted in the exercise for half a day, lying in the open air before her cabin while the community sat around on rail fences and mule-back to watch. They are back in 1800 when stricken sinners lay in windrows under the "power" of the Kentucky revival. Like men, like results. Deserting the Mountains. Economically speaking, there is just one sensible man in the community. At the time of this writing he is just preparing to move thirty miles to town and put his family to work in 82 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS the cotton-mill. He proposes to omit for them the entire evolution of the American people from 1835 to 1890 and to press them direct from the pioneer into the industrial stage. The physical, social, and moral risk is apparent; but their family income from the beginning will be more than he could think of gaining as expert tie cutter and mountain farmer. Missions Upon an Inadequate Basis. Home mis- sions as represented by two Christian women doing religious, community, and school work may convert individuals and even somewhat mitigate the social fragmentariness and spiritual desolation of this moun- tain community. They may educate the children, who are by no means degenerate, to leave the mountains, which of course does not help the community which is left. Of constructive social results, to speak truth, they have little to show for their efforts. The frontier has lasted too long with these thirteen families. They are not socially plastic. They cannot farm on the mountain and achieve a decent standard of living. Industry must either come to them or they go to in- dustry. For the present their salvation is in the mill towns. And what a salvation ! Undeveloped Resources. The case just cited is an extreme one, intended to enforce the dependence of satisfactory religious results upon a sound economic foundation. After the surplus population is removed, the resources of the mountains should be developed to the full so as to sustain adequately those who re- main. There are types of agriculture peculiarly suited w ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 83 to such regions ; stock-raising, dairying, and fruit cul- ture. The better mission schools are working hard to teach the new generation how to profit by these re- sources. There are extensive deposits of coal, too, un- derlying these mountain farms, and industry is fast coming to the mountaineer when the mountaineer will, not go to industry. Between industry and improved mountain agriculture, population may hope to get ad- justed to resources. Meanwhile, home missions as Christian philanthropy must strive to equalize oppor- tunity for the woodsman's boy as for the Turk or Hindu. The Case of the Negro. Another case in which our adequate program will be very inadequate without the further painstaking efforts of home missions is presented by the eight million rural Negroes of the United States. Hordes of them, if they knew such things existed, could not read the bulletins through which Uncle Sam would teach his children to farm. Generally they have been left outside of the scope of those agencies by which the states seek to quicken agriculture. The Negro's schools have been miserable, inadequate fragmentary in time, poorly housed, poorly taught. Even over his conspicuous gains in landownership, the economist shakes his head, remind- ing us that in the long run land will gravitate into the hands of those who can use it best. But the Negro knows little but traditional, land-robbing farm methods. In common with all tenants, he uses insuf- ficient fertilizer. His typical tenant holding is too 84 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS small from which to make a living in the American sense. Child labor seems the only alternative to starv- ation for his family. In debt to his landlord for a year's living before his crop is "made," his margin of opportunity would be pitiably narrow even if his intelligence were greater. In many sections his prog- ress is discouraged by violence. Sometimes his agri- cultural organizations are favored by his neighbors so long as they make him a better producer; nearly always they are bitterly resented when they seek to influence labor conditions or the prices of agricultural products. A Rural Social Settlement. Rural mission schools for Negroes have from the beginning largely sus- tained their pupils by furnishing them with the op- portunity of farm or domestic labor in connection with the institution. They had therefore less to learn from the modern social redirection of education, since they were already teaching so largely in the terms of the pupils' immediate environment. For them, as for home missions in general, the new order consists largely in gathering up and revaluing their social by- products, and then in setting them up as direct social aims. Thus the Joseph Keasby Brick School in east- ern North Carolina had operated a farm of 1,029 acres, and had essentially conducted a rural social set- tlement for twenty years; had graduated generations of tenants into farm owners; had organized and in- structed farmers ; had sent out brilliant young men as instructors of agriculture or the industries, till it ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 85 found itself in the midst of a Negro population own- ing 100,000 acres of farm land in three contiguous counties and with taxable property in one of the three worth $1,250,000. Yet all this while the school had cherished the delusion that its chief function was to prepare students for college. When therefore re- cently its supporting missionary board asked it to accept explicitly the role of a school of rural life, it somewhat resented the suggestion. Its practise was better than its preaching. Its thinking needed redirec- tion though its doing had long ago turned "home to the instant need of things." Notable Community Service. Three years ago a large Negro school in Alabama, whose large farm had previously been an ornamental adjunct rather than an integral factor in education, set itself directly to de- velop a department of rural community service. Its first step was to organize a Negro farmers' associa- tion for its county. This association meets in the county court-house three times a year; has two hun- dred members and an average attendance of seventy- five. Two years ago it established a Colored Farm- ers' County Fair, which last year gathered 2,000 ex- hibits and awarded nearly a hundred different prizes. The school conducts an annual "school in the field" a day on which the whole countryside gathers to its model farm, the men to inspect and receive instruc- tion in new agricultural methods, the women to have demonstrations in home nursing, the care and feeding of infants, cooking, and sewing. Two hundred men 86 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS and seventy-five women now profit by this occasion. Fifty of them, a year ago, took away each 100 grains of tested seed-corn and competed for a prize Jersey pig which should go to the farmer raising the largest yield of corn. In a state which averages less than 15 bushels, David Rutledge raised 56 bushels on one acre and got the pig. An agricultural prize has been established for students of the institution for the greatest profit from a half acre of land. Nine stu- dents have prepared the land, planned the crops, tested the seed, and are now competing for this prize. Ad- vanced students in sociology have been studying the inside and outside of farm homes in order to make the gains of better farming count in better living. Cooperating with the State. The college has laid hold of the public school system, too, and is redirecting it into social efficiency. Thus the County Teachers' Institute is annually held within its walls and con- ducted by one of its professors under state authoriza- tion. In connection with this Institute industrial ex- hibits by the several rural schools are developed. Two days per year are allowed to public school-teachers for observation in schools other than their own. These are utilized by the college to offer a County School of Observation in which suitable methods for rural schools are discussed and demonstrated by its model school. A teachers' reading circle is conducted by its extension department. Patrons of rural schools are being organized into School Improvement Leagues and the educational authorities of the state are being ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 87 encouraged to take a more active interest in their welfare. The railway system on which the college is located is seeking to develop a more diversified type of agriculture along its line, in view of the approach of the cotton boll-weevil; and, along with the state and federal government, is fighting the cattle tick. The college is being used by all these agencies. Its suc- cessful alfalfa culture has been made an object-lesson to the entire state in profitable diversification ; its dip- ping vat has become the center of the county cam- paign for tick eradication. Large Beginnings. All this is necessitated by an adequate program of home missions for the rural Ne- gro, because for him hitherto the resources of the state have been inadequately supplied. He has been so poor a farmer that he could neither maintain family life upon a decent standard of living nor support the community factors essential to rural well-being. But where the better mission schools reach out, large be- ginnings have been made. No more eager and teach- able population exists in America than the Negro farmer, when once he is adequately acquainted with the best possibilities of rural life. And probably no ministers more uniformly make it their business to organize and teach for rural betterment than some of the graduates of such schools as have been described. The author receives hundreds of reports from Negro churches each year in which community gains in cot- ton, peanuts, or sugar-cane are as carefully counted as souls saved. Yet there are left unawakened, inert 88 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS millions. Among them and those of other backward races and groups in the open country lies one of the longest, most stubborn, most patriotic and rewarding tasks of home missions. The extracting and exploit- ing industries, like lumbering and mining, project their peculiar communities and social problems into rural conditions and constitute special tasks for home mis- sions. Wherever they go, mountain and marsh, prairie and piedmont, coastal plain and high plateau, each adds its touch of variety, its challenge and its diffi- culty to their work. Who Is My Neighbor? Recent studies in local his- tory have established the intimate dependence of civ- ilization upon these physical variations. A very little ridge of hills in the midst of a plain, a very narrow valley huddled between mountains, will produce radi- cal differences in population. How very little a physi- cal difference may reenforce other factors to create strange social types is seen within twenty miles of New York City, where descendants of Indians, Dutch, and Negro slaves have lived for a century on the edge of the highlands as a peculiar community, ex- tremely backward in culture and utterly unmoved by the mighty pulsing of the city's life so near them. In the most fertile and highly improved prairie states, the thin fringes of brush along the streams often shelter generations of social Ishmaelites. The richest valleys often look up to impoverished hill towns, lack- ing every progressive factor of rural life. Not only in the city are there proximity of wealth and poverty, ADEQUATE PROGRAM FOR COUNTRY 89 sharp contrast of social fortunes, and the need to unite men in community enthusiasms. In the country, as well, many a Christian, longing for a larger sphere of service, may walk in his garden in the cool of the day and find a mission field no farther away than the hills to which he lifts his eyes. THE CITY AND THE STRANGER Concern for the City. The nation has watched its own marvelous urban growth with deep searchings of heart. It is found that 46 per cent, of our population now lives in cities and we are wont to record this fact as a Problem in capital letters. The gains of the country for the last decade were 1 1 per cent. ; of the city 35 per cent. Our cities now number 2,405 with a population of 42,623,000 people, and the city has grown faster in prestige than in numbers. Its psychological sway is far beyond its weight. The country thinks in terms of the city as never before. The city bears acutely upon the souls of all the people. The country is in a mood of spiritual dependence and quickly adopts the city ways and conventionali- ties. Is the Country Harmed? The assumption, how- ever, that urban growth is necessarily at the expense of the country needs to be sharply challenged. The growth of the rural districts in the last decade is close to the growth in total population of long settled civili- zations like that of Germany ; it nearly equals the in- crease of our own native stock. The country is popu- 93 94 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS lous enough, or rather too populous in spots, already. Fewer country people could support the city than at present, and the economic balance will be better when more have gone from the country. One farm laborer can produce enough to feed seven or eight peo- ple at present, and under ideal conditions of American agriculture ought to be able to feed sixteen. The chances are that, with normal development, the city will grow even more rapidly than in the past. What it has been getting, up to now, is surplus population, especially that from foreign immigration. The British Agricultural Board treats the English urban movement as normal, and complains only of the supplementary drain of population overseas. Reason for the City. The city is inevitable. It is the creation of the country and exists for the sake of the country. When country population increases nor- mally and produces with the tools and the science of modern civilization, it needs vast city populations to transport, transform, and exchange its surplus. Spe- cifically, the city is the product of the machine; it is the greatest machine-made product. One may con- dense the history of its evolution as follows : Steam substituted the machine for the hand tool, and the machine necessitated the factory, which is simply a battery of tools moved by common power. Many ma- chines in one place require many people to run them. These many people living and working together are a city. Where Must the City Be? The location of cities is TOTAL 49,348,683 TOTAL ^dL^^i 2,623. 383 Circles sAow relative size of totals Based on Census of /9/O RURAL AXU URBAN POPULATION THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 95 typically a reflection of the concentration of industry. Where there is material to be manufactured, power to drive machines, and men to consume goods, the cities spring up in groups. Factory production seeks proximity of raw material, water-power or fuel, and markets. The result is not an even distribution of urban population, but its concentration where condi- tions have located industry. The varying accessibility of labor and the tendency of industries to mass to- gether have created in America very interesting ex- tremes of concentration. Thus 40 per cent, of all the gloves manufactured in the United States are made in a small city * of 21,000 people; or, more specifically, of 381 glove factories in the United States (Census of 1900) 243 are in New York State, 166 in Fulton County, 150 being in the adjoining municipalities of Gloversville and Johnstown. 2 The iron industry has two conspicuous centers; and the extreme concentra- tion of the knit goods industry, of the manufacture of collars and cuffs, boots and shoes, silk, glass, and pot- tery is familiar. Each of these industries has created a train of cities. While industry has a general west- ward movement, by far its largest bulk and the great- est percentage of its workers lie in the n northeastern states constituting less than one fifth of our area and bounded by a line run from Philadelphia to St. Louis and thence to St. Paul. And since the city is the re- flection of industry it is natural to find in this area 'Gloversville, N. Y. * Brighatn, Commercial Geography, 209. 96 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS 32 out of our 50 cities of more than 100,000 popu- lation each. The Great Cities. The largest cities of any nation have outgrown the forces which originally located them about single industries or limited markets. Favored by the law that "to him that hath shall be given" they have become vast centers of production, gathered empires of dependent territory around them, focused upon themselves the lines of transportation, become the world markets and the radiant points of civilization. They are among the great social and spiritual achievements of our day. The Shame of the City. A just social evaluation of the city requires the balancing of its human losses and human gains. Its shame has been often exploited crowding, anonymousness, heedlessness of the in- dividual as a person. While the machinery of the city follows the single life closely, recording name and birth and death, and how much it costs one either to live or to die, yet it is as names rather than as immortal souls that the city regards its children. The difficulty of acquiring a home in the physical sense puts great moral overstrain on family life. The immensely diverse and conflicting elements of the city make civic unity diffi- cult The city is a synonym for bad government, which means primarily unsuitable government, one not as yet properly adapted to the new social situation. It is inevitably the lair of commercialized vices. Machine-like organization devised to serve the great needs of civilization is prostituted to serve the THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 97 forces which degrade and damn. Temptation is sys- tematized and made profitable. The Glory of the City. But its worst shame must not blind us to the city's glory. In the city ideals dominate environment. It may become what it will. Man made it, but, instead of calling it therefore arti- ficial, reverence ought to see in it the completest and most natural utterances of the divine in him. It has greater moral resources than the country and it handles them better. It is making much more rapid social progress. It points the way in most of the hopeful programs of social betterment. Health. The city has reduced infant mortality to the lowest rate ever achieved. It is preventing as never before the tremendous waste of being born only to die. The body is better safeguarded in the city than in the country. Eyes, teeth, and tonsils are cared for in the public school. There are better general provisions for the care of sickness less pain in sick- ness and far better social measures to prevent sick- ness. Even tuberculosis is shown to be less prevalent among city children in the United States than in the country. Repeated physical tests between country- bred and city-bred students in university gymnasiums have shown the average city boy to be freer from physical malformations and more normally developed. Sanitation. City streets are cleaner than barn- yards, and city tenements than too many rural kitchen yards. The city man is cleaner in his personal habits than is the American farmer. The farmer consumes 98 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS the milk which the city will not buy. He has not learned that it is no cleaner than the flies which light upon his utensils; nor that the "cowey taste" which the city visitor misses in his pasteurized milk is simply the contribution from the manure pile. City food is both cleaner, cheaper, and more varied than country food. The air of city gathering-places, through super- vised ventilation, is purer than that of the country's, where, as Dr. North points out, the advantage of working all day in the open air is more than offset by the habit of sleeping all night in a tightly closed room with one's head under the bedclothes. While American health statistics from the registration area (17 states) indicate that the country is somewhat healthier than the city, it must be remembered, for example, that the whole hookworm belt is outside of this area. It is doubtful whether a survey covering health conditions in the entire nation would prove the country to be generally more healthy. At any rate, improvement is infinitely easier in the city than in the country owing to better agencies of public con- trol in sanitation. Conditions of Work. At present there are greater opportunities for work, and work to utilize more men at fitting tasks for city men than in the country. There is more leisure as well as more work. The city offers the shortest working day ever afforded to humanity. Social and Educational Advantages. There is also wider fellowship; for while neighborliness is scarce, THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 99 within class lines both at work and at play organiza- tion is keen. In the city the lowliest may belong to something. From the organization of the Christian Church down, the city has been the home of group loyalties and of democratic movements. The city is intellectually alert as compared with the country. Everybody reads the daily paper; everybody discusses the issues of the day; living in a city is in itself an education. It is an education in esthetic sensibility. The store windows, public buildings, amusement- places the stage and even dress tend to universalize taste. The city has schools for all its children, which is far from true of the country at large. They are none too good, but they are the best which were ever afforded to the people in general and their results are immeasurably significant. Life Richer and More Satisfying. There are more varied satisfactions in the city. In the country the range of harmonious and helpful things is limited, and it is not great enough to fill the most forceful and adventurous lives. The city affords many avenues of rewarding interest to one who is not vicious but who is merely eager and zestful. Goodness is better organized and more efficiently directed in the city than in the country; it also touches life at more points. City life is dynamic. Its moral mood is that of achievement. Religion is less inclined to deal in nega- tions. The City at Its Best. All told, the city is democ- ioo THE NEW HOME MISSIONS racy's finest achievement for the largest numbers of men. Any of its moods justify the poet: "Earth hath not anything to show more fair; Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touch- ing in its majesty." To understand the city at its best one needs to ex- plore the city child's memories. One whose earliest experiences were those of a white cottage standing amid green fields, whose adventures were of the swim- ming-hole, and whose dignitary was the country dea- con, almost certainly fails to understand the satis- faction one may find in idealizing the good old win- dowless bedroom, the good old city pavement, the good old public bath, the policeman, the shops, and the public school; yet all these may be as sound and sacred material for human reverence as the other. The Citizen. But the finest achievement of the city is socialized character, and this may be found best ex- hibited in industrial masses. Owning no home, and never expecting to own one; with little of personal wealth, laboring from day to day with little personal reserve against the future, millions of human beings live on worthily, strong in the possession of collective responsibility and wealth, inhabiting the whole city as their home and owning it in the broader sense of enjoying its heaped-up common possessions. They do not miss what they have never had, and they have both human satisfactions and moral excellencies of a new and permanent sort. This thoroughgoing ur- THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 101 banized humanity is the most promising material of the city church. New Religious Conditions. Religion in the city is in the same condition with political and social institu- tions. Most of their forms and too much of their spirit are simply survivals from the farmer economy, not at all adapted to urban conditions. Thus the older home missionary program is totally inadequate to the modern city. The mission church of the older commercial city was fairly successful because it dealt with a largely static population clerks and dependents who were devoid of class resentment. Now however it has to deal with an acutely class-conscious industrial population with which it almost totally fails. Indus- trial workers have personally felt the contrast of wealth and poverty which the city presents and have consequently thought effectively about them. They have asked the question of the fundamental justice of existing conditions and have acquired a highly critical attitude for institutions which tend to restrain men without at the same time urgently concerning them- selves with the rectifying of conditions. The Fortunes of the Churches. The mobility of population in cities, rapid changes within given areas, and the irresponsibility of the transient tenant class tend to make the lot of the smaller city church always precarious. Almost any moment its substantial peo- ple may have to move away in the face of an inun- dating flood of aliens. Expansion of manufacturing or business, with any of the more radical movements 102 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS of populations, may reduce to poverty or exterminate even the strongest city church. Probably no American city of over 100,000 will fail to show ancient and venerable houses of worship turned into storage ware- houses or vaudeville theaters. Urban Missionary Strategy. The subjection of re- ligious institutions in the city to sudden attack and at almost any point, by changes in population, compels a missionary strategy which views the total denomina- tional prospects of a given city as a single problem. To make headway a denominational group must or- ganize and view all church problems as home mission- ary problems. Its several congregations cannot sur- vive if they are parochially selfish, each tending to go its own way. Land and buildings cost so much in the city that only the most exceptional church can get along without denominational aid at some time or an- other. Denominational city missionary organizations which include all the congregations of a city and which view all their problems as missionary problems are characteristic of our present religious policy. Again the city is too difficult for Christian conquest by the denominations acting separately. More and more it compels interdenominational strategy and organiza- tion. The Church as a whole must get the sense of the city as a whole and must collectively direct its forces to the city's redemption. Types of Churches. The religious strategy of the modern city, with its suburbs and "satellite" cities, necessitates a wide range of religious institutions LABOR TEMPLE Located at Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue. Xcw York City. There are 600,000 people south of Fourteenth Street and east of the Bowery. Attendance at Labor Temple, in igij, 250,000 THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 103 matching the city's varied needs. Even in the heart of the city the majority of churches will be of the familiar "family" type. American life fortunately is not so stratified but that its large middle class reaches both up and down and combines in its char- acteristic churches the capitalistic, professional, com- mercial, and industrial populations. As many sur- veys have shown, Protestantism is not literally out of touch with "labor." In typical cities as high as 75 per cent, of Protestant church population are wage- earners, either as clerks or industrial workers. Given adequate resources the extension of "family" churches to match the growth of cities in their residential dis- tricts is one of the most profitable forms of home mis- sions. There will be more new churches of this type than of any other; and large investments in them will be soonest justified. A growing city in the Middle West, for example, is located in the bend of a river. Across the river on two sides are massed its industries and the lowest grade of laboring popu- lation. On the other two sides a middle-class popu- lation, chiefly American, has expanded in an almost continuous band about two blocks wide per year, for the last decade. In these successive rims of city growth a single denomination has located some ten churches, most of which have been successful beyond the average. Other denominations have secured like results. In a few cases rival churches have interfered with one another, but on the whole the process has been effective and orderly. 104 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS Future Development. With the prospective growth of our more than 2,000 cities in the next decade, mis- sionary forces face the necessity of furnishing several thousands of such typical churches. To be sure, their constituency is largely not home-owning, and they suffer from the extreme mobility of urban popula- tions, but there is a larger permanent nucleus than in any other type of city church and with reasonably strategic location and forceful leadership such churches ought to and do succeed. They must of course be housed and equipped in general harmony with the type of community which surrounds them. Their parish methods need not be radically revolu- tionized, but they must live ever in the sense of their greater field the entire city. "Down-town" Churches. Specialized types of churches are also found in most American cities. For example almost every population of 100,000 people can support at least one "down-town" church, or- ganized around a commanding pulpit and furnishing a forum for inspirational messages to the entire city. Such churches frequently wield great civic power, as well as gather immense audiences of more or less transient people. The Institutional Church. This type is an attempt to serve the needs of communities deficient in home life by reason of poverty, or of new or unplaced people living in boarding-houses. It performs a great variety of functions, furnishing amusement and recreation, education, medical care and nursing, employment and THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 105 business advice, to its constituency. It generally suc- ceeds chiefly in serving young people who are rising out of the class in which they were born, or during their transition from country to city. The actual com- munity life about the institutional church frequently does not progress, but is rather continually depleted by the removal of its best material through the successful agency of the church, the masses remaining no higher than they were. Frequently when civic agencies of social betterment are perfected the institutional church is found to be no longer necessary. But where it is needed and when it is needed it is a fundamental form of Christian service. Churches for Foreign-speaking People. Usually under native pastors, these furnish another character- istic urban type. Our more recent aliens are generally non-Protestant and not easily accessible to missionary organizations. When Protestant, however, as in the case of the Welsh, German, and other northern Eu- ropean peoples, the church organized along the line of the common language group is a suitable and often effective one. On the other hand it should be re- membered that the gospel in one's native tongue is not the same as the gospel preached effectively under city conditions. Many of these churches simply bring the rural traditions of Europe, which are no more suitable to the modern city than the rural traditions of Amer- ica. The children rapidly Americanize and the charm of the gospel in the native tongue wears away. The foreign-speaking church peculiarly needs social redi- io6 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS rection. It may then hold its young people and de- velop normally into self-support as an American church, or it may become extinct after performing its temporary service to an alien group in transition. The Social Settlement. Extreme diversity of class, creed, and race under city conditions frequently makes the sectarian church simply an agent of further divi- sion in the community. It cannot therefore do the fundamental social work of organizing a neighbor- hood spirit. The creation of such spirit and its devel- opment are more easily served by the social settle- ment, which may be ardently Christian in spirit but not ecclesiastical in form. The social settlement brings diverse people together, finds for them com- mon ties, gets them to cooperate and therefore to respect and like one another; helps them to idealize their common life and in general establishes the moral foundations of constructive social progress. In rare cases a church manages to do all this when it has a pastor who is large enough to tower above the insti- tution which supports him, and when a church is large enough to allow him to be a community man rather than an ecclesiastic. There are splendid ex- amples of such men who have grown up with urban communities, have overcome their prejudices, incar- nated their ideals, and subordinated the institutional life of the church to the functions of social leader- ship. But the man and the church that can do this are rare. Social Ministries of the State. The largest and UNDAY SERVICE SLOVAK SERVICE SLOVACI SU VI TAN I SUNDAY SCHOOL FOR YOUNG* OLD CHINESE BIBLE SCHOOL ** MAGYAR SERVICE M IN DENKIT SZIVESEN IATUNK ITALIAN SERVICE ITAUANI BENVENUTI POLI5H SERVICE YOUII 3CKCIUB WELCOME. f OPEN AIR SERVICE &t f t I " .--r. ENGLISH MIGHT HOUR SERVICE ,# WELCOME! BULLETIN-BOARD OF A DOWN-TOWN CHURCH, NEW YORK Meeting the needs for church services in a [xilyglot community THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 107 best social progress in the modern city has been wrought through the civic activities of Christian men apart from the direct activities of organized churches. This is probably to be a permanent condition, and it is not necessarily derogatory to the Church. Even if the Church were less sectarian it could not match the extreme diversity of city population. Social problems are largely problems of technique involving expert knowledge and highly specialized talent. The Church is less able to furnish these qualities because it in- cludes all sorts and conditions of men. Many social services may be better performed by more limited vol- untary organizations. City government supported by the taxation of the entire people is properly responsi- ble for the larger social environment of its people. Through government, Christian ideals and Christian conscience can most fundamentally affect the condi- tions of urban life. Through politics the Christian man can approach the entire city as his field of service and touch its various human problems, not indeed with the old intimate personal touch, but in far-reaching working alliance of the group-leaders of its diverse classes and races, in a broad and effective way. The Unappreciated Church. On the other hand, just because most social reforms can be secured and financed by the state, the free Church, which can exist only through the love and gifts of its adherents, has a better right to both of these than some agencies which have come between it and the state. In this respect the Church is being called back into its own. io8 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS There is new warmth of feeling between social work- ers and organized Christianity evidenced by the large recent stress upon the Church in social life in the teaching of the schools of philanthropy. The direct social activity of the Church will surely increase rap- idly in the next decade ; and home missions and social service will come better to understand one another in the modern city. Much of the enthusiasm and many of the Christian efforts which have been drafted off into social service channels outside of the Church had far better return and help convert the mind and perfect the machinery of the Church for this task. Division of Labor. The Church need not feel be- littled by any discovery of permanent limitations upon its direct usefulness in social service. Whenever any other agency can really do a thing better than the Church can it should be allowed to do it. Many pre- cise social tasks will probably remain too complicated for direct performance by church machinery. The Church's clue is, first of all, many-sided service, with a variety of typical organizations ; secondly, timely serv- ice performed in advance of the arousing of civic conscience and the perfecting of civic machinery; and, finally, the permanent service of furnishing vision and religious inspiration deeper than any social knowl- edge. The Church need have no pessimism over its present situation. Its urban growth has exceeded that of the population. It is not out of touch with the profoundest of urban problems, but is rather serv- ing them by a variety of ministrations. The city is THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 109 the best thing which God has yet achieved through man, and its better fortunes for all the future are bound up with the agency which can interpret its life and transfigure its work. The Stranger. Through the Church the city ought to be a place where strangers meet and make friends. But this is doubly difficult under American conditions. America is not settled in the sense of the older world. It has always contained an unexampled number of people new to their present environments. The native stock is hardly more at home than the foreign-born. The West, wherever it has been, has always been full of strangers and now there is the vast cityward move- ment. The cost of immigration includes the pain of loneliness, the temporary loss of social position and esteem, the risk of not-yet-established talent invested in new fields, and deep breaches in personal relations and neighborliness. Leakage from its ranks through immigration has been the chief numerical loss of the American Church. The church-member of the East too often has become the worldling of the West. The country deacon moves to the city and meets unex- pected barriers of social stratification in his own com- munion. There will be three or four years of lost time before he gets into most effective working rela- tions with his Church in a new place, if indeed his children ever survive the shock of changed environ- ment. The Foreigner. Of course the most difficult strang- I io THE NEW HOME MISSIONS er is the stranger from other shores. 1 There are now thirteen and a half million of foreign-born people in the United States, this being 14 per cent, of the total population. They constitute over one fourth of the population in the New England and Middle Atlantic States. Adding those one or both of whose parents are foreign-born gives a total of 35 per cent, of our population as belonging to foreign stock in blood and culture. Foreigners came to America in the decade preceding 1910 to the number of eight and a half mil- lion. Three and a quarter million, however, went back home again, thus illustrating a newly acquired mo- bility in industrial populations, and leaving a net in- crease for the decade of five and a quarter million. The Geography of Immigration. Three fifths of all who came remained in the New England and Middle Atlantic States, which we have already identified as preeminently the industrial and urban section of our nation. Of the foreign-born 72 per cent, dwell in cities ; of the total population but 46 per cent. While this absolute massing of urban millions in the North- east constitutes the most extensive problem of the stranger, yet in proportion to population the most acute situation is in the mountain and coast states of the Northwest. Here naturally immigration is more largely rural and just for that reason more difficult 1 Since the immigrant has recently been the subject of inten- sive mission study, this book will deal only summarily with the background of facts which illuminate his home missionary problem. MILL ION S 12 34 'J6789 1O 182 1-30 1831-40 1841-50 1851-60 1861-70 1871-80 1881-90 1891-00 1901-10 1821-30 1831-40 1841-50 1851-60 1861-70 1871-80 1881-90 189100 1901- 1 Based on sf/umal Reports of Commissioner -General ofj/nmi<raiion TOTAL IMMIGRATION BY DECADES THE CITY AND THE STRANGER in to assimilate. Here must home missions continue many of their pioneer forms to meet a typically social ' problem. Nothing could better demonstrate the fal- lacy of the expectation that country life as such will solve social problems than the fact that the rural Pennsylvania Germans, whose ancestors came over to America in colonial times, are as a group less American in ideals and ways than the Germans who came chiefly to the cities in 1846. Nowhere do an alien tongue, creed, and social order so stubbornly en- trench themselves as in rural colonies. The natural conservatism of country life vies with clannishness to prevent change. The extremest case of all is that of the Mexican population of the Southwest, whose oc- cupancy of their territory antedates our oldest Eng- lish-speaking colonies and whose disinclination to be- come assimilated is the habit of three hundred years. This stubborn habit of clannishness must be prevented in the aliens of the newer West. Social and Moral Factors. Everywhere the alien flood comes largely from rural homes. Its character- istics in the American city are not only those of a population moving from one land to another, but from one social environment: to another. They are new to the city as well as to the nation, being largely a peasant population coming from the open country and undergoing the new stress of industrialization. In short, they are suffering the extreme experience of change in all directions at once. Necessarily then the percentage of individual incapacity to meet this dif- H2 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS ficult test will be large. The immigrant's almost uni- versal expectation of larger advantage than is destined to be realized in the new world gives a pathetic side to the whole problem. His material returns for his labor will not be so great as the stranger imagines, nor will his finer hopes have full realization. At the same time the coming of vast bodies of human beings cherishing strong and definite idealistic expectations certainly adds to the moral resources of the nation. We import energy and faith when we receive the stranger within our gates. The Newer Immigration. Previous to about 1882 most of our immigrant population had come from Northern and Western Europe, from lands which were racially allied to ours and which had experienced paral- lel developments in modern democracy and civilization. Suddenly since that time their great bulk has come largely from Southern and Eastern Europe. Now scarcely one fifth come from the Protestant and fully modernized lands whose civilization is likest ours, while over two thirds come from countries which bor- der on Asia or the Mediterranean Sea. We now deal not merely with the stranger, but such a stranger, who has grown up with our cities until they are largely the human reflection of his problems and struggles. They come from the lands of infinite local variation, of many dialects, of extreme clannishness, of social dis- integration. Every human variety may be found in all our greater cities living largely in clannish com- munities which reproduce as far as possible charac- THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 113 teristics of the old home. Our greatest city New York is particularly the city of the stranger, and gets its unique character and interest from being the gateway of the continent Give and Take. Home missionary interest is con- cerned primarily with the social give and take of the immigration process. It wishes to understand the interaction of the nation and its new peoples, in whom it is equally interested. Its knowledge of sociology leads it to expect that such a mingling of elements is bound to bring vigorous and rapid social change, whether in the direction of progress or not. Home missions are the attempt of religion to turn the immi- grant tide into channels of progress. As a concrete process the give and take of immigration exhibits six fundamental phases: i. Dislocation. To find oneself a stranger in a new place is to be filled with bewilderment and to ex- perience strain. The new world challenges the alien. It is an economic challenge. Can he find a job and make a living, especially one which will enable him to send for his family and establish them upon the American standard of living? It is a political chal- lenge. Can he adjust himself to American institu- tions, escaping exploitation by the political boss and arriving at responsible citizenship? It is a moral challenge. Foundations of customary morality are rooted in the habitual life of the group to which one belongs. The group being broken and the sanctions of morals shaken by his transfer to a new world, can II 4 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS the alien discover and rebuild character upon new sanctions? The Hebrew race for example has been traditionally chaste. One of the great moral victories of the Hebrew prophets of the eighth century before Christ was the stamping out of religious prostitution. It is perhaps the supreme tragedy of Judaism that the first general undoing of their work should be upon the soil of America, through the overstrain of immi- gration upon Hebrew morality. Finally immigration is a religious challenge. Orthodoxy tends to vanish with the control of the religious community which can- not survive in strength its transfer across the seas. Shall the Catholic and the Jew, who form the bulk of the new immigration, turn materialistic in America, or shall they find a new religious life springing out of their new experience and relations? 2. Marked Group Cohesion. As men cling to- gether in panic, the first instinctive remedy of the alien group for dislocation and its challenges is clan- nishness. The immigrant population sticks together in crowded colonies, invades similar industries, acts in political unity under the boss, experiences a narrow- ing moral and religious tendency in which reactionaries tend to get possession of the ancient sources of leader- ship. This tendency to swarm is the root of most of the problems of the modern city, and all of them are complicated by this reactionary tendency. From the standpoint of the nation one would wish to scatter the immigrant into small and easily assimilable bands. From the standpoint of his most thoughtful leaders, THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 115 however, there is a real danger in too rapid Americani- zation. There is a reactionary mood and an over- hasty one. Between them somewhere must lie the secret of normal evolution into a new life to which every people has a right. 3. The Revulsion of the Older Population. As the immigrant group withdraws from us in dread, we equally withdraw from it in dislike, and so the dis- tance between us is doubled. The American moves out of the foreign district. He seeks another job en masse if the foreigner comes into his industry. He denies the foreigner entrance to his social circle. He leaves his religious organization if the foreigner gets in. Part of the American's revulsion is intelligible, for, for the time being at least, the sudden coming of great masses of aliens threatens his standard of liv- ing. The newcomers can underlive us and their com- petition brings down our wages. On the other hand they bring new demands to be supplied, create new opportunities for our more established intelligence to serve, and rapidly adopt our standards themselves. Their gain on the whole is far greater than our loss. 4. Disintegration. In the process of give and take there follows the certain disintegration of immigrant groups. In spite of their best efforts at cohesion they invariably lose the young people. Church, cathe- dral, and synagogue alike suffer. The bigoted Jap- anese Buddhist, who came to California resolved to keep entirely clear of suggestions of Christianity, found even the moving picture shows full of Christian n6 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS suggestiveness. One who has grown up with it can- not possibly comprehend how freighted and saturated with new influences is every scene and activity of a new land. With America beating in upon his brain and heart, the young foreigner is bound to desert in thought, if not in fact, his native group. Unless caught up into the better phases of American life he becomes the social rebel and criminal, and the disin- tegration of the foreign colony thus becomes the dis- integration of society in general. The more success- ful and progressive members of the foreign-speaking group also tend to desert it. The millionaire or lit- erary Jew moves out of the ghetto and loses himself in American society, thus robbing the people of their natural leaders ; so that disintegrating foreign-speak- ing groups are even more dependent than others upon the purposeful leadership of patriotic and Christian agencies. 5. Assimilation. In the molding of the original American stock the elements were very diverse and the resulting sectional and regional variations were considerable. Each chief element brought some con- tribution of genius or tendency which was not totally lost in the resultant fusion, the survival of which has added variety and interest to our national life. In perspective we are reconciled to the variations in our English-speaking tradition introduced by the Irish and German immigration before 1880. It made our cities and helped develop our West. In time of war it shared our blood baptism into national unity. The THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 117 present generation thinks of America as naturally and fittingly including such variations in civilization as are presented by the surviving peculiarities of these groups. The Saturation Point. The real heart of our pres- ent fears as to immigration concerns the suddenness and bulk of a new kind of people whom we suspect on racial grounds and otherwise of being a new quality of human stuff. We are not clear whether, coming in such large numbers as they do and presenting a wider variation from the dominant civilization of our people, they may not introduce stubborn dissimilarities which will make it permanently harder to work out American destinies under the ideals of democracy and the Christian faith. A saturation point has un- doubtedly been reached in some of our more con- gested regions. No one can believe that immigrants of such quality should be dumped down where there are already too many. Both the maintenance of the American standards of living and the operation of the American institutions are made difficult under such circumstances. The Great-Heart Among Nations. That immigra- tion should be controlled with reference to assimila- tion is a formula that few will challenge. Its applic- ability to concrete issues however leaves room for many debates. Most of the tests by which the check- ing of immigration has been proposed are at outs with our traditions and obnoxious to our convictions. Christians who take the world view-point of foreign ii8 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS missions will be unable to regard the welfare of America alone in thinking about the immigration problem. Our brethren across the seas are as truly our brethren as the native-born. Check we may, di- rect we should, but essentially to obstruct so reverend an epic process as the migration of peoples in the search for ideals would be the unfaithfulness of America to her finest mission. Our gates should be still open to the North, South, East, and West, though more precise and scientific tests of fitness and greater certainty of practical advantage on the part of the incoming stranger may well be required. 6. Dilution. The outcome of the immigration process cannot fail to be the dilution of the American type by alien elements. "Dilution" is a figure of speech generally used in a deprecatory sense. Of course the peculiar stream of American life will be diluted and its inner qualities changed ; but the so-called alien ele- ments are already in the same world which Americans have to inhabit. The result of their inclusion in our midst will simply be a somewhat modified ratio of the elements as adjusted here. We dilute the life of the alien far more than he does ours. He brings us positive gifts; not merely raw labor power, but various fine heredities and conspicuous national tal- ents ; he brings also optimism and idealism which tend to dry up in the older stocks. From the moment we reached the Pacific coast and found our free land occupied the chief ground of our historic idealism failed us. From that moment we needed intensely a THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 119 new world commerce in morals and sentiments. Thus some of the finest exemplifications of the modern so- cial spirit are found in the American Hebrew. It is precisely the higher interests of our national life our music, art, and literature which are most con- spicuously indebted to the foreigner. As the "mud- hog" sinking the foundations of our tunnels and our sky-scrapers far underground, and as the poet singing from the loftiest pinnacle of our achievement, he of- fers his share to the common life. Missions and Dislocation. To each of these phases of the give and take of immigration there is a positive and appropriate home missionary ministry. To meet the immigrant in his first shock of dislocation and be- wilderment, home missions send a representative to Ellis Island to soften the gruffness of officialism, and become responsible for the newcomer whose friends or relatives fail to meet him, or who is without sufficient money to reach his proper destination. The guardian- ship of unprotected girls and women is also their spe^ cial care. While duplicatory and not always properly supervised private agencies have seriously compromised the efforts of the missionary boards to use this initial opportunity for service, its helpfulness is still great. Naturally the immigrant's most necessary tool in the new land is the English language, without which he can neither know his rights nor contribute his share of human intercourse to his new home. In far slighter measure than one would wish and with not nearly so much efficiency as the Jewish community, Protestant- 120 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS ism, chiefly through the Young Men's Christian Asso- ciation, but increasingly under the impulse of home missionary direction, has begun to teach the alien English, and to give him his first lessons in patriotism. This has been the long-time and most characteristic approach of Oriental missions to Chinese and Japan- ese. Missions and Group Cohesion. Utilizing and mak- ing the best of the tendency to group cohesion, home missions for many years have organized the Protestant immigrant into foreign-speaking churches, with pas- tors of their own race, and supported them by frater- nal counsel and supervision and grants of money. Naturally those European denominations like the Lutherans, which early became naturalized in America, have had the larger opportunity with the incoming millions of their own language and faith, but many of the larger denominations have long had conspicu- ous success in the evangelization of Scandinavian and German immigrants, as well as those of more recent arrival. Of Southern Europeans, Italians furnish the most hopeful material for Protestant evangeliza- tion. Under urban conditions there is a growing ten- dency to organize the foreigner into branch churches, sometimes occupying the same building with the sup- porting American church and preferably under its careful control. The Guidance of Foreign-speaking Churches. The chief weakness of these efforts is the lack of satis- factory leaders, both as to character and ability, and THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 121 as to fitness for modern social guidance. The danger from the reactionary is great A sincere and conse- crated man sometimes contrives simply to lead his people away from broad American sympathies. The schools therefore which train the foreigner for effective work with his own people are vitally necessary. The ultimate guidance of these foreign-speaking churches is an exacting problem for the missionary administra- tor. They are frequently sensitive, self-opinionated, veneered with American progress rather than funda- mentally changed. The supporting boards must stub- bornly lead where they only seem to help. They must be sympathetic, eternally patient, bearing and endur- ing all things; but they must not let group-cohesion define, limit, or thwart the social realization of Chris- tianity in the united nation. Living Ties. The only basis of vital and enduring leadership is genuine and spontaneous fellowship. Of- ficial ministries are but the giving of stones for bread, so long as the average church-member in his personal life is deliberately sundered from the foreigner. The irony of the situation would be unendurable except for those great mediatorial souls our missionaries whose friendships bridge for us the class, language, and color lines; who in their lives preach peace to those who are afar off and to those who are near. But for them how deep and hopeless would the es- trangement be between the diverse elements of the nation! Their devotion does not excuse but rather shames our lack, but how they link the land together 122 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS with their hearts! And what genuine and abiding satisfaction they find in their friends from other lands; how little condescension and sense of superi- ority there is about the real missionary ! Notable Workers. Dr. E. A. Adams gave his earlier missionary service to Bohemia herself, and then came home to a notable career in the heart of the Bohemian section in Chicago. Here he identified his fortunes; here he reared and educated his sons and daughters and proved that missionaries' children may be none the worse for social sacrifice. For forty years Dr. William C. Pond has been a father to the Chinese of the whole Pacific Coast. Going South as a boy in his teens with a missionary father, Dr. E. C. Silsby has devoted virtu- ally the whole of a long life to Christian service for the Negro. Ranged with these venerable peers of the apostles is the splendid band of those who are newly linking their lives with the lives of the stranger to teach him the ways of the flag and of the cross. They do not pass by on the other side; and they find the Samaritan an interesting and lovable type who makes a remarkable recovery from his wounds under the medicine of fellowship. This is home missions at their best. Missions and Disintegration. Protestant home mis- sions have a peculiar responsibility for alien groups in their disintegration. Children and youth especially need the evangelical gospel. Speaking for himself, the author largely excepts the Jew from this responsi- bility. He bqiieves that the Hebrew faith in America THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 123 is destined to evolve into essential Christianity and that, in its progressive wing, it already shows strong tendencies to quick, democratic adaptation to modern conditions. The social ministries of the Hebrew Church are many and effective. They have set the pace for Protestant missions not once nor twice. We should cooperate therefore in civic and moral reforms with enlightened Jews, should respect and strengthen the vital forces of their religion and should not prose- lyte their youth, believing that they will come most surely to know Christ through the practise of his so- cial teaching. Roman Catholic Immigrants. Similar considera- tions would apply to the Roman Catholic Church so far as it is actually holding its immigrant youth to vital religion and so far as it is truly democratic and modern. There are exceptional localities in which it is all of this. As a first aid in the religious placing of undigested alien masses, its social service is tremen- dous. Nowhere is it the part of home missions to at- tack or tear it down, though specific Catholic aggres- sions are to be resisted. The most outstanding fact however, about the Roman Church in America is that it does not hold its own. Vast as its numbers are they would be twice as large had that Church been able to retain the great immigrant masses of its adherents who have thronged to our shores. The millions of its young deserters are the ripe field of Protestantism. This is a social rather than an ecclesiastical judgment. Religion must adjust the alien to the new world on 124 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS democratic terms. Only Protestantism can meet this test. That Protestantism shall not fail to do so is the burden of home missions. Building on Old-world Missionary Foundations. There are moreover deep-rooted elements of his- toric Protestantism in populations generally counted as Catholic. Thus hundreds of Italians in New York City, who had never known the touch of missions in America, reported themselves to the Census as Protes- tants. The land of Huss could not be without a strong Protestant tradition. Foreign mission converts from papal lands and from the Near and Far East trickle by hundreds through the immigrant millions. Home missions cannot do less than conserve what foreign missions have saved. Missions and Assimilation. Less spectacular than peculiar and separate institutions for foreign-speaking peoples, but sounder and more happy is the persistent assimilating process which takes the foreigner right into the American community and church. With the northern European, especially upon the frontier, this was the rule rather than the exception. The pioneer home missionary church was typically a fusion of human elements. One of the author's childhood rec- ollections is of a Norwegian Sunday-school superin- tendent, and he grew up without any deep sense of separation from the Scandinavian boys who were his schoolfellows. We burden our souls so much now- adays with the difficulties of assimilation as to for- THE CITY AND THE STRANGER 125 get our tremendous successes, which are the world's marvel, and which are still largely operative. A New England Example. -About twenty years ago a young minister took up a pastorate, which was to last for over fifteen years, in a Connecticut mill town. His church was a merger of two ancient par- ishes, which, with the dying off of the native stock, had been starved into uniting. The predominant mill population was German and there were a few of their children in the Sunday-school. At the end of the fifteen years the church-membership was chiefly of German extraction so Americanized as co continue the best Puritan traditions. By this time however a new generation of common labor had arrived upon the scene, consisting of Catholic Polanders. To win the Germans required only that the Puritan church should cease to be conceited and that its pastor should be persistently faithful in work with the children. But neither of these could penetrate within Polish bigotry and clannishness. The pastor therefore changed his tactics; made friends with the Catholic priest, saw to it that the Polish group-leaders were recognized in civic affairs, and enlisted them in a no- license movement. Assimilation includes both proc- esses. When individuals cannot be directly reached and their group brought to disappear in the general community life, they may yet be effectively included under common ideals. A staunch and aggressive minority, in possession of social tradition and organi- zation, may still subject armies of aliens. Thus the 126 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS Puritan spirit still dominates New England, and its best ideals, as expressed in O'Reilly's great tribute to the Pilgrims, are the common possession of Yankee and Irishman. Missions and Dilution. Naturally there is no home missionary agency which deliberately strives for the dilution of American life or the American Church by alien elements. But home missions does purposefully introduce into the Church those who humanly justify the apostolic epithets, "more feeble," "less honor- able," "uncomely." Less steady alike in faith and in morals, with lower standards of general intelligence and of religious taste, compelled to make present shift with an inadequately prepared ministry, they range themselves, no more strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints. Their ultimate contribution to it will be worthy of membership in the body. Of none may the Church say, "I have no need of you." Doubtless the present average of American Christian- ity is in many respects lowered by their inclusion. They do not make it easier for the Church to be free from spot or wrinkle or any such thing; they do help it to include men out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation who are to throng the holy city. In the deliberate judgment of home missions the lat- ter alternative is more worthy of Christ's Church. It is his finally to present it to God faultless; it is ours to see that not the least of his brethren is absent from the ranks in that great day. SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHAPTER V SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Standing Room Only. Just after the Revolution- ary war a soldier received from his grateful country a grant of five thousand acres of land in central Tennessee. Early in the last century this tract was cut up into farms for pioneer settlers. These were described in the old records by natural land-marks this gum tree and that big hickory which time and civilization long since removed. One who went re- cently to locate his ancestral acres within this tract could identify them only by the mill-site. There was but one mill-site on the five thousand acres. The man who got it became a man of power over his fellows. To him must every stubborn pioneer back bend, as it brought corn to be ground. There are no more unoccupied farms for the newcomer and there never was more than one mill-site. Let the five thousand acres stand for the national domain and the mill-site for its limited natural resources its water- power, and waterways, its harbors, mineral deposits, and forests and one has America in miniature. The land and its points of strategic value are all pos- 129 130 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS sessed. They who possess them control the nation and the later comer. Our perplexity over this fact is what we call the social problem. Who Owns the Nation? Of course the case is not quite so simple as our preliminary illustration might suggest. Upon the primary basis of control of land and natural resources modern civilization has built up a great social order in which the transformation and transportation of the raw materials of wealth are of equal moment with the productive land, its fields, for- ests, and mines. Whoever therefore owns the factory and the railroad controls the nation. But these again are so vast that no one can own them except as he first borrows the savings of many thousands of ordi- nary people. This the adventurous, extraordinary man does; and by so doing is able, with others like him, to organize great systems of control over lands and produce, coal fields, oil deposits, railways and steamships, terminals and harbors, banks and exchanges, public privileges and the making of laws, newspapers and the agencies of public opinion and conscience. To control this man, with his hordes of allies and dependents who have had their lives fitted into and their thinking tempered by this vast organi- zation, is the second great factor of the social prob- lem. The Industrial Toilers. But the chief aspect is the possession by capitalistic organization of vast out- numbering millions of propertyless workingmen whom it calls its hands, and whom it pays what it calls wages. SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 131 Large numbers of them perform skilled tasks and re- ceive pay equal to or beyond that ordinarily received by the school-teachers, newspaper men, artists, musi- cians, book-writers, ministers, and other spiritual lead- ers of the nation. But still larger numbers do not receive enough to take their homes out of sordid and ugly surroundings, nor to leave margin for defense against sickness and unemployment, nor to keep family life intact, nor to prevent the benumbing fear of want, nor frequent actual undernutrition. The Human Factor. These millions of low-paid workers are not in every respect amiable human beings. They want, many of them, more than they have, but also more than they can or ought to have without great improvement in their personal efficiency. In their present frame of mind, the best of conditions would not make them happy. Some of them we have met among the Strangers of our earlier chapter; others we will meet among the Race Problems. They are not easy of adjustment within the nation. They re- spond imperfectly to the loyalties which are our second nature. Their vivid class consciousness makes them difficult to work with ; their conduct frequently makes them difficult to apologize for. They are like the rest of us in these respects. They are not nearly so hum- ble as they want the Church to be and are not con- scious of any social sins to repent of. Their moral and spiritual discipline is one of the prime phases of their social problem. They need to be made fit for their present and prospective tasks, and for the fellow- 132 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS ship and responsibilities to which they aspire. At the same time their mood is eager rather than sodden: they have positive moral ideals and are developing fresh loyalties, which put them far and away beyond any mood which is merely conservative or any moral- ity which is enthralled by the past. They bring a definite contribution to the social problem and repre- sent a fundamental attack upon it. Their great mes- sage to the nation is that social issues are upon us, that they are to be taken seriously, that men must live with them day and night, and that nothing which claims to be fundamental, as religion does, can make them anything but central in its interest. The Vision and Machinery of Justice Alike Lack- ing. On the whole America finds herself unprepared to meet the social problem which has stolen upon us as a thief in the night. Half the nation scarcely knows that there is one; the other half knows that there is but does not know what to do about it. We should have no agencies to carry out our knowledge if we had it We are alike without the vision and the machinery of justice. Thus one reports that a chief industrial city of the South represents a "survival from the farmer-economy, whose common needs and in- dividual responsibilities are very different from those of this massed industrial population dropped down in the geographical center of the cotton-belt. It is of a piece with the cramped city limits, the village council, the outgrown income, the criss-cross town plan, the cruil service based on fees, the farmyard sanitation, REV. JOSIAH STRONG A pioneer in social reconstruction SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 133 the stupid system of municipal works . . . With no public library, no public recreation, no meeting hall for her citizens, no city plan for growth." 1 In other words, Birmingham, with her 20,000 coal and iron workers, just happened. She does not represent so- cial reason, social conscience, or social control; and with minor variations Birmingham in these respects is a piece of America. Thus our unpreparedness for it is a final factor in the social situation. The Early Response of the Church. In its recogni- tion of the moral urgency of the social situation the Church was not second among American forces. Not soon enough, yet as soon as any one else she began to sense its importance. By the time outside criticism of the Church for social neglect had become acute, self-criticism had become drastic. By 1889, while such courses were still rare in the universities, three Congregational theological seminaries in New England were teaching young ministers to study social prob- lems radically. Men like Josiah Strong, Washington Gladden and Richard T. Ely had become Christian evangelists of social duty. By 1893 the Baptist and Congregational communions had developed active propagandas for social justice. Many men were speak- ing with heat and some with light. This prophetic phase of the movement had also its martyrs at the hands of conservatism and complacency. But on the whole the Church responded rapidly. Institutional and social service activities were begun in many par- *G. R. Taylor, The Survey, January, 1912. 134 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS ishes and the social conscience became the sudden pos- session of a new Christian generation. Slower Officialism. As late as 1900, however, Dr. Strong could not catalog any general home missionary movement of social betterment except service for the backward races. In mitigation of this delay it may be urged that collective action must necessarily wait upon the development of the average conscience. Vol- untary organization may forge ahead under prophetic impulse, but official agencies have to organize and bring up the main body of the Lord's host. Thus social issues got into home missions as early as into national politics, and into missionary offices sooner. Now practically every important denomination has an official social service agency either incorporated with its existing home missionary machinery or additional to and allied with it ; while, in the collective advocacy of home missions through federated agencies, the so- cial note has become distinctly dominant. The Federal Council of Churches more and more stresses social interests as the common burden of American Chris- tianity, and the marvel is, not that some conservative sects oppose this tendency, but that more do not. Redirecting Home Missions. Yet one has to con- fess a certain defensive and apologetic attitude in the official literature of social Christianity hitherto. The current assent of the Church to the social gospel has reached the stage of official toleration, but in many instances has not gone much further. When it comes to the redirection of home missions in detail, to the re- SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 135 casting of policies and particularly to the shifting of appropriations, old ways are stubborn. Outside the realm of formulas and inside the field of action lies the test of all professions. In home missions it concerns not merely the redirecting of the whole proc- ess, but ultimately the moving of perhaps five million dollars a year in appropriations and 15,000 men from conventional or sectarian to social tasks a step for which no one is quite ready as yet. Inescapable Social Issues. This book then seeks to urge the futility of superficial measures and the ne- cessity of radical action. Vast and sudden changes in society demand equal changes in the Church. Twenty-five years ago a man said in the spirit of the apostle, "I am debtor to barbarians" ; and lost himself in the Indian country on the upper Missouri River. Years were passed in lonely labor, when suddenly there broke in upon his solitude construction gangs of aliens to build a railroad Greeks, they were. So the missionary added modern Greek to his accomplish- ments, sent to Athens for Testaments and amended his life motto to read, "I am debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians." After the Greeks came Japanese, sleepy- ing in the same bunk houses and remaining as section men after the construction gangs had passed on. With the fencing of the ranges the stockmen crowded into the Indian country, starting a trail of graft which led to the senate-chamber of the United States, which the missionary must follow or run from duty. After the stockman came the Dutch renter following the 136 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS irrigation ditch; and after him, with the opening of the reservation, the country towns. Where railroads crossed on the edge of the reservation sprang up sud- denly the little city, surrounded by a region of inten- sive farming, on whose depot platform one to-day will watch a dozen nationalities as he waits for a train. A man went into the wilderness to preach a simple evangelism, and lo, Jerusalem and all Judea went out to him. God pursued this man of the obscure, single- hearted mission with all manner and complexities of social problems. He could not free himself from them. No more can the Church. It is beset behind and be- fore by social issues. And what it must meet it should master for its Master's sake. No Compromise! No moderate or compromising mood therefore is fitting. The age needs the alert passion of original Christianity. The Church needs an energizing consciousness of its ties to the lowliest and the furthest. It must enforce an aggressive brotherliness in the face of growing fixity of social classes. One cannot pass from one American city to another nor go back to his boyhood country home for a visit without keenly realizing the increased separate- ness of men of diverse fortunes within his own life- time. Who then can doubt that it is time to be radi- cal? We must give over planting children's gardens on vacant city lots when the need is to tax the lots out of vacancy. The Approach through Social Knowledge. The most characteristic and notable aspect of the home mis- SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 137 sionary attack upon the social situation is its method of approach. The impatience of social passion is checked, the radical spirit is made effective by the approach through precise social knowledge. What- ever others may do, home missions propose to find out social duty first of all by the investigation of defi- nite areas and the conditions of the life and labor of their people. They start, not with the social order in general, but with one's own community. They dis- cover the needs of that community by a "survey" of all its significant conditions. All the experts, all the official programs agree on this method of approach. The Case of Muscatine. In 1911 a Commission of the Social Service Secretaries of leading denomina- tions, cooperating through the Federal Council of Churches, thus approached the acute social problem of Muscatine, Iowa. This flourishing city of 20,000 on the borders of a prairie state was one in which the strength and success of earlier home missions had been notably exemplified. It had suddenly developed a ro- mantic and profitable industry that of making pearl buttons from the clam-shells which are furnished in great quantity by the Mississippi River. By this in- dustry nearly half of its population lived; yet both the community and the state of which it was a part had ignored many of the possibilities which grew out of this fact and were totally unprepared to meet them. Industrial conditions were not seriously bad. When, however, the workers attempted to get comparatively minor grievances rectified by organizing a union they 138 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS were met by a prompt lockout. Petty violence was resorted to in return and the persecution of non-union workers. The militia was called out ; and later private detectives hired from Chicago. A futile return to work was arranged through the intervention of the churches, the chamber of commerce, and the governor of the state. It failed because it did not go to the roots of the trouble and was in the interest of peace rather than of justice. A general strike followed, with additional violence, which alienated public sympathy from the strikers and shunted the minds of the com- munity from the issue of social justice to that of public order. Finally the whole situation became in- coherent a matter of overstrained temper and nerves. Workmen abandoned their homes seeking work else- where and factories moved to other places. In terms of the community, the losses to purse, to poise of mind, and to human kindness were enormous. A Gross of Buttons. The report of the Commis- sion made it plain that there was a rather simple but unsolved technical issue at the bottom of the whole difficulty, namely, how many buttons made a gross? Wages were paid for so many gross of buttons; but was a gross a gross of buttons or of good buttons? What were good buttons ; buttons which sold at stand- ard price or at any price? If all marketable buttons were to be counted, at what rate ? This involved the question whether the lowest grade buttons were pro- duced at a profit or a loss, and this the manufacturers' crude system of accounting failed to reveal. Mani- SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 139 festly this question was not to be settled by orating upon street corners nor by the muskets of militia. It needed just a production expert and a cost accountant to devise a clear definition of a gross of buttons as an invariable basis for wages. But as the Commission pertinently remarked, this simple point had become the supreme test of religious values in Muscatine just then. All Have Sinned. The report of the Commission went on to deal out even-handed criticism to all parties who had so conspicuously failed in their "mutual re- sponsibilities: to the manufacturers for their unwill- ingness to allow the workers to organize while they themselves were practising this same fundamental right, and for their refusal to recognize the community as being a party at interest in all industrial situations ; to the workers for injustice to non-unionists, for gross misrepresentation of factory conditions, for public dis- order, and for a disregard of the community exactly equal to that of the manufacturers. It condemned the churches for failure as teachers of public morals to include leadership as to industrial conditions, for permitting- unnecessary, loose, and aggravating ideas to dominate the public mind and for not pointing prospectively the way of social righteousness and peace. It found the community guilty of not under- standing the relation of industry to civic responsibility, for not providing such means of social recreation as would have been a safety-valve against violence, and particularly for failure in the development of common 140 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS ideals and aspirations. The state, it pointed out, had no adequate means of keeping public order under con- ditions of industrial strife, nor of investigating nor preventing the evils which led to such strife. Scientific Basis of Justice. It is not to be pre- sumed that every one in Muscatine agreed with the findings of the Commission in all particulars. It was still open to any of the parties to the situation to pre- sent its own point of view and plead its case before the bar of public opinion. It remained however that the Commission had viewed the whole situation in a judicial spirit as no one else had. Its members were experienced in social diagnosis. They brought to bear the best clues from human experience elsewhere. They approached the problem of Muscatine with all the social knowledge available. Their findings represented social justice as nearly as we can now approximate it in such matters. This general method home mis- sions recommend for universal application. It is scien- tific in that it is an application of the method of induc- tive study to actual conditions. It does not deal in vague theories of society but soberly seeks to point out local responsibility and concrete remedies for social ills. It is neither socialistic nor anti-socialistic, be- cause it does not begin with philosophy at all but rather with the practical attitudes of the Christian gospel to- ward all human problems. Willingness to Differ in Details. It is strategic because it presents a basis on which men may unite in practical programs when they could not at all unite in SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 141 theory. Debates about social orthodoxies are just as unprofitable as about theological orthodoxies. A doc- trinal debate about social duties would simply further divide the Church. Men have a right to be extremely sensitive when social conclusions are drawn in the name of religion without the most painstaking pre- liminary study of particular facts. The approach through social knowledge does not preclude differences in judgment between men of equally sincere and sen- sitive consciences. Social workers are entirely accus- tomed to the spectacle of divided opinion on such concrete issues, say of the wisdom of a widowed mothers' pension law, or the terms of a workingmen's compensation act. It is just this willingness to differ in detail, to correct errors by experimentation, and to view the whole matter in an open-minded and scien- tific rather than a dogmatic spirit which characterizes the current home missionary attitude. Such an atti- tude takes much of the sting out of old bitterness and has, for example, largely enabled the North and South to see eye to eye and to unite in common effort for the uplift of the Negro. An Ounce of Prevention. The final excellency of this approach to social issues is that it is by its very nature preventive. As seen in the Muscatine case, the weakness of home missions was that their ministries came too late. Immense damage through social strife had already been suffered. But the most significant of wars are those which were never fought; where the issue and the irritant were ready, but were over- 142 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS mastered by the stronger forces of peace working out thoroughgoing moral adjustments and profound hu- man reconciliations. While home missions therefore in their direct functioning cannot show frequent suc- cessful mediation in industrial conflicts, they are doing something better. Their diffusion of the social spirit, their advocacy of social adjustments, their guidance of the Church in local courses of study, are the precise means which will prevent a repetition of the Muscatine situation. The Local Survey. At the present moment, in con- nection with the new Christian strategy both of city and of rural missions, large numbers of communities are engaged in surveying their local social conditions. Indeed, the survey method is in danger of becoming the current fad; yet nothing would this book more earnestly commend than this very method. It is the essential first step for an efficient local home mission- ary program. Nothing which is permanently wise or significant can be done without an accurate knowledge of and the education of the community in its own social conditions. One of the largest services of recent missionary scholarship and publication is that of per- fecting the technical methods for making and using such surveys, and in this matter the Church may be proud of her leadership. The recent bulletin on the Social Survey issued by the Russell Sage Foundation 1 shows how largely this general field of social study is Bulletin No. 2, December, 1913. SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 143 indebted to home missionary leaders for literature and results. Justice through Social Control. Out of these many social studies and local experiments, and in harmony with the general social thought of our age, home missions are able to formulate a constructive program of social justice for the Church. Certain agreements have emerged and established themselves in the modern Christian conscience. Their economic background may be variously stated. It does not ques- tion the fundamental rights of property say in eggs. It is recognized that there will be a season of fluctua- tion in the price of eggs, owing to the fact that hens will produce them more profusely in the summer than in the winter. There is no disposition to forbid a profit to the man of intelligence and foresight who buys up quantities of eggs and puts them in cold storage against the day of relative scarcity. It is in- sisted however that the eggs which he sells out of cold storage shall be good, and that the new resource which has come to humanity in the preservation of the food supply through refrigeration shall in its largest use tend to equalize human advantage and not merely to enrich those who are able to get possession of it. In other words, strict social control is to be exercised over all economic processes and monopoly advantage is to be limited. Whenever a monopoly advantage can be shown to be directly of social creation, as when a public franchise gives an exclusive right to a city street, a harbor frontage, or an interstate railway line, 144 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS the state is particularly bound to compel private busi- ness to work out the ends of social justice and may often find it advantageous directly to assume the busi- ness itself. The Well-being of Men Paramount. Some such general tendency of economic thought undoubtedly underlies the missionary program. Home missions, however, by no means ask specific consent to this or any other strictly economic proposition, but are rather directly concerned with the human and moral aspects of the social order. In this realm their fundamental agreement is that any specific exploitation of human beings, any industrial or social condition which is shown to degrade man, by attacking his health, limit- ing his educational opportunity, or subjecting him to moral overstrain, must cease. Society is not to do business at the expense of any of its members, but only on condition that all shall have an opportunity for normal and worthy life. A Social Creed. The specific convictions which ex- press this agreement and which have been drawn out of study and experience have been formulated by home missions as the social creed of the American Churches. In their form they are a development from a long series of declarations by the denominations and are most perfectly expressed in the action of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ of Amer- ica, at the last great quadrennial gathering in Chicago in 1912: The Churches must stand : SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 145 1. For equal rights and complete organized justice for all men in all stations of life. 2. For the protection of the family, by the single standard of purity, uniform divorce laws, proper reg- ulation of marriage, and proper housing. 3. For the fullest possible development for every child, especially by the provision of proper education and recreation. 4. For the abolition of child labor. 5. For such regulation of the conditions of toil for women as shall safeguard the physical and moral health of the community. 6. For the abatement and prevention of poverty. 7. For the protection of the individual and society from the social, economic, and moral waste of the liquor traffic. 8. For the conservation of health. 9. For the protection of the worker from dan- gerous machinery, occupational diseases, and mortal- ity. 10. For the right of all men to the opportunity for self -maintenance, for safeguarding this right against encroachments of every kind, and for the protection of workers from the hardships of enforced unem- ployment. 11. For suitable provision for the old age of the workers, and for those incapacitated by injury. 12. For the right of employees and employers alike to organize for adequate means of conciliation and arbitration in industrial disputes. 146 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS Staying Eternally Teachable. It is worth while to insist again that even these specifications, which at once stir the heart and compel the conscience, are not to be regarded in the old dogmatic and strictly creedal sense. Their application is to be worked out through further years of experimentation as to the precise terms of a given law or regulation in the interests of social justice. The laws of one state will not pre- cisely fit the conditions in another. Nothing could be more abhorrent to the spirit in which missions ap- proach this matter than a legalistic tendency which should array the Church in the interest of some par- ticular formula instead of keeping it eternally teach- able as to social duty. The Church will reach a work- ing knowledge of the truth only by persevering in the task of local adjustment and experimentation. The realization of social justice through home missions is largely in the hands of agencies other than the organized Church. Home missions are the impelling and educating agencies ; Christian men and women are the individual inspiring units of organization, but the Church as such is not to be the chief factor in the securing of social results. If Christ is really sovereign over all the forces of society, it is his right to utilize those best suited to a particular end and to hold the Church in reserve when need be for its original task of spiritual insight and moral impulse. No New Organization. Thus a typical declaration of one of the denominational social service commis- sions states explicitly that it does not recommend any SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 147 new ecclesiastical organization in the interests of social justice. It calls upon the Church everywhere to teach Christian ideals of social relationships and industrial and community welfare; to study local conditions; to make its members good citizens and particularly to co- operate with public, private, educational, social, and re- ligious agencies. In other words, it is in the spheres of politics and of voluntary organization, rather than of formal ecclesiastical activity, that the hand-to-hand work of social justice is chiefly to be done. Thus in the catalog of the definite social ideals for which the Churches must stand it is evident that almost every item is a natural field for legislation in the activity of the Christianized state. The regulation of marriage and divorce; the control of tenement-house construc- tion and sanitation ; the maintenance and adaptation of schools; regulation of child labor and of factory con- ditions in general; conservation of health; compensa- tion for industrial injuries; means for conciliation and arbitration in industrial disputes, and the definition of a living wage in given industries are all ultimately matters for social decision through legislation; and this control must be carried out into actual justice through political administration. Cooperation. To get these ideals before the public conscience and to organize them into compelling public opinion, state by state and city by city, manifold volun- tary organizations are necessary with which the Church must heartily cooperate. Such are local parent and teachers' associations in the interests of efficient 148 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS public schools; the national and local Child Labor Committees; the Charity Organization Societies; the Anti-Saloon Leagues ; public health organizations ; the Sabbath Leagues ; and always the local boards of trade, manufacturers' associations, and trade-unions. Occa- sionally the social survey will find radical lacks which must be corrected by the creation of additional organi- zations. In the main however there is chiefly needed a perfection and yoking up of the machinery already existing and its agreement upon a common construc- tive program for the community. When home mis- sions tell the best of their Christian youth to go out and act through these agencies, they do the Church no less honor than if they organized a new depart- ment within her own walls. Direct Social Ministries. There remains however a very large field for the direct social functioning of the Church. The local social service program natur- ally varies as to the needs of particular parishes. The family church will find its usefulness largely in estab- lishing a branch or social settlement in a foreign or industrial quarter of the city. The down-town parish may become directly institutional and be itself used by the whole round of public and voluntary social institutions, besides carrying on its own multifarious missions of social betterment. Home missions func- tioning as a city church extension organization may strongly direct the social activities of aided churches, particularly those under foreign-speaking pastors. They may even find it wise to label some particular SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 149 church a labor church, and to use it as a common meeting-ground for organized industry and religious insight. In general, however, the fewer class labels we attach to Christian institutions the better. For the backward and non-European peoples, the national home missionary boards will continue their marvelous round of constructive social service, ranging from the distribution of old clothes to the organization of build- ing and loan associations ; the housing of public libra- ries, and the reorganization of agriculture. All these forms of service are in actual operation in hundreds of communities throughout the nation under direct home missionary impulse, or as the outgrowth of home missionary education merging with the common social intelligence of the Church. Brother versus Expert Especially important in all these efforts is the spirit which respects and utilizes on terms of equality the initiative and local leadership of the people whom home missions desire to help. Thus the system of fraternal delegates sent by de- nominational or local church organizations to sit in trade-union councils has put the touch of personal con- fidence and intimacy upon the whole question of the Church and labor. A recent social survey in Morris- town, New Jersey, was raided and wrecked by a mob of 400 Italians who did not relish the exhibition of their unfortunate living conditions. It would have been far better to have advised with the leaders of the Italian colony in advance, made them understand the necessity of public intelligence as to the lives of all the 150 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS people of the community, and utilized their better im- pulses in the movement for their own redemption. Human contact is the fine secret of effectiveness in all social service work, and a fine regard for the feel- ings of others will be the Church's best equipment for her expert and technical task. The Church's Own Labor Problem. Finally there is the question of the Church's own employees her ministers and janitors. She cannot well instruct the world in justice as to wages and conditions of labor until she has more radically and intelligently consid- ered the minister's remuneration and the conditions under which the paid servants of the church are com- pelled to live, educate their families, and do their work. The ability to secure high-class executive talent for small pay has often been pointed out as the su- preme test of the cooperative movement in the eco- nomic field. This the English cooperators have been able to secure. Many of their local managers could draw immensely larger salaries in the world of com- petitive business but choose rather to remain with a movement which stands for human ideals instead of individual gain. In America the Church is the only agency which has been at all able to command and keep high-class men on inadequate pay, but she has no right to press this advantage too far or to glory in it when the real glory belongs to her faithful ser- vants. The Church's own labor problem needs im- mediate attention. Justice before Kindness. Allied to this is the prob- SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 151 lem of old age pensions for ministers and their sup- port in disablement. In this matter the Church has shown great kindness but an inadequate sense of jus- tice. Her aged ministers have been offered charity when an earlier realization of social justice would have provided adequate systems of pensioning such as are now expected of all reasonable corporations. It is impossible that the Church should lead the world in such matters until she has set her own house in order. The Church's Own Housing Problem. The same considerations apply to those forms of social service which are directly carried on by the Church collectively through the missionary board. In her mission schools, for example, the Church has created her own housing problem. Home missions have become the voluntary landlord to Indian, Negro, Mountaineer, Oriental, Porto Rican, but have frequently housed them in mis- sion buildings and plants lacking the minimum re- quirements of collective safety and decency as re- flected in modern legislation. Indeed she has some- times suffered the humiliation of having the state com- pel her to provide decent safety and sanitation for her wards. Not even in the name of Christ is it per- missible for two or three hundred to be gathered together without an unimpeachable supply of pure water, fire protection, adequate air and light, and a system of sewage-disposal which reinvigorates the soil rather than contaminates it. Yet in relatively few of the mission schools are these minimum requirements 152 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS met. The whole conception of adequate support of missionary enterprise must be revolutionized in the light of the modern social conscience. Immensely larger sums must be contributed to missionary treas- uries before the Church can provide for herself the conditions of collective life which her social justice program demands of the world. The Social Gospel. Summing up, then, home mis- sions are deeply concerned with social justice and throw their strong and persistent weight into the trembling balance of the Church's conscience. They propose the method of local and concrete attack upon social problems based on accurate knowledge, con- fident that the ultimate results of this method will be exceedingly radical. They discover a group of agree- ments growing out of experience which they have expanded into a common workable program of so- cial advance. Home missions attempt to achieve social justice piecemeal, but do not intend to stop until the work is done. Each church and community is set to repairing the breaches in justice over against its own house, and where there is no house all join together to build the wall. Home missions get their working strength from their alliances. They first set the Church to train Christian workers, who in turn or- ganize voluntary agencies of social betterment; then the Church utilizes and cooperates with these agencies. Her allied ministers include business men and poli- ticians. She views both with a degree of suspicion, and keeps examining their ulterior motives ; and the Church SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTICE 153 is just as sensitive about her own ulterior motives. She keeps examining herself to see if she is really continu- ing in the social faith. Home missions direct the local church in its large immediate ministries of social bet- terment, but are more fundamentally concerned with the duty of advocacy and education. They proclaim a social gospel in which justice in the collective life of men is regarded, not as a by-product of religion, but as one of the essential exercises of religion itself as interpreted by Christ. To those who question whether the sphere of social religion is really central in his heart, they reply with the old catalog of Messianic ac- tivities, "The deaf hear, the lame walk, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good tidings preached to them; and blessed is he who is not offended in <ne." A SOCIAL RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS CHAPTER VI A SOCIAL RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS Race Problems Include All Others. As affecting hu- man fellowship in America race problems have com- monly been approached passionately, and largely so because they have commonly been approached through their extremest contrast, namely, that of the most ad- vanced white type as over against the lowest colored type. One begins by staging mentally a drama of conflict with these two as hero and villain respectively. Its theme concerns their difficulty of association under democratic conditions. The plot is complicated by the fact that one was recently the slave of the other* The result is tragedy. Common Conditions of Social Misery. A better and more just approach, the author submits, was dis- covered by him when he arrived in a strange city at night in the midst of a blinding winter storm and sought to locate a social settlement in a slum quarter. Regretfully relinquishing the friendly lights of the departing street-car and the solid, slippery pavements, he plunged into a maze of crooked and narrow side streets with deep mud underfoot and the bewildering outlines of huddled dwellings as his guide to direction. He knew that he was in the heart of a district in which '57 158 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS Irish, Jew, and Negro lived under common conditions of social depression and misery. Occasionally silent, shadowy forms lunged by, crouching against the walls of houses for protection from the cutting wind. In the storm and dark one was color-blind and felt only the sudden presence of men like himself, buffeted by the elements and seeking the same light and warmth he sought. And somehow in the stress of common struggle with the elements one assumed in them a com- mon humanity which knew the same inner gusts and fires of passion and sought the same desired haven of the soul. Negro and Italian. What the sentiment of the night wrought the severe, scientific survey of the day reen- forced. Here was a definite, frequent social setting, the most frequent one indeed in which the social problems of race present themselves in the greatest American cities. Vast groups of varying races on the lowest economic level live contiguously in the poorest quarters and suffer every social ill together. Here in a newer outlying district it is the Italian and the Negro. Year before last the place was a swamp. Then it suddenly became dotted with cheap and patchy habitations standing in sodden pools of water. Now the old country road which was its main artery has been partly paved. Huge heaps of paving-blocks and a huddle of contractors' carts obstruct it. Tawdry saloons ornament every corner. The district has filled with houses. Being just without the city limits, it has neither sidewalks nor sewers, is inadequately RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 159 lighted, and has no schoolhouse and no permanent church. Under these conditions of sudden social acci- dent the newest arrivals from sunny Italy and the sunny South are dumped together by the overflowing city. Here, in the cheapest, least improved, least reg- ulated area, they begin their search for a job and their struggle for a place. Their men, women, and children have just a life apiece to live, each his own, and all burdened with a common social handicap. First Aid to the Injured. One diagnoses the first needs of these diverse race-groups as identical. They need to have the building and sanitary codes extended and to be provided with the ordinary public facilities of the city. If clean streets, ventilated tenements, fire and police protection, equally applied laws, equal schools, rational amusement, and effective labor or- ganization can help a group of Italians they ought to help an equal group of Negroes in the next block ; and they do. If criminals and prostitutes are herded into the districts where the poor must make their homes, if jobs are few and precarious, and the swamp is allowed still to occupy the street, Italians and Ne- groes alike may become acute social problems; and they do. Under such circumstances the social con- science has enough with which to busy itself for some time before it gets to any specific matter of race. The first step of civilized procedure is clearly to remove specific social evils. Social Evils Always Specific. From the standpoint of the man who is going to do something about the 160 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS matter the so-called inferior races in America are pri- marily victims of a peculiar social status coupled with the experience of specific social evils. With large num- bers of the white race of like status they suffer com- mon difficulties and are subject to like remedies. All the urban perplexities and wrongs which earlier chap- ters of this book discuss crowding, bad housing, in- adequate sanitation, compulsory association with the depraved, inferior economic opportunity beset, some- what unequally to be sure, the urban Negro, Jew, Oriental, or European immigrant. All the factors which figure in the decay of rural civilization war against the inferior race in the open country. The Indian, rural Negro, Mexican, Porto Rican, or Orien- tal needs all that other country people need and more. All social resources, all social compassion and wrath ought to be equally available on their behalf. Reducing the Problem's Dimensions. Reform this and that specific abuse and the race problem shrinks in size; reform them all and it largely evaporates. Race difficulties are nearly always simply common forms of social difficulties, the hopeful remedies to which are perfectly well known and agreed upon. This aspect of them should be dealt with first. Race, the sociologists warn us, can no longer be used as a jug- gler's hat from which to draw theoretical explanations of social difference when concrete explanations are right at hand. "More and more," says Ross, "the time-honored appeal to race is looked upon as the resource of ignorance or indolence. To the scholar RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 161 the attributing of the mental and moral traits of a population to heredity is a confession of defeat, not to be thought of until he has wrung from every factor of life its last drop of explanation." 1 Note the order of explanation; for this is the kernel of the thought. We are to cry "race" last of all, after we have reck- oned with every other factor, every nearer and more obvious cause. Then if there is something left, say of the Negro's deficiency, which belongs to him as a Negro, one must confess it ; but not until from every social factor has been wrung its last drop of signifi- cance, and till every known duty, based upon his spe- cific social handicaps, has been performed toward him. Colored Americans: The Negro. It is from this view-point that home missions as socially redirected now approach the non-European race material of the United States ; first to catalog, to locate, and briefly to characterize it. One American in every ten is black. Ten millions of Negroes, recently enslaved, now suf- fering every ill of a socially depressed group, are massed chiefly in the rural sections of the South but stream increasingly toward the Northern cities. They absolutely outnumber the white population in South Carolina and Mississippi and have gained more rapidly than the whites during the last census decade in West Virginia, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. No man can deny that the Negro is below the nation's average in health, wealth, education, civic intelligence, and civilized mor- ality. Yet his rich capacity for improvement has been 1 Foundations of Sociology, 309. 162 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS demonstrated at ten thousand points. He is vastly increasing in numbers, homes, ownership of land, and variety of successful occupation. He is multiplying his farmers twice as fast as the white population is, and his strength and gains as an agricultural producer and proprietor are notable. He has reduced his illit- eracy 14 per cent, in the last ten years and made im- measurable gains in racial self-respect, initiative, and moral control. Judged by the ratio of his churches and ministers he is the most religious of all Americans. The Indian. Arriving almost contemporaneously, the Pilgrim Father and the African slave found the continent thinly possessed by barbarian primeval Americans of whom three hundred thousand a slightly increasing rather than a dwindling number abide with us still. Now almost everywhere engulfed by white civilization, pressed from decreasing reserva- tions on to small individual holdings and these fre- quently in semi-arid regions where whites can farm with difficulty the Indian is obliged to make his tran- sition from savagery to civilization under enormous handicaps. He must abandon tribal life under the benevolent paternalism of the government, and face the problems of living and a job. His deeply en- trenched traditions are desperately at outs with Amer- ican notions. Individual ownership is alien to his pro- foundest sense of the meaning of property. Individual responsibility is all to learn. Greed and graft menace him ; red tape hinders. Whisky, trachoma, and tuber- culosis undermine his physical manhood. He is the RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 163 victim of the unearned increment of land values, an idle rich man without adequate incentive to industry; yet in spite of his millions and Uncle Sam's, fourteen thousand of his children remain out of school. The Eskimo. Clinging to our Arctic coasts, strug- gling for existence under the severest climatic and economic conditions known to the human family, live the Eskimo, a sound, stocky, cheerful, democratic race of fishers and hunters, organized only into fragmentary village groups. Their snow houses, fur clothing, weapons, lamp, sledge, and canoe show marvelous me- chanical ingenuity and artistic instincts. White civili- zation has brought them employment, schools, and the reindeer; also liquor, disease, and the lust for gold. Missions must counteract these by morality, sanitation, and intelligent faith. The Chinese. More than half way to meet the west- ward movement of the European races across our con- tinent, came Chinese pilgrims of poverty a few hun- dreds of thousands from beyond the Pacific. They built the first railroad which linked our two oceans; they performed the heavy frontier tasks of the mine and the ranch and the drudgery of the kitchen. Feared, abused, and excluded as cheap labor, they have dwin- dled now to only about seventy thousand, one half of whom are massed in California. One third of them are engaged in agricultural pursuits; another third in trade and industry ; only incidentally are they laundrymen. Chiefly they are enterprising, hard- working, and literate Cantonese. Among them are 164 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS great merchants; not a few are well-to-do. So long as they were an ill-housed, not-yet-adjusted immigrant group, sharing the same quarters with criminals and prostitutes, they showed excessive immorality. For a long time the Chinese in America was typically without a wife and without a God. He had left both his family and his faith beyond the seas. Now, however, in the Christian communities are scores of fine and stable families, hundreds of children born under the Stars and Stripes, and intending to stay there, and a per- manently organized group life which, while little as- similated to American ways, is not without increas- ingly adequate social standards and agencies of its own. And while their contribution to America is yet but slight, these Christian communities have had a vast influence on their former homeland. New China owes much to them both in ideals, benevolent contri- butions, and men. The Hindu. One of the latest wrinkles in Oriental exclusion, aimed chiefly at the Japanese, proposed to keep out all peoples not tall enough to get into the United States army. But this would be more than half an invitation to the tall and turbaned Hindu, him- self frequently an ex-soldier of Great Britain. Some 6,000 only have been admitted to our shores. These constitute an insignificant though interesting addition to the variety of our non-European elements, impor- tant only because the surplus millions of India have to be reckoned with somewhere if not here. They simply testify within our gates to a world-wide re- RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 165 sponsibility in which home missions and foreign mis- sions are one. The Japanese. There are Japanese in America to the number of seventy-one thousand only. Ninety-five per cent, of them are confined to the Pacific Coast states. They tend rather to scatter among the general population than to create distinctive quarters, and they uniformly adopt American customs of dress and hous- ing. As rural laborers they are the chief factor in much of the distinctive agriculture of the Coast states. Emigration is now voluntarily restricted by the Jap- anese government and there is reason to believe that it can be permanently controlled without friction be- tween the two nations, if the status of the Japanese now in America can be satisfactorily adjusted. Quick to learn English, literate almost to a ma.n, great read- ers, keenly intelligent on civic affairs, the Japanese propose to have something to say about this adjust- ment. They have strong and educated leaders, an active press, and the means of focusing group senti- ment Their Buddhism, with 5,000 enrolled adherents, is aggressive and adaptive, imitating modern Christian organizations and activities. Their racial sensitiveness and capacity for initiative combine also to turn their Christian activities largely into self-directed lines. Interdenominational evangelism, federated churches, close cooperation between the several communions, and the production of Christian literature all thrive in their hands. While numerically insignificant so that all the Japanese in America could be poured into New i66 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS York City and scarcely any one be the wiser their massing in thinly settled states, their temperamental aggressiveness, successful competition with American interests, and their membership in a mighty and highly self-conscious nation, make them, above all non- European groups in America, most significant for in- ternational weal or wo. The Hawaiian. The beautiful and immensely fer- tile Hawaiian Islands form the home of a scant 200,000 of population incredibly mingled in race and blood. They were the scene of one of the earlier triumphs of foreign missions which first completely Christianized a pagan people. Now upon the soil of Hawaii as part of our own nation, the battle for civilization and Christianity has to be fought all over again by reason of the inpouring Oriental races. Jap- anese furnish the largest racial element, and with Chinese constitute over a half of the population. The dominant religion of the Islands is Buddhism; the dominant form of Christianity, Mormonism. The small but wealthy white population, led by sons of the early missionaries, with one hand exploits the labor of these thronging aliens and with the other actively and handsomely sustains the institutions of philan- thropy and education, encouraged by the fellowship and gifts of the homeland churches. The Mexican. Along our southwestern border from California to Texas, on former Mexican soil, live perhaps three quarters of a million Americans of Mex- ican race. Their Spanish fathers came before our YOUNG MEN OF A JAPANESE MISSION PORTLAND, OREGON Pilgrim Fathers came. No one knows with accuracy what racial blend the present generations represent, though competent observers guess them to be one fifth Spanish, two fifths Indian, and two fifths mixed, al- ways with a dash of Negro blood. At any rate the effective result is non-European in trait and tendency. As lonely cattlemen and ranchers in empty deserts, as teamster and laborer on railway construction and irri- gation projects, as miner, fruit grower, and packer, the Mexican lives and labors. His latest recruits are miserable refugees from revolution across the border. He is a bigoted Catholic, the victim of a stationary half -civilization. Yet he does not lack shrewd politi- cal leaders, nor rich landholders; nor promising youths, whose training in mission school and agricul- tural college is the best hope of a better day. The Porto Rican. In the West Indian world, as in the whole of continental America south of the Rio Grande, we are neighbors to a mixed racial breed, which verges away from the European type. Under the flags, first or last, of the chief European powers, for four hundred years the West Indies have been becoming more and more Negro. And strangely enough those Islands which have been and remained most European have been just the former possessions of poor, decrepit, much-belabored Spain, who never- theless was the most genuine colonizer of them all. Even in them, however, the resultant racial blend is distinctly non-European. One of these Islands has fallen to us. Of blood so mixed that the census has 168 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS given over the attempt to distinguish black from white, and of civilization so one that black and white think, feel, and act alike, Porto Rico adds her million and more of souls to our deeply sundered human stuff. The economic efficiency of the entire Island is said to be cut in half by the hookworm disease alone. The decrepit and bigoted Romanism of four centuries failed to bless if it did not curse the people. American rule has added population, preserved order, furnished capital and initiative for industry, planted two thou- sand schools, fought disease, and is valued for its results but not loved. Self-government, native initia- tive, democracy, thrift, loyalty, and the effective carry- ing of civilization into the lives and homes of the masses largely wait upon the living fellowships of Christian missions. Numerical Summary. Totaling the entire group of important non-European populations in the United States one gets, in approximate numbers, the follow- ing result: Negroes 10,000,000 Indians 300,000 Orientals 150,000 Hawaiians 200,000 Mexicans 750,000 Porto Ricans 1,100,000 Total 12,500,000 This twelve and a half million constitutes one eighth of our people; and the eighth upon which more RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 169 heavily than on any other social pressure rests. Upon them, first and last, all the social evils focus. And, as the chapter began by saying, there is an overwhelming mass of remediable wrong to which we know the remedy, which must be righted before there is any justice in invoking specific race factors in the problem. The National Attitude toward Race. As a mat- ter of fact, it must be confessed, almost nobody takes that attitude. On the contrary, the non-European eighth of our people is marked by our minds in ad- vance for particular hopelessness. We have nearly as many actual European-born foreigners within our borders as the total population which is non-European in origin. Yet unquestionably we regard their dilu- tion of our blood and institutions as less ominous than that of our darker brethren. What is this twelve and a half million more than another twelve and a half million? Discrimination between Europeans. The broadest ground for an answer is doubtless in the fact that we instinctively discriminate also within the European immigrant population. What is the five million from Southern and Eastern Europe more than the nearly seven million from Northwestern Europe? The best one can say is that we are inwardly aware of a greater separation from the Southeastern European. There is a feeble consciousness of kind with respect to him and a profounder consciousness of difference. He is nearer to Asia and to Africa than we are or our fathers were. Mixing with the aboriginal peoples he 170 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS has covered one of the two American continents and the other as far as the Rio Grande with a hybrid stock. His is an intermediate, buffer breed which makes, we think, a fundamental difference in the char- acter of our population. The Color Line. Remoter still from us, as meas- ured by our feelings, is the colored man, whose case we have been considering. His initial needs, we ad- mit, may be the same as those of any other of like social status ; but his final needs must lie deeper. There is a residual something, we are sure, which makes the problem of race more than a matter of social ad- justment. So we incline to amend our formula to read: race problems include all others, but they also exceed all others. The precise meaning of this dis- tinction comes home one day to the leader of a settle- ment club including Negro and Italian boys in a New York suburb. This very little Sandro, she reflects, should he turn out to be a successful artist, engineer, or merely a rich man, might live in a house on Upper Mountain Avenue and belong to the Montclair Golf Club, a thing not conceivably possible for Sam how- ever talented or rich he might become. In a single lifetime the Italian might compass the whole range of social achievement; but, as most Americans feel, generations of Negroes cannot do it. A Depressing Social Atmosphere. As a matter of course, therefore, social effort proceeds with less hope- fulness for the non-European peoples even when pre- sented side by side with depressed Europeans of the RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 171 same social stratum. There is no doubt about their race handicap which lies in us. We feel differently about them, knowing that they will encounter special difficulties our little faith being one of them and suspecting that they will exhibit less initiative and resistance under them. It weakens our efforts, saps our faith, limits our patience, undermines our strength. On the one hand we are victims of a social heredity which forbids us to be scientific in race mat- ters, and which makes it almost impossible for us to do the best which might be done with the material at hand. On the other hand our thought of them is a depressing atmosphere for the "lower" races to live in. It affects their response. Knowing our little faith in them, they tend to have little faith in them- selves. Their social heredity was largely made by us. It restricts and depresses their capacities and ener- gies, and they are the victims of it. The Issue Not Equality but Capacity. For the sal- vation of both of us, therefore, it is important to know what the best social knowledge has to say about the ultimate and irreducible significance of race, if there is any, which must persist as a barrier to human fel- lowship, no matter what we hope or can do. About equality we have no time to waste. There is no such thing as equality between individuals; how then can there be between groups composed of individuals such as the sexes, the races, or the nations? Equality is not only impossible but unnecessary. We do know 172 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS a certain horrid equality among the dregs of mankind. It has been said that "the bottom of hell is level." What is important for us to know, however, is whether in natural capacity the sound cores of the various races overlap in their larger areas, so that they might bring substantially equal brawn and intelligence to common tasks and might find, in a well-rounded civili- zation, honorable and normally rewarded places for the special gifts of each; also whether each can fur- nish a proportionate number of leaders able to meet one another on common ground. The Case of the Negro. So far, this chapter has endeavored to avoid that chief specific bone of racial contention in America, the Negro problem, and to keep discussion on the broadest grounds. Humanly speak- ing, the Negro problem is not the chief race problem. On account of his greatly inferior numbers the Negro will figure relatively little in the ultimate human out- come. The Armageddon of race, if there is to be one, will be fought between the white and yellow races. Our nearer American race problem, however, does chiefly concern the Negro. Its specific issue is whether he has capacity to associate with us on democratic terms in the significant things which belong to Amer- icans. Settling this issue for him settles it for all the darker-skinned races. Practical Common Ground. In this matter it seems wise to the author to present ground for others to stand on which is distinctly lower than his per- sonal understanding and conviction. It is high enough, RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 173 however, from which to reach great social conclusions. Professor William S. Sutton of the University of Texas has written a pamphlet on the Education of the Southern Negro which is issued by the University as official Bulletin No. 221. Discussing the signifi- cance of ultimate racial factors in humanity, Professor Sutton says: "How far training can modify and overcome original mental characteristic nobody has yet determined. Boas, in his work entitled The Mind of Primitive Man, published this year, devotes a chap- ter to race problems in the United States. Concern- ing the question, how far undesirable traits now found in the Negro population are due to racial influences, and how far they are due to social environment for which that population is not accountable, he reaches this conclusion : Verdict of Anthropology. " 'To this question an- thropology can give the decided answer that the traits of African culture as observed in the aboriginal home of the Negro are those of a healthy, primitive people, with a considerable degree of personal initiative, with a talent for organization, and with imaginative power, with technical skill and thrift. Neither is a warlike spirit absent in the race, as proved by the mighty con- querors who overthrew states and founded new em- pires, and by the courage of the armies that follow the bidding of their leaders. There is nothing to prove that licentiousness, shiftless laziness, lack of initiative, are fundamental characteristics of the race. Every- thing points out that these qualities are the result of 174 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS social conditions, rather than of hereditary traits.' He remarks, with emphasis, however, that it would be altogether a fallacious view to assume that there are no differences in the make-up of the Negro race and other races, and that their activities should run in the same line. Whatever determination shall finally be reached concerning the respective values of racial inheritance or modification by environment, however well-founded may be certain racial instincts, it seems clear that, in the education of the Negro, he should be granted every reasonable opportunity to make all the advancement of which he is capable. To deny him such opportunity is unkind, undemocratic, and un- safe." General Conclusion of Professor Boas. Professor Boas, summarizing his own conclusions, finds that "no proof of the inferiority of the Negro type could be given except that it seemed quite possible that per- haps the race would not produce quite so many men of the highest genius as other races; while there was nothing at all that could be interpreted as sug- gesting any material difference in the mental capacity of the bulk of the Negro population as compared with the bulk of the white population." 2 He therefore pushes his logic further than Professor Sutton does and judges that with opportunity the Negro will be- come fully equal to citizenship. 3 1 Sutton, "Education of the Southern Negro," 13, 14. * Mind of Primitive Man, 268. *Ibid., 272. RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 175 Irreducible Minimum of Missions. For the practi- cal purposes of the missionary outlook it will be enough to agree that any racial factor underlying so- cial difficulties and evils will be found capable of modi- fication in the direction of greater equality. It may be stubborn; it cannot be implacable. There is much at any rate that we can do besides removing evil con- ditions. We can modify nature so far as change of environment can affect it. We have gone nowhere near the limit of profitable effort. Fundamental social improvement at the worst is only checked, not pre- vented, by ultimate racial factors. If any race can radically better itself, all can. As concerns the darker- skinned races in the United States, home missions are the attempt of the Church to do all that can be done for each and every one through the total resources of Christianity and civilization. Missionary Education. The most outstanding mis- sionary service which the Church has undertaken for our incomplete Americans of non-European origin is education. So deficient are they that education must precede most of the organized activities of the Church itself. So needy are they and at so many points that education must include manifold forms of social bet- terment activities, and be brought to bear on every social problem. So vast are their numbers and so acute their needs that all the splendid and increasingly available schools of the states and of the federal gov- ernment must still be mightily supplemented by the Church. With rising standards of living in the people i;6 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS whom she has lifted up, her ill-supported schools have come into newly difficult responsibility and sharp struggle to maintain the quality of their service. They are not carpet-bagging institutions. They were planted to stay ; and stay they must. The Right Policy. But we speak of education now in the broadest sense as deliberate social direc- tion. "Through education," says Dewey, "society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with defi- niteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move." 1 Educational policy best tells in what direction a nation wishes to move, and to move with its most depressed and alien elements. And mis- sionary education should indicate what the Church be- lieves to be the Christian direction of national tendency for and with the belated races. A Cubit Added to Stature. Conscious of its chal- lenging power and responsibility missionary educa- tion for the non-European populations has actually shown two phases : first, it has dealt with the deter- mination of racial outlook and the discovery of racial capacity. It has been a hopeful adventure beyond the horizon of their proved powers in the direction of the ampler men they were believed to be. And if the analysis of our former paragraph is right this is both noble and scientific. If the powers of the "lower" races are stunted by our little faith in them they should be enlarged when our faith increases. When l My Pedagogical Creed, 17. RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 177 One ascended on high, he "led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men." One of his gifts is that of making a lesser man greater than he was by the ex- pectancy and daring of fellowship. "And there was that about his eye That none might see and crouch " His dominant word was, "Man, stand up," and men stood up for him. Who would not like to be such a man? "Oh, tender dreamer of a generous dream Who didst believe so surely in our soul, That ever since, our soul, and evermore, Affirms, defines itself " Who would not wish remotely to help on such effects? A Contrasting Ideal. Quite another program of racial education for the colored peoples has been com- monly and influentially held. Their education is to be vocational, with no expectation that they will ever want to enlarge their vocations. It is conceived as merely a tool for use in present status, not as a key to wider possibilities. It is a splendid idea that edu- cation should prepare men frankly for the concrete probabilities of their life, but a vicious one when prob- abilities are limited by narrow expectation. Whoever believes that there are fatally "lower" and inferior races will lack faith to try those broad incentives which are the soul of the educational method of home mis- sions. 178 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS Leadership Primary. Now, if in ultimate issues the soul is greater than the body, the primal need of any group in a fundamental, character-molding strug- gle out from under social depression is not to be ad- justed to the immediately practical demands of their lives, nor to be fitted in the shortest possible time for making a living. It is rather to extend the boundaries of experience and achievement within which prac- tical demands may grow. In short, it must have lead- ers whose gains become the ideal capital of the strug- gling masses. It must have its energized examples, its standard-bearers, its men of whom millions will say, "I can because he has." Such leadership is the chief human value of Jesus Christ to this world. And in the largest social interpretations of education noth- ing could be sounder than the enthusiastic quest and joyful discovery by the mission school of the excep- tional man who should show by his own life what other men can do, and thus lead his people out of the wilderness. Release of Suppressed Capacity. A just educa- tional policy, then, for either Church or nation, toward any group which has recently suffered, or is suffering from social repression, must seek to find adjustment, not to its present fragmentary and distorted manifes- tations of natural capacities and traits, but to its future completely emancipated mind and genius. The im- mediate task of education with respect to such a group must be to rouse and discover that suppressed capac- ity. First find your man. This should be the imme- RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 179 diate business of education; for lack of it any policy toward him is sure to blunder. "What a thing is when its becoming is completed, that we call the nature of a thing," said Aristotle. Because strong sentiment in the nation persistently urges a type of training which would fix the Negro and his dark-skinned fellows in their incompleteness, let the educator, patriot, anthro- pologist each beware. This is the crux of the prob- lem. The Masses. The leaders being found and their capacities proved, the door being faithfully held wide open to possibilities, missionary education under social redirection has experienced a certain return to prob- abilities. It is now attempting to adapt its education more democratically toward meeting the prospects of the masses. Perhaps the author's chief personal con- tribution to home missions has been the partial work- ing out of such redirection in a large group of schools for non-European populations. Elsewhere he has for- mulated the principles of such an adaptation as fol- lows: "A wise democracy will not offer its masses merely the schools of the professional or leisure classes, but will multiply class schools until there are enough to go around, and thus one to fit each Amer- ican group. As an invitation to the fairer possibilities because the best wealth of a nation is always its poor boys all these diverse groups of schools will be 'open at the top.' The state, as destiny, must never forbid the university to any child because he is poor or black." i8o THE NEW HOME MISSIONS Race More Varied than Class. "When this central issue is secure, it freely follows that the immediate economic and practical needs of any historically pe- culiar or socially handicapped group of Americans, such as the juvenile delinquent, the Indian, the immi- grant's child, the unskilled worker, may dictate a tem- porary policy of special training for their masses. The actual employment of such a policy can be justified only by a detailed sociological study of their actual situation. But such a study reveals that the Negro's case at least is not parallel to those cited. His life is indefinitely broader than that of any social group. His millions contain groups of all degrees of develop- ment. The only analogy for him is the analogy of white population in its entirety. He needs not one but all kinds of American education for the diverse grades and classes of his people. Life from Within. The profoundest educational right of any people is the right to have its inner re- sources of character utilized for its own uplift. Sub- ject groups, whether children, women, or dependent races, while they cannot be controlled unless their own souls are enlisted in the task, may be and have been warped and distorted by external pressure. It can hinder but cannot help. It never succeeds. The modern school confesses that when it fails to awaken the child's own interest its failure is absolute. Some are bold to believe that the world- wanderings of the "new woman" will lead her back to many of her old tasks, but if so it must be because her heart comes RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 181 around to them again. Her return cannot be of com- pulsion. At all hazards she must follow the inner light. The question of incentive is equally central for Negro education. Vocational efficiency in the long run must be the same as social efficiency. Train, indeed, for the child's "actual condition in life," but be quite sure that condition is understood. We inhabit many-storied houses and our true calling is to occupy them through- out. The effort to make any man a good worker with- out making him a full man will fail ; and could it suc- ceed, it would but give us a blinded Samson grinding in the prison-house of spiritual bondage. * The Church and Religion. In no sphere is the utili- zation of native capacity and resource on the part of non-European populations so subtly and profoundly important as in religion, and in none have they blos- somed more convincingly. For example, seven eighths of all Negro churches are included within racial de- nominations, self-governing and chiefly self-support- ing. Ninety-eight per cent, belong to the various Methodist and Baptist bodies. All told, the Negro church is the chief institutional achievement of the race; its best embodiment of self-government and group ideals. On the other hand, as an agency of Christian life and leadership it has notable defects lax moral standards, poor business methods, crude and noisy worship, no fundamental grasp of race needs and their remedies. In these matters, while all de- nominations are struggling forward, the chief stand- 1 Christian Reconstruction in the South, 296, 299, 301. i&2 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS ard-bearers of social redirection have been, and still largely are, a relatively few churches attached to the Northern denominations, and notable for their edu- cated ministry, restraint in worship, rigid morals, and careful supervision. Spiritual Gifts and Fruits. The raw material of re- ligion is possessed by the Negro in rich abundance, together with a very genius for its portrayal. Over and over again their worship repeats the universal and fundamental cycle of religious experience; first, the sense of misery and unworthiness amounting often to complete physical collapse; then the feeling of salva- tion and uplift by a power not oneself; finally the joy of relief and abandon of gratitude. Indeed, to awaken this round of emotion and to dramatize it by voice, posture, and action is the express object of the typi- cal Negro church service. Some of the simpler fruits of religion too are delightfully exhibited in the Negro's version of it : a characteristic cheerfulness based on faith as well as on temperament; an unfeigned piety, dependent, resigned, childlike ; a mood of friendliness to fellow Christians. Never have these graces and the vitality and power of Negro religion had franker recognition than by many of the masters of slavery days. Whoever knows Negro believers knows saints not a few ; souls which have much to teach and to give of the fine mystery of salvation. The One Spirit. No original theology or formula- tion of Christian truth is yet included in the Negro's religious development. At the same time it has by no RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 183 means remained naive and unsophisticated. On the plane of practical wisdom, it has studied deeply the spiritual states of men, their moral weaknesses, and the common means of grace. Profound and shrewd insights abound in sermonizing and glow in prayer and song. As religious lyrics the jubilee melodies reach universal significance and stand as a unique racial contribution to American Christianity. Fresh Potencies of Grace. No one can deal with the hopes and aspirations of these churches without feeling that their initiative and self-consciousness is something to be touched reverently. Their religious genius includes fresh and unexplored spiritual poten- cies. It is a stream of grace newly sprung from the Source of all grace, from which uniquely interesting expressions are to be expected. In spite of all their too well known shortcomings it is easy to feel in the collective religious life of the Negro churches the presence of a very holy thing. To the Christian mind the deepest fact in any human being or group is the fact of God. "If then God gave unto them the like gift as he did also unto us, when we believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I, that I could withstand God" (Acts xi. 17). On Earth as It Is in Heaven. Confronted with the fact of God in the darker-skinned races, the mission- ary conscience is compelled to face the often dis- quieting issue of ultimate race relations undei the gospel. The necessity of facing it is implicit in the great Christian consequence of God in men, the fact 184 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS of brotherhood. Especially does the whole momentum of the modern social conscience press for at least a tentative answer as to how the races are to live to- gether in the kingdom of God on earth. Peter and Cornelius. The New Testament nar- rates pointedly, in the Peter and Cornelius episode, the particular method of the new-born impulse to brotherhood in the early Church. And the Spirit's first step in this actual case is disappointing. It seems negative and inglorious. It is the refusal to make dogmatic announcement to prejudiced minds of the exact terms of unprejudiced fellowship. One step the Spirit takes inexorably : There are social consequences to religions fellowship. Cornelius drew the conclusion that baptism at Peter's hands implied social intimacy on Peter's part "Then prayed they him to tarry cer- tain days." To Cornelius this was the climax of the episode; and Cornelius was right. The church in Jerusalem, on the other hand, did not at all meet the issue which Cornelius raised. When they heard Peter's story "they held their peace" (as to his social conduct) "and glorified God, saying, 'Then to the Gentiles also hath God granted repentance unto life.' ' This is the great admission of the spiritual princi- ple of Christian brotherhood; yet it is quite a dif- ferent matter from stopping in a Gentile's house certain days. Not Forcing the Issue. This evasion of the social consequences of the gospel was cowardice on the part of the Church yet not to force it was wisdom on the RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 185 part of the Spirit. The half -emancipated mind of the Church was by no means ready for the ultimate issue. It could not bear it then ; it cannot bear it now. We are not prepared to raise in detail the question of ulti- mate social arrangements under the gospel. Type of Mind Required. What manner of mind might judge that question? A stubbornly teachable mind, ready to experiment to the death with race relations, as men with the flying-machine. Assuredly a free mind, not one browbeaten by repressive preju- dice. Still more necessarily a just mind, unswayed by the clamor of racial epithets. Finally, the mind of Christ, for which (God forgive us) we have sub- stituted a mongrel religion. Milk for Babes. At worst we have no right to as- sume that the terms of perfected Christian fellowship will be offensive. Indeed we ought to know, on the authority of such fragmentary Christianity as we have, that they cannot be offensive. Christianity has not had a chance to show what unforced forms its fellow- ship will take. But the gospel cannot require of us that to which it does not first conform our hearts. Love is love, which means something spontaneous; and there is no fear in it. Searching Standard of the Kingdom. Again, we know that the proprieties of the kingdom of God will not be lax. Its sense of social fitness will not be less keen than that of the world. Some men of wealth will find surprising difficulty in getting into so select a company. Does one really fear that Christian so- 186 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS ciety will be less refined than Mrs. Grundy ? Will the emancipated soul be less socially discriminating than the traditional? Does the taste of the kingdom of God suggest social promiscuity and anarchy. So long as perfect love delays to cast out all fear, it will help many to ask themselves such questions. Brotherliness a Constructive Principle. Far more important is it to insist that Christian brotherliness is a constructive social principle, which we must first free and then trust. We must not force its hand nor let another do so. Realizing Brotherhood through Personal Courage. The story of Peter and Cornelius teaches also that there is immediate specific gain every time the chal- lenge of brotherliness is pressed to a particular issue. "Can any man forbid the water, that these should not be baptized, who have received the Holy Spirit as well as we?" This is not the word of a man dogmatically certain of the whole future, nor yet of a man assured just now even of the assent of the whole Church. Rather, it is the instant clinching of the gains of an exalted hour, by a man none too certain even of his own heart. There is a grimly humorous contrast be- tween Peter's courage, with the Spirit's immediate backing, and Peter's defensive attitude before the critical Jerusalem church. The moral is : If you feel a big, fine, generous, brotherly impulse, act on it you may cool off by to-morrow, too. Step by Step. Yet at the worst, every time any man, however feeble his courage, has dared to throw RESTATEMENT OF RACE PROBLEMS 187 out that challenge, a specific gain has been made. Can any man forbid the water? No man ever has. They have been baptized in it. Prejudice for a moment has been dissolved. Brotherhood for a moment has been realized. Nay, sometimes it even lasts on for several days. Make the challenge over again and the days of brotherliness begin to overlap. Finally, some good day, they merge together and there shall be no more night. This is the heroic, constructive method of achieving brotherhood piecemeal, through personal courage. For those who are of the kingdom and patience of Jesus it will suffice. THE SOCIAL REACTION OF HOME MIS- SIONS UPON THE CHURCH THE SOCIAL REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS UPON THE CHURCH Weakness of Division. Even the pillar of fire had its dark side. Told in the book of Joshua the conquest of Caanan seems the exalted onslaught of a united people; told in the book of Judges it appears as a long-drawn-out series of independent tribal forays and fragmentary occupancies with only occasional brief spurts of national cooperation. A third record of the same events also a true one might have been written' from the standpoint of the Caananites. "Israel struck us down at length," it would read, "but how much sooner would they have done it if they had always struck together!" Competitive Missions. The facts permit the story of home missions to be told as hitherto in this book, namely, as the common geographical expansion and social readjustment of Protestant Christianity. This furnishes a sound, illuminating, and practical view- point. It is not complete, however, without the con- fession of the sectarian aspects of home missions. The conquest of America by the Church has been made under the competitive system. This fact has peculiarly 191 192 THE NEW HOME "MISSIONS determined the social forms of home missions. Most of the thousands of pages which have been written about home missions during the last hundred years have treated them implicitly if not explicitly as the process of denominational self-propagation. Its large motive has been that of extending some particular communion throughout the nation. This has been the appeal to which men responded in prayer, and in cash ; and in this aspect home missions are most definitely challenged by the newer social insights and tasks of the Church. Sectarianism. Let it be understood from the outset that social insight and duty do not challenge sectarian- ism because it is sectarian, but because it is harmfully divisive. Sect is a word from which the average Protestant instinctively shies. An uneasy conscience drives him to seek some softer equivalent. But the sociologist does not spare us; in his analysis we are sectarians. Nor is sectarianism a bad thing unless it works badly. It merely means that there are, within the immense variety of any nation's population, certain like-minded people who are mentally reen forced by one another and thus make some one chord to vibrate with great vigor. Having discovered one another, such people draw together, create agencies emphasiz- ing their common interests, and achieve some form of organization. By badges and banners they make them- selves a "peculiar people." By their slogans ye shall know them (when not by their nicknames) Socialist, Suffragist, Progressive, Pragmatist, Futurist, Cubist. REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 193 Religious sects are no less respectable if based upon distinctions equally vital. The Social Justification of Sect. According to this definition one easily understands why many a sect will be short-lived. The furor which throws its tempo- rary movement upon the crest of the social wave sub- sides. It represented no permanent human interest or point of view. Its abortive "organ" suspends after the third issue. On the other hand, sheltered in clois- ter or in lodge-room, expressed by robe or regalia, en- trenched in secrecy, a sect with scant capital of dis- tinctive interest may perpetuate itself for a long time so ample in man is the faculty of imitation. Any sect which has vitality enough to meet normal exposure to the competitive interests of civilization and to with- stand its leveling forces when fairly met, may be as- sumed to have some social value, temporarily at least. So far as American religious sects have been based in an honest attempt to rally like-minded people around an idea which they felt worthy, they have been so- cially natural, intelligible, and so far admirable. To call them sects makes them neither better nor worse than the merits of their case as judged by its ulti- mate social results. The Inevitability of Sect. Organization by sect is one of the permanent methods of human society. Such organization may take place within as easily as without the bounds of a Church. Thus the various monastic orders of Roman Catholicism and the high or low church parties, the liberals or conservatives of Protes- 194 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS tantism, if they have common standards, leaders, and organs of expression, are as truly sects as though they were completely separate rival denominations. Sec- tarianism therefore as a natural phenomenon is not incompatible with a certain unity in the Church ; since sects are already comprehended in bodies whose large unity is not broken. A Church may learn to be more tolerant and inclusive instead of dividing, and this alternative is just as often used as the method of divi- sion is. But not to divide does not remedy or obliter- ate sects. It simply reacts upon them in another way. These considerations are intended to convince the reader that he must abandon all idea that sec- tarianism in itself is either bad or good, in order to study its particular forms in the American Church and to judge by their actual social results how much of either bad or good has been in them. Sectarian Methods Taken for Granted. The older home missions definitely organized themselves for sectarian propagation and perpetuation, taking for granted the measures necessary to bring this result about. Thus a majority of the governing board of the typical church school were required to belong to the communion which founded it, or else were wholly the appointees of some ecclesiastical body. The teach- ers must be of like faith. For professors creed sub- scription was necessary. Fixed requirements of re- ligious observation extended to students, and this was intended to secure continuity of belief and tradition. Students for the ministry got free tuition and other REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 195 aid and became thus financially obligated to their denominations. Barely living salaries, with more or less certain annuities in case of disablement, age, or death, tended to keep the clergy in a permanent eco- nomic bondage. In many communions, periodical accounting for denominational results was exacted of all denominational servants; and in all, promotion and esteem depended largely upon the numbers and money found to their credit in denominational book- keeping. This made the home missionary largely a propagandist of some special sectarian gospel in con- scious competition with others. Education in Sect Loyalty. Frontier churches were constantly reminded that their denomination was aid- ing them now in the expectation of receiving as much again and that very soon; they must therefore hasten on to self -support. Of seventeen boards whose con- ditions of granting aid were recently examined, but one failed to make this duty of sect-loyalty explicitly paramount. Denominational boards and bishops pros- pered or starved according to their success in gaining funds and adherents for their own communions. A definite type of sectarian ecclesiastic developed. Men- tally and morally he was own cousin to the magnates of competitive business. Pleas and Plans of Propaganda. "Benevolence" was skilfully wrung from faithful denominationalists on pleas of the frontier's need of the gospel inter- spersed with reports of the progress of "our glorious Church." Doubtless this mood was more marked in 196 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS some communions than in others. Some, like the Con- gregationalists in their plan of union with the Pres- byterians, or in the South, were liberal in regions where the character of the population gave them little chance to succeed, and sectarian where they found themselves really in the denominational race. All shared competitive methods and ambitions and all had reaches of consciousness and of service which towered above all sectarian formulation. To these this book as a whole bears vigorous witness; mean- while this chapter sets itself to read faithfully the other side of the shield. Origins of American Sects. Before passing verdict on this process of sectarian self -propagation it is neces- sary to hold the mind still longer in suspense while inquiring how the particular sects came to be which one finds struggling for ascendency in America? Why these, one asks, and not others? American de- nominationalism consists of all the sectarian divisions which have immigrated to our shores from all the lands from which our people came, generously multi- plied by national, linguistic, and racial cleavages and added to by all the schisms of our national history, especially by the sectional shattering of the great de- nominations between North and South; and by all the theological aberrations of crude minds unfettered and intoxicated by the intellectual ferment of a youth- ful nation. From the beginning there were Catholic and Protestant; then English, Dutch, Scotch, Swede, and German, each with his national variant of the REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 197 Reformed faith. The English split again into Puritan, Quaker, and Baptist, and again into liberal and ortho- dox. Frontier disintegrations of old habits, quickened emotionalism, and doctrinal zeal were the occasion of offshoots like Cumberland Presbyterianism and that of Alexander Campbell; or the opportunity of freshly imported vital movements, especially that of Method- ism. When civilization had transformed frontier crudity, reaction sometimes set in and pioneer religious ways persisted in sectarian guise, as in the Primitive Baptists of the Southern mountain states. Religious originators like William Miller, Joseph Smith, Mrs. Eddy, and John Alexander Dowie founded sects on alleged direct revelations. Churches imported by in- coming races brought the sectarianism of Babel not yet mastered by the spirit of Pentecost. The End Not Yet. Altogether there are 186 va- rieties of American Christian, differing in polity or doctrine, or nationality or race or temperament; and doubtless more to follow. There is absolute liberty of religious practise so far as is compatible with civilized decency. The Church is a voluntary organization supported by the gifts of its member- ship. Any one who can get one disciple may start a sect. The census will enumerate one with as few as a dozen churches. There is no reason why the num- ber should not be indefinitely multiplied. A Plea in Mitigation Great Family Groups. But it is not fair to leave the matter without certain quali- fying comments. First, the actual situation is not 198 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS nearly so bad as the confession that there are 186 de- nominations sounds. The mighty Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian family groups include the vast majority of Protestant Christians. While divi- sions within families are often the most bitter and irritating, still families are families, with ties to bind them together as well as tempers to drive them apart. There remains the principle, and in important respects, the practise of union within these groups, which re- cently are showing special capacity for cooperating or getting together. Church Has Succeeded. Second, the Church as de- nominationally propagated in America has succeeded. It has been growing faster than the population. In 1850 there were only 149 church-members out of every thousand of our people; now there are 391. The ratio has much more than doubled. Between 1890 and 1906 church-membership gained upon population by over 6 per cent. The immigration of this period was overwhelmingly Catholic, in spite of which the Protestant gain was nearly 2 per cent. America's total church-membership in 1906 was 32 million. To count children and adherents would be to multiply this multitude more than twice. Over a billion dollars is invested in church property. There are sittings in houses of worship for 58 million people. Over twelve million dollars are spent annually for home missions, and thirty-eight millions are applied to human better- ment under definite Christian direction. Whether be- REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 199 cause of or in spite of sectarian methods, these are the facts. Overchurching Is Limited. Third, there are thou- sands of communities in America which have never known the actual rivalries of sectarian churches. Of missionary aid extended to churches in Vermont by Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists, 45 per cent, goes to fields where there is but one church. In thousands of communities more, sectarianism has not worked distinct moral or social harm. The Colorado survey of the Federal Council found only 1 1 per cent, of communities where flagrantly objectionable duplica- tion of churches existed. The Indictment (i) Divisiveness. So far the dis- cussion has professed to hold the scales even as to the good or evil of denominationalism in home missions. One may be pardoned for suspecting, however, that the last few paragraphs were a sort of plea of mitigation in advance of a dreaded indictment. And now the indictment must be faced : denominational home mis- sions have made a profound social failure. First, they have made the American people more different than they were, and have kept them more different than they might have been if subjected to other nationaliz- ing influences without the pullback of sect. Denomina- tions have caused extra and arbitrary social divisions, have sometimes fixed hurtful schisms, have prevented assimilation. Not all of the sects have been guilty of all of these sins, and perhaps none of them has been guilty all of the time; but these have been their 200 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS collective results. In the large the charge stands. The Church has hindered as well as helped the Amer- icanization of Americans. The Indictment (2) Neglect and Preoccupation. In supplying the religious needs of the nation the Church has, in the second place, flagrantly disregarded the law of supply and demand, congesting privilege in the more desirable places denominationally speaking, and leaving vast numbers of obscure places without the adequate gospel. Besides the Church has been so preoccupied with self-propagation as not easily to sense many of its newer social duties as they have appeared. It has therefore now belatedly to cure evils which a socially-minded Church might have pre- vented. An Extreme Case. The evidence for these charges of social failure may be read in single cases or in the great summaries of religious conditions. Thus a com- munity of 800 souls in a far Western state is re- ported as having eight churches, as follows : Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, 3 Lutheran, and 2 Methodist. The investigator finds that sectarian envy and jealousy express themselves in social cliques and an anti-com- munity spirit, but that by strange contradiction there is little genuine denominationalism in the people. Ten denominations are represented in the membership of the Presbyterian church and people easily pass from one church to another. This shows that the population could have been united by the churches much more than it was. There was not really enough local sec- AN OVKRCHfRCHKI) KfkAL COMMUNITY Within this radius of four miles tin-re arc i\ churche for every i . >, |K-rs.,n.s, indu.liiiK thil.lrcn; one diun li lor t every 2.5 families This represents one church y <o voters; one church fur REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 201 tarianism to create 8 churches without assistance through the pressure of outside organizations. The Catholic church in this community, one assumes, em- bodies historic differences which it is necessary to express; the Presbyterian and Baptist perhaps stand for the more intellectual in contrast to the more emo- tional type of religious experience. It would be fair enough to mark this difference by separate organiza- tions among 8,000 people, but not among 800. The 3 Lutheran bodies divide along linguistic lines, and are samples of the 24 divisions into which that noble communion has sadly fallen in the national life. The Methodist divisions are Northern and Southern. These meaninglessly continue in the far West old border bit- ternesses of which men have long ago repented in rela- tions in which they are more Christian than they are in their churches. Thus 800 souls are less united, less American, less socially effective and probably less religious because of the churches as they are. Average Conditions. The author's memory runs back to three out-in-the-country charges in one of which he, as a Congregationalist, fought the Presby- terians, in another the Baptists, in the third the Meth- odists. In one case the community was suffering a heritage of sectarian bitterness which had divided families and always obtruded itself into the simple social gatherings of the countryside. In all the cases it involved a waste of time and money to have dupli- catory churches at work. In none of them could the modern community service program for the country 202 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS church have been carried out without grave hindrance, by reason of denominational division and jealousy. In each of them the denominational evil will have to be healed if it has not been already before the church can do the business of the Kingdom in a modern, so- cially constructive sense. The Colorado Survey. Turning nowto larger areas : The Colorado investigation of 1909 made by the Na- tional Federal Council of Churches revealed 133 places in that state of from 150 to 1,000 population without a Protestant church, 100 of which had no Catholic church either. Extreme cases of overlapping were reported; like the community of 300 people with six churches receiving an aggregate of $600 annually from missionary boards. The Neglected Fields Survey. Far more extensive than anything undertaken before is the great Neglected Fields Survey which the Home Missions Council has under way. It is nothing less than a united attempt as yet imperfectly carried out to get detailed knowl- edge of religious conditions in every school district of the fifteen Northwestern states which, as our remain- ing frontier, receive a very large proportion of the home missionary aid of the nation. Partial results for five states, which have now been published, indi- cate that there are probably 170,000 people in them living more than four miles from a church, and that over 1,000 unchurched communities show presumptive evidence of the need of permanent organization. The survey shows also what denominations might most REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 203 usefully serve the people in many of these cases. Thus there are perhaps 300 calls to the Methodist church, 150 to the Lutheran, 100 each to the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Catholic, 50 to the Congregational, and so forth. But in these cases, as in the many cases of overlapping, the survey committee does not pretend yet to advise finally as to what should be done. It has reported a general situation. There are many points of religious distribution and many others of religious congestion. Much education of local church leaders of the several states in social-mindedness and the spirit of comity is necessary, and a more intensive study of the administrative situation, before the positive pro- gram of cooperative advance can be ventured upon. The situation is in faithful, responsible hands for further working out. Redistribution of Religious Forces. At the same time it does discover and confess a grave misapplica- tion, over a vast area, of national missionary resources directed and distributed through national agencies. It is pertinent then to offer even a theoretical sugges- tion as to how the Churches might better direct their expenditures, and get the money to found a thousand new churches in five states, should that prove to be wise. The researches of the Rev. George Frederick Wells show how it might be done. Case in Vermont. If the Baptist, Congregational, and Methodist religious forces of Vermont were re- organized into non-duplicatory churches of two hun- dred members each, with pastors receiving $ 1,000 sal- 204 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS ary each, not only would Vermont be more efficiently supplied with the gospel, but $65,000 per year would be released for use elsewhere. Sending only one third of this saving to the 15 Northwestern states, Vermont alone could maintain fifty of the thousand presumably necessary new churches. Showing of Rhode Island. Little Rhode Island is essentially an urban state. Most of its 356 churches are massed in the five largest cities. They have 65,000 members of 27 different denominations and cost $780,- ooo annually to maintain. In a city a membership of 300 is not too large nor a salary of $3,000. If the religious forces were redistributed on this basis, Rhode Island would save 140 ministers and $140,000 annually for service elsewhere. Rhode Island could then af- ford nearly 50 men and sustain over 100 new churches in the Northwest, have an equal number left for new forms of social evangelism and still a third available for the foreign field. A National Survey and Program. The social aspects of church organization as discovered and verified over such wide areas, through painstaking investiga- tions carried through years, and digested by the most competent experts, mark a new era in religious strat- egy. It is possible to hope that in a very short time we may have an adequate survey of the entire religious forces of America, as a basis for a common program of advance. Already the federal census as relates to the churches has been distinctly modified by the superior methods of the New York Federation of REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 205 Churches. The cooperating churches could undoubt- edly bring Congress to try to find out in the next census what needs to be known in this matter of na- tional import; or if not, they can find out for them- selves. The subject is worthy the attention of the universities in their advanced social studies. We should then in a little while be able to make a com- plete theoretical redistribution of the religious forces of the nation so as to serve the social need down to the least community. All the social cracks and crev- ices, which extensive home missions in her proudest days somehow failed to reach, would be supplied on paper. The survey method extended to the whole na- tion and interpreted by the best science and scholar- ship is competent to give the united American Church its national institutional program. Till one is reached the work at best will be in the twilight. The Truth Even If It Hurts. There has been a fashion to deprecate too great plainness of speech in the matter of the duplication and overlapping of churches. The effect has been feared upon the layman and his purse. Will he not say, "No more of my money to be wasted in rivalry," and turn away with the impression that the Church is socially unadjusted to the situation and generally inefficient and incom- petent? Yet probably the aforesaid layman is, this very moment, paying a fourth more than he should for his table because there are too many grocery stores, besides deliberately contributing to the support of a minister, a choir, an untaxed building, and a janitor 206 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS in competition with the church in the next block. He cannot cast the first stone, because he lives in a glass house. The sin has been the sin of all. Even at the cost of denominationalism the religious needs of Amer- ica must be met; and the layman must pay for it this way till a better is found. Better Way Found. As a matter of fact a better way is being found. Not only has the Church the method to find out the conditions and their remedy, but she has told the truth about herself more com- pletely and fearlessly than any one else has. And she is far along in applying the remedy. She is in most excellent position to say to the layman: "We used your money magnificently in taking this nation for God in the continental sense. We are fast getting both the technique and the will necessary to take it for God in the social sense. Only lift up your eyes and see how all things ecclesiastical are becoming new under the impulse of the vision and passion to save the collective and community life of the people." Increasing Cooperation. The remainder of the chapter will try to summarize what is to be seen in this realm. In 1903, Randolph, Vermont, a typical New England town of 1,800 inhabitants, had seven churches. The two oldest and strongest, the Congre- gational and the Christian, then united, sold one of their parsonages, tore down one of their meeting- houses and, with the aid of a generous donor, erected a fine community house and music hall. The merger enabled the new organization greatly to increase the REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 207 pastor's salary, to carry on what corresponds to Young Men's Christian Association and Young Women's Christian Association work, to control public amuse- ment and to use it as a positive means of grace, and to command civic leadership. The experiment has justified itself by ten years of pronounced success. Machinery of Direction and Adjustment. One of the most enlightened of religious journals, recently describing this case, commented : "Church union has furnished striking headlines for the press, provided attractive themes for public speakers, contributed to the making of books, has admitted of many theories, and yet has found but few consistent advocates who have attempted to put into practise what is so ardently and generally urged." This comment is so much less than the truth as to be distinctly misleading and mis- chievous. Not only do reports from a single denom- ination indicate that it has participated in the merg- ing or federating of more than fifty churches within two years; but beyond such local combinations the churches are weaving and strengthening a vast central network of directive and restraining organization. In- creasingly made official, as real an expression of the Church in America as the denominations themselves, it has been called into being chiefly in direct and prompt response to the challenge of the social task. The organized Church is the denominations plus their machinery of cooperation and adjustment. The or- dinary church-member may not realize this, but he will never understand the dominant tendencies of his 208 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS age till he gets beyond regarding local church con- solidations as exceptional, and fully appreciates the great actual and permanent agencies of working unity. The Home Missions Council. Founded in 1908, this great agency of working unity includes 33 boards of national jurisdiction working in the United States and dependencies, and represents thirteen denominations. As many as 5,115 of the 6,066 missionaries work- ing in the fifteen Northwestern states are under the commission of its constituent boards who have co- operatively agreed, first, to the mutual allotment of all unoccupied fields that none may be without the re- ligious privileges, and second, "to decline to endorse applications for home mission aid in places where the gospel of Christ is earnestly and adequately promul- gated by others, and where assured prospects of growth do not seem to demand the establishment of other churches." On these two commandments against "overlapping" and "overlooking" hang the law and the prophets of the united home missionary program. Cooperation for Special Groups. Standing com- mittees of the Home Missions, Council on immigrants, Indians, Spanish-speaking peoples, Negroes, and other exceptional groups, act as clearing-houses for common plans in their respective fields, all having under way important pieces of united work. The immigration committee is midway in a nation-wide survey to deter- mine the measure both of overlooking and overlapping in missions to the stranger within our gates. After REV. CHARLES L. THOMPSON Chairman of the Home Missions Council, roprocntmt; v; orK;ini/~itions and 34 denominations REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 209 a careful study three years ago, the entire unevan- gelized Indian population was allotted definitely, group by group, to the different denominations, who are oc- cupying the assigned territory as rapidly as their funds permit, and also undertaking joint educational work at certain points. Interdenominational councils have been organized, composed of executive and other workers among the Orientals of the Pacific coast, and the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest. These act as agents of the Home Missions Council and of their several boards in comity matters and in united work. For example, native evangelists representing our common Christianity have been sent to scattered Orientals in small and transient rural groups, and sup- ported by subsidies paid jointly by the boards. Comity in Porto Rico. From the first American occupancy, Porto Rico has been divided territorially for mission work between the larger denominations. While others have later pressed in without full regard for comity considerations, the Island after thirteen years remains essentially without overlapping of forces and with all its significant towns occupied very in- adequately indeed, by the cooperative Protestant ad- vance. Joint educational and publication agencies are also engaged in by the more neighborly denomina- tions. United Measures for Negroes. These are so largely carried on by agencies not fully coordinate with most of the constituent boards of the Home Missions Coun- cil, that cooperative measures have chiefly originated 210 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS in voluntary joint conferences of officials. They act however in close cooperation with the Council, and also with the great funds for Negro education and the Federal government Substantial beginnings have been made in standardizing courses of study and school administration, in the exclusion of unworthy and fraudulent institutions, and in federating competitive institutions. The General Boards of Denominational Education. These have also their Council established in 1911, in which most of the stronger communions are included. It is working on the problems of the distribution of colleges and academies with respect to comity consid- erations, the control of new foundations, standards of academic efficiency, cooperation with the state uni- versities, and joint measures for publicity, and for in- teresting givers in Christian education. Comity in this field may hope for financial encouragement from that benevolent disposer of educational destiny, the Gen- eral Education Board. Cooperation of All Home and Foreign Missions Agencies. The general policies of home missionary promotion, agitation, and advocacy are now planned unitedly by the Home Missions Council and the coop- erating Council of Women for Home Missions. They in turn now stand in a larger affiliation of all home and foreign missionary agencies in their approach to the Christian public for interest and support. Whether the whirlwind campaign methods familiarized by the Laymen's Missionary and Men and Religion Move- REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 211 ments survive or not, the unity of missionary agencies is permanently attained in this field. Joint plans, joint budgets, the common use of experts and devices are here to stay. Missionary Education. Particularly in the sphere of missionary education is cooperation made effective and permanent. Through the Missionary Education Move- ment, as the agent of the boards for pedagogical and publishing work, is produced the general literature necessary to carry out missionary advocacy as jointly planned from year to year, and, more especially, care- fully prepared and graded text-books and other mater- ial for mission study classes. These are circulated by the hundred thousand. Summer assemblies are also held for the training of teachers for such classes and of missionary leaders in the local churches. Technical methods are cooperatively worked out by the Move- ment and the educational secretaries of the several denominations. Recently the home and foreign mis- sion study programs have been unified. 1 The Sunday School World. The International Sun- day School Association, from motives not directly so- cial, has long been committed to the uniform lesson and largely to standardized methods of treatment. Re- volts from its ideals of uniformity in the more pro- gressive communions have compelled it to adapt its les- 1 This book is one of the first to be issued under the joint plan, which contemplates a companion volume, The Social Aspects of Foreign Missions. The two books constitute authorized current study material for the entire constituency of the American Protestant Church. 212 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS son material to the different ages; and incidentally have reminded us of the need to keep voluntary initia- tive alive. On the whole, however, the Sunday-school has been one of the most successful as it has been one of the most conspicuous spheres of Christian coopera- tion. More recently cooperation has been developed among the denominations through the organization of the Sunday School Council of the Evangelical Churches, in which publishers, editors, lesson writers, and secretaries unite for conference on common prob- lems. Local and State Federations. Naturally such vast cooperative agencies of national scope could not have originated before unity in work had first been tried out in smaller areas as it was in the interchurch federa- tions, particularly of some of the New England states. Home missions in actual operation are largely the de- nominational machinery of state, conference, or city. Unless these are converted to the practise of comity even when it hurts, resolutions of conventions and exhortations of headquarters' secretaries can have little weight. If they have weight, it is because the spirit and practise of unity are widespread in the American Church. Thus, thirteen states have active church fed- erations, and seven more have more or less rudimen- tary ones. Wisconsin furnishes a typical example. Its federation originated directly in the social motive. It worked out its own solution for sectarian overlapping, namely, to induce competitive churches in a com- munity to secure a joint pastor, while retaining their REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 213 separate organizations. In cases of conflicting in- terests it appoints advisory councils, composed of representatives of all denominations, and submits the case to them, as reflecting the wisdom of the united Church of Christ. Exchange of Fields. In the newer Western states, where a larger proportion of churches are necessarily recipients of missionary aid, cooperative movements naturally fall more directly under the leadership of national boards. First by conferences, modestly called "Consultations," denominational state leaders and of- ficials have been skilfully introduced to the ideals of working comity; then after thorough surveys of con- ditions, institutes are being held, under the auspices of the Home Missions Council, in which experts ad- vise as to the redirection of the whole missionary enter- prise and the strategic redistribution of its united forces. Such a program is under way in fifteen states. Then, the situation is left to work itself out not, it must be confessed, without a certain "watchful waiting" on the part of the initiating boards. And it does often work out. Thus, in October, 1913, representatives of three of the strongest denominations in South Dakota met and agreed upon a policy of the reciprocal exchange of fields in order to prevent the duplication of churches. Forthwith, the Congregation- alists surrendered two churches and their outstations to the Methodists, taking in exchange five Methodist points. The result is that some ten communities, largely in the newly-opened Indian country west of 214 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS the Missouri River, will be more adequately served with the gospel, and that without the financial and spiritual strain of sectarian rivalry. And similar processes are at work in various fields from Maine to Washington. City and Country Federations. The ultimate sphere in which working unity is to be practised is, of course, local. If it fails with actual groups of neighboring churches, it fails everywhere. Crucial importance, therefore, attaches to the local federations of churches, usually organized with the city or the country as a unit. About a hundred aggressive organizations of this type are now reported, eighty-five per cent, of which have originated within five years. Some of them are affiliated with the national Federal Council of Churches, and operate in the realm of public opin- ion, or unite in occasional civic interest rather than conduct consistent policies of church extensions and community service. Some exist preeminently to give the churches the basic sociological information on which to found policies, as does that of New York City. The most effective local federations, however, directly combine the home missionary agencies of the given city or district, both in the positive strategy of unitedly possessing the community for God, and the negative strategy of keeping out of each other's way while doing so. After all, the only absolute expres- sion of working unity is that which controls budgets and subsidies, locates institutions, and places men unitedly. This, Chicago, St. Louis, and other of our REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 215 greater cities are beginning to do, basing their policies on painstakingly acquired knowledge, and using de- nominational interests and forces merely as pawns in the high game of applying urban Christianity to the actual factors in home mission service. Social Service and the Federal Council. The newly developed activities of the Church in the interest of social amelioration and justice, particularly with ref- erence to the living and working conditions of wage- earners, have been handled in various ways by the different denominations. Some have attached "social service" departments to their old home missionary boards; others have created new agencies. All the chief communions have them, however, and virtually from the beginning they have been in the closest work- ing alliance through the national Federal Council, in which the denominational social service secretaries con- stitute a "cabinet." Their platforms, methods, investi- gations, and publications have been joint labors, imme- diately made effective in common. Reuniting Families. Finally, important mergings of denominational families are under way. That be- tween the northern Presbyterians and the Cumberland Presbyterians is accomplished, though not without re- division ; that between the United Brethren and Meth- odist Protestants is in hopeful process of consumma- tion; that between the Northern and Southern Pres- byterians still in the stage of preliminary overtures and joint sessions. The Methodists, North and South, have a Federal Council to which cases of possible 216 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS cooperation are being referred for adjustment. They have commissions also at work trying to define their respective spheres, to prevent future competition, and to plan joint advances, and in the North the regular and Free Baptists are now happily reunited. Thus each of the greater denominational families is seen to be in the process of reintegration. Unity in Far-reaching Fields. Summarizing the fields in which working unity is largely and increas- ingly in effect, one is amazed to find how far-reaching it is. The home missionary frontier in at least five sixths of its extent; the newer intensive missions to rural life; virtually all the exceptional peoples In- dians, Orientals, Negroes, Mexicans; denominational education very largely ; missionary publicity, education, and publication on a nation-wide scale; city evangeli- zation and social service ; and the sectional divisions of churches are all powerfully moved, if not practically controlled, by working unity as a current practise under highly organized agencies. Its program is theoretically universal; its realization actually astounding. How Widely Effective. Some of the sectional branches of the Church still linger outside of its scope, and the great Negro sects are practically little touched by it. There are thousands of remote communities steeped in the sectarian spirit which do not even dream that it exists. But these are overmatched by equal thousands of communities which have never known sectarian rivalry because they have always been served by a single church organization ; and, more profoundly, SECRETARIAL COUNCIL OF THE COMMISSION ON THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL SERVICE OF THE FEDERAL COUNCIL OF THE CHURCHES OF CHRIST IN AMERICA Charles (). (Jill I-rank M Crouch Harry !'. Ward Henry A. Atkinson Samuel /. It.illrn Charles S. MaifarUnd REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 217 by the super-sectarian spirit which, thank God, has distinctly pervaded American Christianity in spite of its divisions; which has enabled it to make essentially a unified impression upon the expanding nation, and to assimilate it so largely to the Protestant type. Permanent Factors of Ecclesiastical Organization. There needs to be a deliberate revolt against the habit of thought which takes the census as the point of de- parture, and goes on to regard the Church in its 186 denominational divisions. Just as staggering and as significant columns of figures could be arranged, show- ing its manifold coordinating and cooperative rela- tions, extradenominational, interdenominational, fed- eral, and world-wide. Under the impulse of social vision these have become the essential expression of the Church to tens of thousands. One-sided Conception. To ignore these is one- sided and unscientific. The Christian imagination need not be so, even if the United States Census is ; and the census should reform. The agencies, organizations, and movements which work in unity are as much a part of American Christianity as the sects are, while the spirit which works in unity is native to the Chris- tianity of Christ, in which there is no place at all for the spirit of sect. Facts as above presented are enough to provoke the spirit of song, and when next taunted with the weakness and waste of denominational divi- sion the up-to-date Christian may at least retort, "Like a mighty army moves a large part of the Church of God." 218 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS Social Sectarianism Still at Work. How much fur- ther will working unity carry us? That question cannot be answered by itself alone. The Church can- not conquer herself for Christian unity except as she also conquers society. All moral problems are pro- foundly interrelated. If the class spirit gets a per- manent upper hand in America, some sect will incar- nate it, and live on, under some honored but misused name, as the Church of the rich, or of the intelligent, after its historic or doctrinal origins have been for- gotten. Racial Lines of Cleavage. The Christian Japanese of the West are close to the edge of a new secta- rian division from the American churches along racial lines. What they feel to be an attack upon their racial self-respect has almost impelled them to sever the denominational relations and to unite .as a Japanese Church. As long as a social color-line is drawn, a sectarian color-line may be expected between white and Negro denominations. Our swarming immigra- tion from eastern and southern Europe brings to us new sects, reflecting their petty provincialisms, their linguistic differences, and their obscure doctrinal dif- ferences. Thus, the greatly useful Lutheran com- munion is being increasingly broken into fragments. The Greek Catholic Church appears in four divisions. The number of linguistic sects is thereby increasing rather than diminishing, and except as the foreigner is assimilated, sectarianism as a divisive and disin- tegrating spirit is sure to increase at one point even REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 219 while we conquer it at another. Indeed, even holding the ground we have already gained depends upon vic- tory all along the line against all the unbrotherly forces of society. Only by being strong enough to unite all life in service can the Church unite herself in service. After Working Unity. Again, will working unity carry us beyond itself to some form of organic union embracing all denominations? Let it be insisted that working unity is unity as definite and concrete an evidence of the spiritual oneness of the Church as sacrament or symbol, and a very much more signifi- cant one. Yet none will doubt that, if working unity is accomplished, she will feel an inner necessity to idealize herself in some fresh outward and visible con- fession of the one Lord and the one faith. What has the social outlook to say as to the form which this instinct will probably take? The Psychology of Sect. Here enter some of the obscurer insights of the social psychologists in the study of sects. They think they discover certain broad differences in human nature within the Amer- ican population, say four types of mental make-up, the areas of which may be roughly defined. Thus, according to Giddings, "the 'forceful' congregate about seaboard and lakeboard, in all the mountain regions, and on the great plains. The 'convivial' predominate in the South. The 'austere' are thickest in a broad belt reaching from New England to Iowa and Kansas. The 'rationally conscientious' are found here and 220 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS there in cities." 1 These elemental differences the so- cial psychologist interprets as "natural sects," whose differences will spontaneously appear in separate re- ligious expressions and organizations. He then pro- ceeds to tabulate the American denominations and to assign them to the different natural sects to which they correspond. Naturally, most of us fall between the types, and none may feel greatly flattered by the scientists' handling of his own case. Temperamental Affinities. The least discriminating however, will sense the contrast between the more emotional and the more intellectual denominations, and confess that there are certain Christians with whom he feels in temperamental affinity and others who strike him as somehow alien. Further, the so- cial psychologist argues, the great denominational families correspond roughly to the natural sects and their intermediate types. Only let them reunite and the result will be half a dozen or so vast and master- ful branches of the Church, which could afford to ignore such other denominations as did not then unite with them on grounds of inner similarity. 2 Some- thing approximating this result would appear to be desirable from the standpoint of social effectiveness. Sect and Efficiency. It is doubtful, however, wheth- er social effectiveness would prescribe more than a working unity between such great bodies. Our in- dustrial trusts, we are finding, have often succeeded * Quoted in Ross, Foundations of Sociology, 303. * McComas, Psychology of Religious Sects, 227. REACTION OF HOME MISSIONS 221 in spite of their size rather than because of it. Some of us suspect that something similar is true of the Roman Catholic Church. A denomination might easily become of unwieldy size. Dr. Fisher of the Laymen's Mission- ary Movement of the Methodist Episcopal Church explains the failure of his denomination to respond as readily as others to the appeal for a missionary ad- vance on the ground that it is so much larger a mass to move. Judging by the criterion of efficiency rather than of pride, the missionary administrator would be slow to recommend the nation as the work- ing unit. So large a unit is at least not directly in- dicated by the social view-point in church organiza- tion. A Few Denominations and Working Unity. If, therefore, half a dozen denominations should be found necessary to express the more permanent and natural psychological differences between men, it would not defeat social effectiveness to have the ultimate Amer- ican Church so organized, provided always that the working unity which we have even now in fairly com- plete outline were perpetuated and perfected. Spiritual Unity. Whether men utterly commited to fellowship in service would find esthetic fitness and moral concentration in erecting some further inclusive order of the visible Church the future will determine. Such a united Church ruled by experts and social engineers rather than by ecclesiastics might escape some of its ancient perils. Its advantages over a 222 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS harmonious federation of denominational families will be doubted by those whose temperaments make them willing that the ecclesiastical body shall have members differing sufficiently one from another to remind them that their Head is Christ alone. SOCIAL REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA CHAPTER VIII SOCIAL REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA Making the Gospel Operative. The religion of the New Testament is a seamless robe which cannot be divided. There is no such thing as a social realization of Christianity standing alone. Not any nor all of the forces and agencies which this book has tried to inter- pret and honor can make the gospel operative in our land. In Browning's "Death in the Desert" (to borrow an illustration of Dr. Jowett's) the end comes to the aged apostle John while hid from persecution in a cave with three humble converts and a boy. Lay- ing him where a rift of light plays on his face they try to rouse him for a last farewell. They touch his lips with wine, cool his brow with water, chafe his hands and pray; he smiles but sleeps on. Then the boy springs from his knees, fetches the graven tablet of the Gospel and pronounces, "I am the resurrection and the life" ; whereat the old man rouses, sits up, and speaks. Humanity is that aged frame. Social serv- ice may apply the stimulants to life the wine, the water, the chafing of the hands ; personal religion may pray; but the living word alone can stir life itself 225 226 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS afresh and make it to triumph in all the measureless realm of being. Man Bound to FaiL No improvement of environ- ment will make the human soul commensurate with its largest visions. Discrepancy there will still be between a man and his best; humiliation will be his portion, with the experience of essential failure and the inces- sant sense that it is better not to live than not to at- tain. In its profoundest reaches life will still need a redeeming touch deeper than any social ministry. Its total meaning, birth and death, its early and later mysteries, will still overwhelm; nor will any "normality" discovered in the natural cycles of life nor the best balance of social adjustment dissolve the paradox of sin. Only God himself can wipe away all tears from human eyes. Working Together with God. In the sense of these solemnities the whole mighty enterprise and enginery of missions is struck humble. The mood of going about religious service as about a business utterly dissolves. If machinery is not sufficient for ultimate things it is not sufficient for anything. Life is of one piece, and only God can make the cooperation of its various movements work out into final blessedness. Home missions simply offer themselves humbly as the bond-servant of Jesus Christ, for social utilization and for the service of the common life. Comfort in Past Results. At the same time they go about their remaining tasks strangely comforted in REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY 227 this sense of inadequacy by the consciousness of im- portant service accomplished in the past, and of new knowledge and resources for the future. Missions have overspread the continent with the hearthstone and the spire. They have invented and possessed themselves of original forms of service which have worked imperial results alike under the control of old ideals and now under social redirection. They have visioned in beauty and order a Paradise Redeemed for all the spacious reaches of the open country ; they have seen in outline a completed common life through the mystic potencies of the city, the most perfect re- flection of the World that Shall Be; they have com- posed a symphony of nations out of the babel of alien voices; they have started intelligent and far-reaching streams of social justice which shall yet roll down like mighty waters; they have closed up the deepest racial gulfs of humanity with the daring of fraternal fellow- ship; they have made even the Church brotherly and therefore conquering! These things they have done in part, even as all human service is yet fragmentary. Facing the Final Phase. Now home missions must undertake the final phase of their task, namely, the combination of these fragments of success into a more perfect realization of Christianity in America worthy to be presented to God for ultimate completion. i. Motive and the Missionary. The social real- ization of Christianity in America depends upon the control of personal motive. The missionary is the key 228 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS to missions; and the missionary is one whose own heart also sends him upon the business which the Lord appoints. Even to operate the enginery of mis- sions which the Church has available money to pay for, there is desperate lack of men. Shortage of labor is the chief spiritual lack as it is the chief economic lack of the Church. "More reapers" is still the groan and travail-cry of fields white to harvest. Growing Social Service of State. But the field in which there is greatest shortage of adequately moti- vated lives is not that of the Church but of the state. Throughout the book there have been frequent con- fessions of the relatively limited sphere of the Church as such in many realms of constructive social effort. Measured by the number and importance of social functions performed, the Christian state has been rec- ognized as the chief agent of the social application of the gospel. Government is the frequent supplanter of the Church in ministries which were once ecclesiasti- cal, so that there is a narrowing of the outward forms of "religious" service. In education, in libraries; in the technical aspects of rural betterment; in an infin- itely varied range of urban activities; in schools for Indians, Negroes, and similar backward groups, gov- ernment local, state, and national is doing much which the Church had to do in the earlier eras. Missionaries of the State. There is no higher call- ing of God than to serve social ends through the Christian state. On the other hand, the serviceable- REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY 229 ness of politics is strictly limited by the quality of the men it can summon to its tasks. There are many things and they the most fundamental which the law cannot do because it is "weak through the flesh." Its greatest weakness is in the control of motive. American politics have not directly ministered greatly to morality. The vaster the social structure, the more complicated the functions it has to perform, the more dependent does it become upon the power which drives its social machinery. The United States Bureau of Indian Affairs has hundreds of workers under civil service regulations to carry on its great work, and millions of money to spend. Yet so keen is its sense of the need of Christian quality in its service that a recent Indian Commissioner began a deliberate ap- peal to the same students who became volunteers to the foreign missionary field, and to the home mission- ary agencies, to send men of missionary consecration to take the civil service examinations. In the whole range of social ministry, whatever agency does the work, the Church preeminently must inspire and pre- pare the men. Conversion and Calling. The origin, then, and the renewal of the sources of motive in the hearts of Christians who may serve either the state or the Church is of preeminent concern. The Church, as has been statistically proved, is the chief present source of social workers ; religion has been their ultimate in- spiration. Their work consists mainly in drudgery and in many of its experiences tends to disillusion. The 230 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS discrepancy between social ideals and our present con- trol of conditions; the old hardship of delay that we are in a great hurry while God does not seem to be constantly throws the social worker back into depend- ence upon the original basis of his consecration in definite religious experience. Now the least outworn of religious experiences the one of greatest working value is unquestionably that of thorough, conscious, personal conversion, whereby God comes into specific possession of one's life. Most lives alternate between hopes and fears, between doubts and certitudes. Hearts beat to the rhythm now of weariness and wav- ering courage, now of new access of faith. Our sure warrant in these vacillating moods is the memory of moments which shone by their own inner glory, untouched by the waxing or waning of the outer day. "I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear"; but spiritual extremity always drives one back upon some self-evidencing experience; "but now mine eye seeth thee." These are the central realities whereby men live, upon which the reformer must stand, to which the prophet must return. It is highly important then that his faith should be deep-rooted, that in the initial experience of the Christian religion there shall be a dis- tinctly social aspect. The high, creative, personal ex- perience of redemption should have its strong social coloring, in order that social motive in the completest degree may bear the fundamental stamp of religion against the day of its desperate trial. Social Fire. Individual Christian experience and so- REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY 231 cial passion being of right two phases of one experi- ence, it follows that the call to definite personal service and to the vocation of the missionary in a day of social emphasis should have social fire as its inmost quality. The forms that such a call takes in the lives of the youth of any generation are largely dependent upon the teaching of the Church. It cannot create, but it can direct the divine responses of unfolding souls. The summons to social service should then be read into the profoundest call of Christian vocation. The mys- tical sense and deep confession, "I know the Lord has laid his hands on me," furnishes the only certain and steadying basis for human service. On the other hand, the social vision greatly reenforces the summons to Christian service. Qualifications for social service have become a chief test of the missionary. The fact that one possesses them becomes the most definite practical answer to the ques- tion whether the Lord has truly called him. The recruiting agencies of the Church have begun to sound the social emphasis in no uncertain tones. Those who look for missionary volunteers should go where social enthusiasm has been dominant and economically minded, as often in the agricultural college, the state university, and even in the medical or technical school. Prayer and the Springs of Motive. But the deepest preparation and enduement of the missionary is the work of forces too fundamental for social control. Spiritual efficiency and power are unlocked only by the mystic key of prayer. Education is of the schools, 232 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS practical efficiency a matter of working plans and plant, and men may be hired for pay; but the missionary spirit is born and nourished only in an atmosphere of intercession, in which personal resolves are made good and personal decisions drawn up into the august com- munions of the saints around the throne of grace. Prayer, then, for the missionary that his faith and zeal fail not, for the administrator of missions that his patience and judgment fail not, for the support- ers of missions that their devotion and money fail not, is indispensable in the deeper program of mis- sionary success. The missionary is the key to mis- sions. Whoever can find and furnish motive to this man takes the first step in the social realization of Christianity in America. This is a preeminent task of the Church through home missions. 2. The Kingdom of God. The social realization of Christianity in our country depends also upon an ade- quate restatement of Christian doctrine. To make effective the social leadership of Jesus Christ necessi- tates a redirection of theology and its rearrangement in social terms around Jesus' teaching of the king- dom of God. In this doctrine he freed an ancient so- cial conception from centuries of limitations. In mak- ing it the central tenet of his thought he kept it so- cial, and made it more than social, expanding it till it reached up into all the realms of life. He taught that the kingdom was to be realized on earth as it is in heaven. He took good care that this concept should not be too greatly entangled with the current social REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY 233 demands of his own time. It was a germinal idea; a life-giving spirit, the definite social character of which he made perfectly plain, but the applications of which he left largely to each generation. We must equally preserve the very atmosphere of this doctrine of Jesus, and must press its detailed claims upon our day. God Father ; men brothers ! God's reign ; man's social life expressing it! Let the divine simplicity of it stand, unvexed by economic or theological subtle- ties. This will leave the doctrine of the kingdom of God perfectly open to the most concrete and practical uses of the present day. When home missions under- take to check the cotton-boll weevil or to eradicate the cattle tick in a given community, they get their war- rant straight from the gospel, in which Jesus purpose- fully imbedded his social principle knowing well that it would be needed for unimaginable uses in every future day. Spiritual Basis of Fraternity. As it flows out into the doctrine of universal brotherliness, it is the par- ticular task of the social gospel to correct and com- plete the crude and often materialistic formula of equality which has played so large a part in the social hopes of the modern masses. In a day when the Church has had her doubts as to the efficacy of doc- trine, socialistic doctrine, backed by antiquated philos- ophies and misunderstood science, has been the staff of life to millions of crude but effective thinkers upon social justice. Largely outside of the academic influ- ences, socialism in its various versions has flourished 234 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS through the dogmatic method. Banished from the pulpit, dogma finds a forum in the streets, and flour- ishes from dry-goods boxes and the tails of carts. The moral passion which has been behind it shames the frequent lukewarmness of the Church. To interpret its very real aspirations for fraternity into the terms of Christian brotherhood, to show how equality can only be realized through the enthusiastic sense of membership in the body of Christ, is the mediatorial office of the Christian thinker, and will be on through the centuries. The man who can direct, order, and convince the great outstanding categories of social thought according to the mind of Christ has a mission second to none. Not necessarily apart from daily deeds of social value, and frequently in connection with the practical tests of administrative duties, but always magnifying and controlled by the interpretive gift, this man fulfils his office under the one Spirit. Home missions have large share in the social realization of Christianity through their servants who can think ef- fectively. 3. A New Creation. The social realization of Christianity in America depends moreover upon a warm-hearted faith in lowly men. The old home missions dealt more largely with their own sons and daughters of the Church in their Westward migration. The new home missions have more largely upon their heart the stranger and those far off, historically and racially. In the difficult problems of their assimila- tion to the nation's deepest life, a controlling and un- REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY 235 failing faith is impossible apart from the ever-burning fires of personal experience. One knows in himself the power of the gospel to make him greater than he was. Faith simply transfers the certainty of this ex- perience from the redeemed man to the remotest brother in whose redemption he labors. This is the apostolic order of statement: "You did he make alive," and therefore you can understand social conse- quences of the life-giving gospel to the Gentiles. To the man in fundamental doubt as to his brother's full human quality and capacity, especially to the man suf- fering the extreme forms of race prejudice, religion is the only effective approach. Argument is a blunt weapon; science is helpless before stubbornness; but show a man that the lowliest Christian is possessed of the same spiritual life which he knows himself, and you make all arbitrary limitations and divisions for- ever impossible ; all essential fellowships forever neces- sary. "For he is our peace, who . . . brake down the middle wall of partition." The Christian life in lowly men is just as revolutionary as the New Testa- ment represents it to be. A class or a race with this experience is a new creation. For it old things have passed away. It is no longer a question of the natural powers or capacities of men. For the entire human race the central fact is the re-creation and reinter- pretation of life by Jesus Christ, and the development of new moral forces through his leadership; "By the one spirit are we all baptized into the one body, whether we be bond or free." 236 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS Missions at Home. Home missions themselves have not always accorded full and equal membership in the body of the nation and of Christ to those whom we think to be "less honorable, more feeble, un- comely." The denominations have differed greatly in their fidelity to the needs of the Negro, Indian, and other non-European groups, as measured by the pro- portion of money and men expended in their behalf. Home missions as denominational church extension have flourished throughout the field, but the peoples who could not recompense the church in conspicuous success or rapid growth have sometimes been forgot- ten. It is necessary then, sometimes at least, to make distinctions within the home missionary field itself and to discriminate between home missions and missions at home. Thus "missions at home" may stand for the vast work for remoter and non-European aliens under our flag, which in problem and method is essentially a duplicate of foreign missions. So much is this true that many branches of such work, though on American soil, are still conducted by the foreign boards of certain denominations. Since all the deeper bases of civilization are lacking with such peoples, social serv- ice for them has to mean, not so much the rectifying of bad conditions, as the creation of fundamental social relations. The civilized home, the modern social com- munity, every deeper aspect of the common life have to be refounded as well as nourished and directed. Farm, shop, and kindergarten have to precede the more highly organized and ecclesiastical forms of religious REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY 237 institutions. Relatively speaking, such poor and lowly people can do little for themselves financially, and their missions will cost proportionately more; also results will be slower. Yet effective loyalty to home missions means loyalty to them in the persons of the least of these our brethren. Man for man, home for home, community for community, they represent the most desperate of America's needs for brotherly bounty and friendship. Loving and Liking. But service is not all we owe them : there is the deeper debt of appreciation. A sen- sitive and welcoming recognition that the American Church is genuinely reenforced by the new moral powers born in lowly peoples and races is the finest exercise of social faith. It is the most vital test of spritual discrimination in a too complacent Church. That we are receivers as well as givers, that we need the alien and stranger with their fresh inspirations, young hearts, and novel glow of ideals is one of the greatest social discoveries of American Christianity through home missions. 4. Home and Foreign Missions. The social reali- zation of Christianity in America depends again upon the naturalization of Christianity in every nation. It is not enough that we be reenforced by the gifts and graces of the new or varied peoples who throng our borders. Redemption is a world-wide task. The redemption of our land will come through the fellowships of a world- wide task, and not alone through our fellowship of missionary service in foreign lands. We live in an 238 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS age, not only of stupendous migrations of peoples, but of stupendous movements which both ebb and flow. From other shores they come to us; to other shores from us they go. And far more potent than the momentous recessional of returning pilgrim feet is the still, small voice of new ideas which he whispers back to his old home, and which ink and steel, vibrant wire and thrilling ether echo to every corner of the earth. Home missions and foreign missions merge and inter- penetrate as nations move backward and forward among the continents and pass from moral zone to moral zone. The typical missionary sits no more in distant loneliness, but stands on the crowded highway of nations and sends daily greetings to his brother across the world by the emigrant who passes nis door. Utilizing World Experience. What America needs to complete her social version of the gospel in action can only be discovered for her as the outcome of so- cial experiments in Christianity as naturalized in the East and the South and wrought out in practise by the genius of the darker races under the direction of the indigenous spirit. Foreign missions must give way to the home missions of Asia and Africa. Two divine calls are theirs, of ec[ual moment for the salva- tion of the nations: first, the call to go; second, the call to come away. First, they must evangelize the people; second, naturalize the gospel by the thorough founding of the native Church. Then the work of foreign missions is over. Where foreign missions end, REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY 239 home missions begin. All deeper issues must be faced, all ultimate social applications of the gospel for Asia and Africa made by the native Church conducting its own home missions into social fields under the guidance of the one Spirit, dividing insight and efficiency to each several race and continent even as he will. Process of Give and Take, Then will begin that final process of give and take between the home mis- sionary fields of earth which will make world experi- ence available for all and give social Christianity its widest induction and its broadest catholicity. Those social ultimates, the family, the Church, the state, will get their final form from the experiences of the total human race. Faith and brotherhood will get world reenforcement and world definition. Till that day they remain fragmentary even for us. Christian society must mean the permeation of the common life of the whole earthly family of God. It can never be realized in America alone. Apart from all the rest we shall not be made perfect 5. Whose Is the Church? The social realization of Christianity in America depends upon the Church's radical and sincere repentance of her social isola- tion. She needs not only the gifts of comers from all lands, and the graces which can bloom only in other lands where Christ has become their very own: she needs as well, yea, first, the worth and loy- alty of all sorts and conditions of men in our own America. The Church has position, wealth, technical resources, and ideals largely because it has received an 240 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS unearned increment from the land and a monopoly ad- vantage from industry. These have unlocked all the higher treasures of civilization. The Church has ex- perienced the profitableness of godliness and proved the permanent relations which exist between thrift and virtue and success. It is the Church of people whose fathers worked hard; the farmer's Church and the small capitalist's Church ; the institution of the achiev- ing older population which got hold of natural re- sources first. Wealth to Be Democratized. The Church is to be honored rather than blamed for this condition. She cannot permanently raise any one to her own position of advantage except through the same discipline and on the same terms of character. What troubles her peace is the verified suspicion that late comers of equal capacity and likelihood of character have not now the same advantage to capitalize their virtues in the acquirement of wealth and position. It is for the Church therefore to repent of her exclusive advantage and to put an end to it. Christian wealth must be democratized not by arbitrary equalization or divi- sion but by the development of a juster social order which will rapidly equalize it; by the control of wages and profits, by taxation and by exacting standards of Christian stewardship in the use of property. An Old Virtue to the Front. Taxes must be re- stored to the place of preeminent virtue which they occupied in the Old Testament, and the Church must cease to misquote, as exhortations to Christian char- REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY 241 ity, Scriptures whose first application was to the politi- cal duty of taxpaying. But taxation must be in- terpreted religiously in the light of the best Christian and modern social emphasis. Giving must be carried out in humility and repentance. Benevolence must take a third place in the catalog of social virtues. If taxes come first, personal service comes second, and the giv- ing of money only third. Of these three the greatest is taxes. But benevolence has still its place and in the support of the voluntary Church and its vast train of missionary and human enterprises it is the central one. It is preeminently the virtue which makes home missions possible. In all its uses benevolence must put on humility. Only humility and works meet for re- pentance can take away the taint which clings to too much missionary money. Keeping Goodness Good. The Church's ideals must be democratized; she must be humble in her moral superiorities; she must repent of her frequent sunderings from the masses, even when their separa- tions have been partly due to the higher personal ideals and the finer individual conduct of the church-member. None of these elements of goodness can even remain good without their recombination with the more ro- bust and modern excellencies of social morality, in which often enough the religious teacher needs to sit at the feet of the trade-unionist, and the rural saint to go to school to the city child. Only the speediest spread and equalization of the moral advantages of the Church can keep them from decay. The presence 242 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS of this deep mood of repentance in the fundamental thinking of home missions is a necessary condition of the social realization of Christianity in America. 6. Environment and the Average Christian. The social realization of Christianity in America de- pends, finally, upon an effective strategy of social control. The Church is committed through the home missionary enterprise to a social program confessedly in advance of the average conscience. Just as mis- sions propose to organize an uplifting environment for the socially depressed people; just as they try to re- deem the young criminal by putting him in a com- munity of higher ideals; so missions propose to or- ganize an uplifting environment for the average Chris- tian in which his collective will may function more generously and wisely than his individual will would do. The individual Christian is immensely dependent upon the moralizing pressure of the collective religious life. This is only to say that he is truly a member of a spiritual body of which the Church is the visible organ. The Church is in a strategic position of social advantage. As an organization it is greatly in con- trol of the moral atmosphere of its adherents. Its deep power over them was shown by its former ability to put upon them a sectarian stamp. It achieved this end only by ceaseless education. It now sets itself to put a social stamp upon the mind and conduct of its members, to do which it must still ceaselessly educate under a redirected social impulse. Religious Education. In its larger social expression REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY 243 religious education uses the pulpit, the Sunday- school, and the manifold agencies of public opinion. It involves a modern use of the Bible as a book of social invention and adventure; as an instrument for the guidance of social experiment, and not as a reposi- tory of doctrine or a completed code of social laws. Religious education embraces and must direct the con- crete study of social issues and must interpret the so- cial surveys which have been explained as the current method of approach to social duty. Finally, religious education must include mission study as the record of the outstanding achievements of the Church, both social and spiritual, both at home and abroad. Thus it becomes one of the essential elements in the strategy of Christian conquest. Constructive Statesmanship. Home missions have made the Church one of the chief factors in American social life. The Church in turn recognizes and sup- ports home missionary organizations as one of the chief devices of social progress and control. Among the greatest triumphs of modern invention are the so- cial organizations which the new age has originated. In their local and national phases, expressed either in the men that they control, the money that they use, or the influence which they wield, organized home missions rank with the trusts or the trade-unions as one of the first-rate social achievements of the genera- tion. With their experts, their increasingly precise technique, their ability to dispose their vast forces as to time, place, and need, and especially in their coop- 244 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS erative results interdenominational and interna- tional they reach the highest constructive statesman- ship. They are the most efficient, dominant, and highly Christianized of agencies for planting the king- dom of God on the soil of America. America Becoming Christian. Among the most en- viable of men is that group of missionary administra- tors whose part it is, in behalf of the Church, to know these United States in their social and Christian prob- lems and potencies, from end to end, and from top to bottom. Probably they, as no one else, understand the redirection of patriotism and affection involved in the social vision of the home missionary task. A Land of Natural Charms. To know any part of our land is to love it. The white birches silhouetted against the dark hemlocks on the New England hill- side; the tender little creeping greenery delicately em- broidering the feet of the Adirondack forest; the meeting of rugged highland and misty marshes at the nation's greatest gateway, and the mighty stretch of reddening sunrise over the waving marsh grasses up and down all our coastal plain; the widespread shade of the live oaks draped with Spanish moss, equally stir and engage the affections of one whose parish is the nation. The lapping deep-green waters of the Great Lakes; the dotted farms and forests of the interior wreathed in the smoke of factory chim- neys; the steep bridle paths of the Southern Appalach- ians winding under majestic chestnut and mighty beech; the smiling cotton fields of the Southern up- REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY 245 lands and plains enclosed in a framework of pine tree and vine, all are the familiar furnishing of home to one who lives wherever the flag flies. The shimmer of sunlight over the prairie ; the rich yellow of wheat ripe for harvest ; the smoking gray of the new-turned prairie sod; and then the high plains southward over ranch and mine, to where, against the serrated back- ground of mountains, the cactus towers -as the sand- like pillars in the ruins of Karnak, and the day-long mirage mocks one day after day, each has a mystic compulsion over the heart of one who knows them all. From the white peaks of the farther Rockies ; from the Cascades forested somberly by the firs ; from the stark grandeur of the high Sierras to the virile beauty of the Golden Gate, and the smiling gardens and orchards, with the ancient missions slumbering in the mellow light between the foothills and the unutterably white surf of the Pacific, our land is goodly to know and to call ours. A Land of Human Splendor. But infinitely the most beautiful part of America the most majestic, alluring, and passionately compelling is its wealth of people and of divine incentives to brotherliness. Ours is a land of human splendor, passing increasingly under the mastery of Jesus Christ. To miss this is to miss all; and how often it is missed! Barrier of the Unfamiliar. Confession perhaps may best serve the case at this point. Once on a vacation ramble in Vermont, I experienced one of the most dramatic surprises of my life. Following a 246 THE NEW HOME MISSIONS mountain path, I seemed to hear the voice of angry, quarreling men. My mind pictured a drunken crowd, carousing in the woods, and I would have turned aside if I could. Persisting, however, I came upon a group of Slavic folk picking blackberries; mothers with little children at their breasts, garrulous grand- mothers, maidens, brothers, and lovers all peaceful, domestic, innocent. And the violent brutal words which I had heard were the most dulcet tones of the Itskys and Ozskys. / had never heard them before. Yet in that tongue mild mothers had crooned their babes to sleep for centuries ; man had wooed maid ; God had heard prayers. The excuse, therefore, that I had never heard it before lacked something of cogency, partook somewhat of stupidity and provincialism. Yet for less cause age-long animosities have been cherished. Herodotus thought the barbarous tongue-tied, so strange their language sounded to him. And, at the bottom of their minds, millions of men imagine that those who differ from them by some superficiality of color, voice, or mental pace really suffer some positive defect, or at least somehow lack complete humanity. The Bond of Peace. For the lack of this keen and compelling sense of inner likeness and fraternity, Christianity fails of social realization in America. Separated by our vast divergencies of origin and tra- ditions; kept asunder by the vast extent and physical variety of our country, how desperate the need of a unifying spirit, of a bond of peace! How wonder- ful to know and to testify, of personal knowledge, that REALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY 247 everywhere middle walls of partition are breaking down and men being made one in the blood of the cross; that out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation the transformation into kings and priests unto God is under way. Privilege and Task. The people under God are the strength and glory of the land. A mighty land to glimpse whose future is to share a mission with the stars ; to control whose destinies is to stand within the grip of the right hand of the omnipotent God. What then lovingly and faithfully to follow and to serve all the strange and complicated paths of social duty into the furthest recesses, the uttermost nooks and crannies of human relationship; to control their inner qualities and applications as well as their outer exhibi- tions and forms! What then to occupy this land for Christ, not f ragmentarily as the field has won upon the forest, nor fitfully, as the wind sweeps over the prai- ries, but searchingly, engulfingly, as the waters cover the sea ! What then to share in thy social realization of Christianity, O country of our love! *And crown thy good with brotherhood, From sea to shining sea." BIBLIOGRAPHY BIBLIOGRAPHY Pioneer Missions Adams, Ephraim. The Iowa Band. 1870. Pilgrim Press, Bos- ton. $100. Burleson, Hugh L. The Conquest of the Continent. 1911. Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, New York. 50 cents, net. Dark, Joseph B. Leavening the Nation. 1903. Baker & Taylor Company, New York. $1.25, net Douglass, T. C. Pilgrims of Iowa. 1911. Pilgrim Press, Bos- ton. $2.00, net. Hines, H. K. Missionary History of the Pacific Northwest. 1899. H. K. Hines, Portland, Oregon. $1.50. Platt, Ward. The Frontier. 1908. Missionary Education Move- ment, New York. 60 cents. Puddefoot, W. G. The Minute Man on the Frontier. 1895. T. Y. Crowell & Co., New York. $1.25. Shelton, Don O. Heroes of the Cross in America. 1904. Mis- sionary Education Movement, New York. 6b cents. Sloan, William N. Spiritual Conquest Along the Rockies. 1913. George H. Doran Company, New York. $1.25, net. Stewart, Robert L. Sheldon Jackson. 1908. Fleming H. Re- vell Company, New York. $2.00, net. Talbot, Ethelbert. My People of the Plains. Harper & Bros., 1906, New York. $1.75, net. Tomlinson, Everett T. The Fruit of the Desert. 1907. Grif- fith & Rowland Press, Philadelphia. $1.25. Tuttle, Daniel S. Reminiscences of a Missionary Bishop. 1906. Thomas Whittaker, New York. $2.00, net. Whipple, Henry B. Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate. 1902. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2.50, net 251 252 BIBLIOGRAPHY City Addams, Jane. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. 1909. The Macmillan Company, New York. 50 cents. Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House. 1910. The Mac- millan Company, New York. $1.50, net. Betts, Lillian W. The Leaven in a Great City. 1902. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York. $1.50, net. DeForest, R. W., and Veiller, L. Tenement House Problem, 2 Vols. 1903. The Macmillan Company, New York. $6.00. Howe, F. C. The City the Hope of Democracy. 1905. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $1.50, net. McCulloch, J. E. The Open Church for the Unchurched. 1905. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. $1.00, net. Riis, Jacob A. The Battle With the Slum. 1902. The Mac- millan Company, New York. $2.00, net. Sears, Charles H. The Redemption of the City. 1911. Griffith & Rowland Press, Philadelphia. 50 cents. Stelzle, Charles. Christianity's Storm Center. 1907. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. $1.00. Strong, Josiah. The Challenge of the City. 1907. Missionary Education Movement, New York. 60 cents. Wilcox, Delos F. The American City. 1904. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.25. Country Church Anderson, W. L. The Country Town. 1911. Baker & Taylor Company, New York $1.00, net. Ashenhurst, J. O. The Day of the Country Church. 1910. Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York. $1.00, net. Bailey, L. H. The Country Life Movement in the United States. 1911. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.25, net. Beard, A. F. The Story of John Frederic Oberlin. 1909. Pil- grim Press, Boston. $1.25. Bricker, Garland A. Solving the Country Church Problem. 1913. Eaton & Mains, New York. $1.25, net. BIBLIOGRAPHY 253 Butterfield, K. L. The Country Church and the Rural Problem. 191 1. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. $1.00. Carver, T. N. Principles of Rural Economics. 1911. Ginn & Company, Boston. $1.30. Fiske, G. Walter. The Challenge of the Country Church. 1912. Association Press, New York. 75 cents. Gill, C O., and Pinchot, Gifford. The Country Church. 1913. The Maemillan Company, New York. $1.25. Plunkett, Sir Horace. The Rural Life Problem in the United States. 1910. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.25. Roads, Charles. Rural Christendom. 1009. American Sunday School Union, Philadelphia. 90 cents. Wilson, Warren H. The Church of the Open Country. 1911. Missionary Education Movement, New York. 60 cents. Immigration Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. 1912. Houghton, Mifflin Company, New York. $1.75. Antin, Mary. They Who Knock at Our Gates. 1914. Hough- ton, Mifflin Company, New York. $1.00, net. Commons, J. R. Races and Immigrants in America. 1907. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.50. Fairchild, Henry P. Immigration. 1913. The Macmillan Com- pany, New York. $1.75, net. Haskin, Frederic K. The Immigrant. 1913. Fleming H. Re- vell Company, New York. $1.25. Jenks, Jeremiah W., and Lauck, W. Jett. The Immigration Problem. 1912. Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York. $I-7S Roberts, Peter. The New Immigration. 1912. The Macmillan Company, New York $1.50. Shriver, W. P. Immigrant Forces. 1913. Missionary Educa- tion Movement, New York. 60 cents. Steiner, Edward A. The Broken Wall. 1911. Fleming H. Re- veil Company, New York, $1.00. Warne, Frank J. The Immigrant Inz<asion. 1913. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York. $2.50, net 254 BIBLIOGRAPHY Races Baker, Ray S. Following the Color Line. 1908. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. $2.00, net. Brain, Belle M. The Transformation of Hawaii. 1898. Flem- ing H. Revell Company, New York. $1.00. Brown, Arthur J. The New Era in the Philippines. 1903. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. $1.25. Douglass, H. Paul. Christian Reconstruction in the South. 1909. Pilgrim Press, Boston. $1.50. Grinnell, George B. The Story of the Indian. 1895. D. Apple- ton & Company, New York. $1.50. Grose, Howard B. Advance in the Antilles. 1910. Missionary Education Movement, New York. 60 cents. Hammond, L. H. In Black and White. 1914. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. $1.25, net. Helm, Mary. The Upward Path. 1909. Missionary Education Movement, New York, 60 cents. Hinman, George W. "The Oriental in America." 1913. Mis- sionary Education Movement, New York. 5 cents. Humphrey, Seth K. The Indian Dispossessed. 1905. Little, Brown & Co., Boston. $1.50. Leupp, Francis E. In Red Man's Land. 1914. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. 50 cents, net. Leupp, Francis E. The Indian and His Problem. 1910. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $2.00. Miller, Kelly. Race Adjustment. 1908. Neale Publishing Com- pany, Washington. $2.00, net. Moffett, Thomas C. The American Indian on the New Trail. 1914. Missionary Education Movement, New York. 60 cents. Murphy, Edgar G. Problems of the Present South. 1909. Long- mans, Green & Co., New York. $1.50, net. Oldham, W. F. India, Malaysia, and the Philippines. 1914. Eaton & Mains, New York. $1.00. Stone, Alfred H. Studies in the American Race Problem. 1908. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. $2.00. Waid, Eva Clark. Alaska, the Land of the Totem. Woman's BIBLIOGRAPHY 255 Board of Home Missions, Presbyterian Church in U. S. A., New York. 50 cents. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1900. Douhleday, Page & Co., New York. $1.50, net. Wilson, Gilbert L. Goodbird the Indian. 1914. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. 25 cents, net. General Social Batten, S. Z. The Social Task of Christianity. 1911. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. $1.25. Brown, Charles R. The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit. 1906. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $1.25, net. Clow, W. M. Christ in the Social Order. 1913. George H. Do ran Company, New York. $1.25, net. Cooley, C. H. Human Nature and the Social Order. 1902. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $1.50. Cutting, R. F. The Church and Society. 1913. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.25. Dickinson, Charles H. The Christian Reconstruction of Modern Life. 1913. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.50, net. Earp, Edwin L. The Social Engineer. 1911. Eaton & Mains, New York. $1.50, net Hall, T. C. Social Solutions in the Light of Christian Ethics. 1910. Eaton & Mains, New York. $1.50, net. Henderson, C. R. Social Duties from the Christian Point of View. 1898. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. $1.25. King, Henry C. The Moral and Religious Challenge of Our Times. 1911. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.50. Mathews, Shailer. The Making of To-Morrow. 1913. Eaton & Mains, New York. $1.00, net. Mathews, Shailer. The Social Teaching of Jesus. 1910. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.50, net. Mathews, Shailer. The Church and the Changing Order. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.50, net. Mathews, Shailer. The Social Gospel. 1910. Pilgrim Press, Boston. 50 cents, net. 256 BIBLIOGRAPHY Nearing, Scott. Social Religion. 1913. The Macmillan Com- pany, New York. $r.oo, net. Patten, Simon N. The New Basis of Civilisation. 1907. The Macmillan Company, New York $1.00, net. Patten, Simon N. The Social Basis of Religion. 1911. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.25, net. Peabody, Francis G. Jesus Christ and the Social Question. 1900. Grosset & Dunlap, New York. 50 cents, net. Rauschenbusch, Walter. Christianising the Social Order. 1912. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.50, net. Rauschenbusch, Walter. Christianity and the Social Crisis. 1908. The Macmillan Company, New York 50 cents, net. Ross, E. A. Social Control. 1901. The Macmillan Company, New York $1.25, net Scudder, Vida D. Socialism and Character. 1912. Houghton, Mifflin Company, New York. $1.50. Smith, Samuel G. Democracy and the Church. 1912. D. Ap- pleton & Co., New York $1.50, net. Spargo, John. The Bitter Cry of the Children. 1906. The Macmillan Company, New York $1.50, net. Stelzle, Charles. The Workingman and Social Problems. 1903. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York 75 cents, net. Stelzle, Charles. American Social and Religious Conditions, 1912. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. $1.00. Taylor, G. Religion in Social Action. 1913. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York $1.25, net Thompson, C. B. The Churches and the Wage Earners. 1909. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York $1.00, net. Tippy, W. M. The Socialised Church. 1909. Eaton & Mains, New York 50 cents. Ward, Harry F. Social Creed of the Churches. 1912. Eaton & Mains, New York. 50 cents, net. INDEX INDEX Abolition talk, 44 Academy, democracy of the, 41 Adams, Dr. E. A., 122 Admission of Western States to the Union, 5 American Bible Society, 39 American Church, chief business of, 45; future task, 46 American Home Missionary So- ciety, 15 American rule in Porto Rico, 168 American Tract Society, 39 American sects, origins of, 196, 197 "Americanization of the World," 26 Amherst, a proposed center for training rural pastors, 68 Andover Theological Seminary essay, quoted, 14 Anniversaries, uses of, 74 Anthropology and the Negro, i?3 Aristotle, quoted, 179 Armageddon, the racial, 172 Advantages of city life, 97-100 Agriculture, as affected by horse- power machinery, 12, 13; new idealistic note, 64; problem of a ministry adapted to present needs, 66-76 Agriculture, Illinois College of, 64 Alfalfa, 87 Alien, the, assimilation of, 124, 125; first problems of, 113; revulsion of older popula- tions from, 115 Aliens and "barbarians" on the upper Missouri, 135, 136 Assimilation of aliens, 124, 125 Atlantic Monthly, quoted, 4 Automobile, 52, 71 B Band of settlers, a typical, 19 Bank, first in at opening of a reservation, 52; in plan of community center, 72 Baptists, 17, 133 Baseball should be a factor in rural play, 73 Bible, lack of, 10; plans for cir- culation, 39; value of in Protestant view, 40; Biblical chairs, 67 Birmingham, Ala., 133 Blackburn, Dr. Gideon, 19, 36 Black Hawk strip, 40 Boas, Professor Franz, quoted, T, I 73 ' - 174 Bohemia, 122 Books, poverty in, of early Mississippi Valley region, 39, 40 Boy Scouts, 74 Brotherhood, the fact of, 183- 186 Brown, E. E., quoted, 41 Browning, Robert, referred to, 225 Buckley, James M., 16 259 260 INDEX Buddhism, 165 Burleson, H. L., 16, 46 Call to home mission work, 230 Camp Fire Girls, 74 Campbell, Alexander, 197 Canaan, contrasted accounts of conquest of, 191 Capital and industry, 130, 131 Capitalist, a mountaineer, 79 Cartwright, Peter, 33 Carver, Professor T. N., chal- lenge of, 78; quoted, 12, 21, 51 Case of social failure, 200 Catalog of social ideals, 147 Cattle tick, 87; mountain men and the, 49, 53 Census views, 217 Champaign, 111., a center of agricultural education, 67 Charity Organization Societies, 148 Child labor, 84; Committees, 148; in the country home, 74 Child, old-time city and country, 100 Chinese immigrant, the, 163 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christian Reconstruction in the South, 181 Church, the, as respects Ameri- can social life, 243; fields of, 76; problems of, 64 Church school, ideal of the early, 40 Cities of the stranger, 112, 113 Citizen, the, 100 City church, conditions in, 101- 105; family type, 103; for foreign-speaking people, 105 City, glory of, 97; reason for, 94; shame of, 96; some statistics, 93 City life, advantages of, 97-100 City's machinery, 96 Civil War, some results of, 24 Claim outlining in the North- west, 51 Clannishness, in Clark, Joseph B., quoted, 15 | Coal deposits, 83 Colorado Survey, 202 Colored Farmers' Courty Fair, 85 Community and the Citizen, The, 35 Community, bank, center, church, creamery, school, store, 72 Community - minded church needed in the country, 72 Community spirit, 71, 72 Community, the transplanted, 33 Congregational Church, 1 1 Congregationalism, 22, 133 Connecticut Missionary Society, the, ii Conquest of national domain completed by home missions, So Conquest of the Continent, The, 16,46 Conscience, the modern Chris- tian, 143 Consolidated school, 72 Constitution of state, itinerant's thought of, 27 "Consultations," 213 Cooperation rapidly growing among denominations, 207- 222 Cooperative creamery and store, 72 Corinthians, Second, xi. 26-29, quoted, 37 Cornelius and Peter incident, 184, 1 86 Cornell University, proposed al- liance for training rural pas- tors, 68 Cotton boll-weevil, 87 Cotton, growth of and slavery, 17; King, 23 Council of Women for Home Missions, 210 INDEX 261 Country store's successor, 72 County Teachers' Institute, 86 Cumberland Presbyterianism, 197 Cutler, Manasseh, career of, 31, D Dairy industry, 49 Darwinism, misunderstood, 76 Dates, crucial, 5 "Death in the Desert, A," 225 Debt to the alien, our, 119 Degradation in Southern high- lands, 78 Democratization of wealth, 240 Denominational, colleges, 42 ; families reuniting, 215; move- ments explained, 16, 17 Denominationalism in home mis- sions, 199; effects of, 200, 201 De Tocqueville alluded to, 12 Devoutness, 73 Dewey, Professor John, quoted, 176 "Dilution" of the American element, 118, 126 Divergences and the bond of peace, 246 Douglass, T. O., Autobiography, ?uoted, 19, 20, 48; Pilgrims of owa, 44 Dowie, John Alexander, sect founder, 197 "Down-town" church, 104 Dry farming, 51 Drew Theological Seminary, al- liance proposed, for training rural pastors, 68 Dunn, A. W. quoted, 35 Early settlers, the, 12 Economic processes and social control, 143, 144 Eddy, Mrs. Mary B. G., sect founder, 197 Education, for non-European peoples, 175, 176; of the South- ern Negro, 173 Education in the United States Since the Civil War, 43 Ely, Richard T., referred to, 133 Emotional religion, 8 English language, effect of teach- ing, 119, 120 Episcopal Church and missions, 16 Equality not necessary. 171 Erie Canal, 5; effect of its com- pletion, 21 Eskimo, the, 163 Evolution, of a city, 94-96; of the American people, 82 Evolution of the Country Com- munity, The, 49 Faith in lowly men, 234 Far West, the semi-arid, 24 Farm work in pioneer times, 12; revision of methods, 75 Farmer, the, 13, 14; and the community church, n; new, 64; vanishing race, 6 1 Fathers feared rather than loved by many country-bred chil- dren, 74 Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 134, 137, 214; social creed formulated, 144 Festivals and pageants to be used in rural life, 74 Fisher, Dr. F. P., referred to, 221 Florida purchase, the, 5 Foreigners in U. S., no; assimi- lation of, 53; churches for, 105 Forests conquered, prairies en- tered, n Frontier gone, 50, 61 Gain, facts of the Church's, 108 Garden and poultry for farm boys and girls, 75 262 INDEX Giddings, F. H., quoted on types of mental make-up, 219 Give and take, 113, 119, 239 Gladden, Washington, 133 Glove-factory data, 95 Grange, the, an agency in the new era, 73 H Half -holiday, for country young people, 75 Hampton Institute, 45 Hand-power and horse-power, 12 Harvard and Yale and Church control, 42 Hawaiian, the, 1 66, 1 68 Health, city and country, 97, 98 Helm, Mary, quoted, 44 Hindu immigrant, the, 164 History of the Pacific Northwest, 6 Holy Rollers, the, 81 Home Missionary, quoted, 40 Home Missions, early form and work of, 3-48; redirection of, 53-58; now applied to the country, 6 1-88; serving the city and stranger, 93-126; wide social bearings, 129-247 Home Missions Council, 208, 213 Homesteading, 61-63 Hookworm, 168 Immigration, changes in char- acter of, 112 Inadequate basis for missions, 82 Indebtedness to the alien, our, 119 Indian in Relation to the White Population, The, 45 Indians, the, 5, 8, 61, 162, 168; missionary, 26; missions, 45; reservation opening, 51, 52 Individuality encouraged, 74 Initiative, 46; farm boys and girls to have room for, 75 Inner resources, 180 Institutional church, the, 104 Intensive, moral husbandry, 65; program, 69 Interchurch federations, 112 International Sunday School As- sociation, 211 Iowa Band, the, 37, 42 Irrigation, 50 Itinerant, the, 8, 26, 36 Japanese in America, 165; a possible church, 218 Jersey prize pig, 86 Jesus Christ, 58, 183; interpret- ing religion and life. 153, 235; recognized as alone Leader and Head, 178, 222 Jew in America, the, 122, 123 Joseph Keasby Brick School, 84 Justice, machinery of social, lacking, 132 Lack of men in social service, 228 Land values, 62 Landmarks of Western expan- sion, 4, 5 Language differences, 246 Language group churches, 105 Lay missionary, the, 66 Lay preachers, 9, 18, 19 Layman and his purse, the, 205 Laymen's Missionary Move- ment, 210 Leadership, 20, 65, 66, 71, 121; of Jesus Christ, 178 Leavening the Nation, 15 Lee, Jason, 35 Louisiana purchase, 5 "Lower" races, 171 Lumber tracts, 79 M McComas, H. C., 220 McCord, Grandfather, 19 Me Kenzie, F. A., quoted, 45 INDEX 263 Machinery lacking for social justice, 132 Madison, Wis., a center of agricultural education, 67 Making of Our Middle Schools, 41 Market, the, in rural redirection, 73 Marietta Colony, 32 Men and Religion Movement, 210 Messianic activities, the, 153 Methodism, 16 Methodism a missionary system, 9 Methodists and Baptists among pioneer missionaries, 81 Methods, early, of home mission work, n Mexican, the, 166, 168 Milk and the farmer, 98 Mill town, from the farm to the, 82 Miller, William, religious orig- inator, 197 Milliners' windows, 73 Mills and Schermerhorn's report on frontier conditions, 9, 10, 39 Mind of Primitive Man, The, 1 73 Minister, the rural, preparing, placing, paying, and keeping, 68-70 Missionary Education Move- ment, 211 Missionary methods change, 14 Missionary pastor, 36, 37, 122 Missionary Survey, an early, 9 "Missions at home," 236 Missouri River missionary, a, 135 Money, ready, a need of farm boys and girls, 75 Moral issues, 53, 55 Morals and milk, 49 Monnonism, 50 Morristown Survey, 149 Motive, search for the source of, 76, 77 Mountain, agriculture, 82; com- munity, 78-82 Moving pictures should be a factor in rural recreation, 73 Muscatine, Iowa, 137-140, 141 My Pedagogical Creed, 176 N National Survey, 204 Near at hand mission field, a, 89 Neglected fields survey, 202 Negro, the, 83-88, 161, 168, 172, 1 80, 182; education of the Southern, 173; farmers' asso- ciation, 85; jubilee melodies, 183; missions to, 45; religious experience, 182; service for, 122, 209 New Englander, the, 20-22 New far-reaching questions, 55 New Testament religion, 225, 233 New woman, the, 180 New York Federation of Church- es, 204, 205 Non-European peoples, needs of the, 175, 176, 236; in the United States, 1 68 North, Dr. F. M., quoted on pure air, 98 Norwegian Sunday-school super- intendent, a, 124 O Ohio Company, the, 32 Ohio's early settlers, 18 Old age pensions, 151 Open gates, our duty respecting, 118 O'Reilly's tribute to the Pilgrims, 126 Organization, of American Home Missionary Society, 15; of early Boards, 10, 1 1 Oriental exclusion, 164 Our Country. 35 Our national unity, 116 264 INDEX Overchurching, 119-206 Over-organization, danger of, 46 Pacific Northwest, opening of, 6 Pathos in immigration, 112 Pearl buttons, 137 Personal experience and social service, 229 Phillips Academies, the, 41 Physiography and the farmer, 51 Picture show suggestions to aliens, 115, 116 Pilgrims of Iowa, 44 Pioneers in forest and prairie, 6-1 1 Plantation system, 23, 24 Play, value of, in the country, 73-75 Political strife, 23 Politics and service, 107 Pond, Dr. William C., 122 Populations, non-European in the United States, 168 Porto Rican, the, 167, 168 Porto Rico, 209 Prayer, the mystic key, 231 Presbyterian Church, n, 20 Presbyterian early work, 9, 10, 39 Principles of Rural Economics, 12 "Problem of the West," quoted, 4 Protestantism and labor, 103 Psychology of Religious Sects, 220 Puritan spirit, the, 126 Purse, a share in, the right of mothers or wives, 75 Q Quakers, 17 Questions, new far-reaching, 55 R Race, our attitude toward, 169, 170 Redemption a world-wide task, 237 Redirection of home missions, 53-58 "Regions beyond," the, 3 Religion, the farmer's, 13; new application of, 53 Religious education, 243 Religious experience and the Negro, 182 Religious Movements for Social Betterment, 45. Revival, the early, 8; the farm- er's, 14 Rhode Island possible new Church adjustment, 204 Rise of the New West, 7 Rivalry, church, 199 Roads, good, a community asset, 7i, 73 Rochester Theological Seminary, proposed alliance, 68 Roman Catholic Church, the, 123, 124 Ross, E. A., quoted, 161 Rural Economics, 51 Rural life methods, 70-75; Church and state in agricul- tural processes, 76, 77 Russell Sage Foundation Social Service Bulletin, 142 Rutgers College, proposed al- liance, 68 Rutledge, David, wins prize pig, 86 Safeguarding the home, 44 Sam and Sandro, 170 Sanitation, 97, 98 Saturation point in immigration, 117 Schafer, Joseph, quoted, 6, 35 School, Church ideal in the early, 40 School Improvement Leagues, 86 Schoolmaster, the, 22 INDEX 265 Scientific method in home mis- sions, the, 57 Scotch-Irish, the, 18-20, 36, 80 Seamless robe, a, 225 Sectarianism, 192-199 Sectionalism, 22 Sects, origin of American, 196, 197 Shacks and barbed wire in secur- ing claims, 51 Shortcomings of the early home mission workers, 47 Silsby, Dr. E.G., 122 Skyscraper morality, 55 Slavery and cotton-growing, 17, 23-25 Slavic group m Vermont, a, 246 Smallpox epidemic, lessons from a, 48, 49 Smith, Joseph, sect originator, 197 Social, aim and by-product, 58; conscience, 159; creed of the American churches, 144, 145; engineer, 57; frontier, 56; ideals, 147; leadership of Jesus Christ, 232, 233; misery, 157, 159; problem, 130; sectarian- ism, 218; service of Church and state, 228, 229; settlement, 106, 107. 157 Social and individual redemp- tion, 54 Social Aspects of Foreign Mis- sions, 211 Social Service Secretaries, Com- mission of, 137-140 Social types, strange, 88 Soldier's Tennessee land grant, a, 129 Solidarity of farm life, 74 South Dakota, cooperation in, 213 Southern settlers in the West, 18 Speculator, the fanner now tends to be a, 62 Spiritual unity, 221 State, work of the, 76 States, admission of new to the Union, 5 Statistics, Church in the United States, 198; city and country, ?" 93 Strangers and the Church, 109 Strategy, religious, 102 Strong, Dr. josiah, quoted, 34, 45, 133, 134 Success of the Church, the, 198 Sunday-school, the, 38; library, 40 Sunday School Council of the Evangelical Churches, 212 Survey method, strong approval of, 69, 137 Survey, The, quoted, 133 Sutton, Professor William S., quoted, 173 Taxpaying, 241 Taylor, G. R., quoted, 133 Team-haul distance, 71 Theological and agricultural cen- ters, favorable for rural pas- toral training, 67, 68 Thinking and doing, 85 Thwing, C. F., 43 Todd, Pastor John, 44 Trapper and pioneer as vanished classes, 61 Turner, F. J., quoted, 4, 7, 18, 23 Types, strange social, 88 U United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, social workers of, 229 University of Texas Bulletin, 173 Upward Path, The, 44 Urbanized humanity, 100 Vices of the frontier, 10; pro- tection of the family from the, 14 266 INDEX Vermont, 203; cooperation in, 204, 206 Vocational education, 177 W Washington (Terr.) and the Yale Band, 70 Weekly half -holiday. See Half- holiday. Wells, Rev. George Frederick, suggestions made by, 203 West, the, crucial dates for, 5; significance of, 4; versus East, 22 Western Reserve Colony, a, 34 Whisky, 8 Wilson, Dr. Warren H., 20, 49, 50, 63 Wisconsin, federation in, 212 Woman, aiding in Church sup- port in farmer period, 14; educated by academies, 41; now needing in country, better guaranties of her comfort, re- sources, and privileges, 75; status and habits in mountain community, 78-81 Working unity, 219 Worship and play, in rural reconstruction, 73, 74 Yale Band, the, 70 Yankee in the West, the, 18-21, 36 Young Men's Christian Asso- ciation, 1 20, 207 Young Women's Christian Asso- ciation, 207 Mission Study Courses "Anywhere, provided it be FORWARD." David Livingstone. Prepared under the direction of the MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA EDUCATIONAL COMMITTEE: G. F. Sutherland, Chairman; A. E. Armstrong, J. I. Armstrong, Frank L. Brown, Hugh L. Burleson, W. W. Cleland, W. E. Doughty, H. Paul Douglass, Arthur R. Gray, B. Carter Millikin, John M. Moore, John H. Poorman, T. Bronson Ray, Jay S. Stowell. The Forward Mission Study Courses are an outgrowth of a conference of leaders in young people's mission work, held in New York City, December, 1901. To meet the need that was manifested at that conference for mission study text- books suitable for young people, two of the delegates, Pro- fessor Amos R. Wells, of the United Society of Christian Endeavor, and Mr. S. Earl Taylor, Chairman of the General Missionary Committee of the Epworth League, projected the Mission Study Courses. These courses have been officially adopted by the Missionary Education Movement, and are now under the immediate direction of the Educational Com- mittee of the Movement. The books of the Movement are now being used by more than forty home and foreign mis- sion boards and societies of the United States and Canada. The aim is to publish a series of text-books covering the various home and foreign mission fields and problems and written by leading authorities. The following text-books having a sale of over 1,500,000 have been published: 1. THE PRICE OF AFRICA. Biographical. By S. Earl Taylor. 2. INTO ALL THE WORLD. A general survey of missions. By Amos R. Wells. 3. PRINCELY MEN IN THE HEAVENLY KINGDOM. Biograph- ical. By Harlan P. Beach. 4. SUNRISE IN THE SUNRISE KINGDOM. Revised Edition. A study of Japan. By John H. De Forest. 5. HEROES OF THE CROSS IN AMERICA. Home Missions. Biographical. By Don O. Shelton. 6. DAYBREAK IN THE DARK CONTINENT. Revised Edition. A study of Africa. By Wilson S. Naylor. 7. THE CHRISTIAN CONQUEST OF INDIA. A study of India. By James M. Thoburn. 8. ALIENS OR AMERICANS? A study of Immigration. By Howard B. Grose. 9. THE UPLIFT OF CHINA. Revised Edition. A study of China. By Arthur H. Smith. 10. THE CHALLENGE OF THE CITY. A study of the City. By Josiah Strong. 11. THE WHY AND How OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. A study of the relation of the home Church to the foreign mission- ary enterprise. By Arthur J. Brown. 12. THE MOSLEM WORLD. A study of the Mohammedan World. By Samuel M. Zwemer. 13. THE FRONTIER. A study of the New West. By Ward Platt. 14. SOUTH AMERICA : Its Missionary Problems. A study of South America. By Thomas B. Neely. 15. THE UPWARD PATH : The Evolution of a Race. A study of the Negro. By Mary Helm. 16. KOREA IN TRANSITION. A study of Korea. By James S. Gale. 17. ADVANCE IN THE ANTILLES. A study of Cuba and Porto Rico. By Howard B. Grose. 18. THE DECISIVE HOUR OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. A study of conditions throughout the non-Christian world. By John R. Mott. 19. INDIA AWAKENING. A study of present conditions in India. By Sherwood Eddy. 20. THE CHURCH OF THE OPEN COUNTRY. A study of the problem of the Rural Church. By Warren H. Wilson. 21. THE CALL OF THE WORLD. A survey of conditions at home and abroad of challenging interest to men. By W. E. Doughty. 22. THE EMERGENCY IN CHINA. A study of present-day conditions in China. By F. L. Hawks Pott. 23. MEXICO TO-DAY: Social. Political, and Religious Con- ditions. A study of present-day conditions in Mexico. By George B. Winton. 24. IMMIGRANT FORCES. A study of the immigrant in his home and American environment. By William P. Shriver. 25. THE NEW ERA IN ASIA. Contrast of early and pres- ent conditions in the Orient By Sherwood Eddy. 26. THE SOCIAL ASPECTS OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. A study of the social achievements of foreign missions. By W. H. P. Faunce. 27. THE NEW HOME MISSIONS. A study of the social achievements and social program of home missions. By H. Paul Douglass. 28. THE AMERICAN INDIAN ON THE NEW TRAIL. A story of the Red Men of the United States and the Christian gospel. By Thomas C. Moffett. In addition to the above courses, the following have been published especially for use among younger persons : 1. UGANDA'S WHITE MAN OF WORK. The story of Alex- ander M. Mackay of Africa. By Sophia Lyon Fahs. 2. SERVANTS OF THE KING. A series of eleven sketches of famous home and foreign missionaries. By Robert E. Speer. 3. UNDER MARCHING ORDERS. The story of Mary Porter Gamewell of China. By Ethel Daniels Hubbard. 4. WINNING THE OREGON COUNTRY. The story of Marcus Whitman and Jason Lee in the Oregon country. By John T. Faris. 5. THE BLACK BEARDED BARBARIAN. The story of George Leslie Mackay of Formosa. By Marian Keith. 6. LIVINGSTONE THE PATHFINDER. The story of David Livingstone. By Basil Mathews. 7. ANN OF AVA. The story of Ann Hasseltine Judson of Burma. By Ethel Daniels Hubbard. These books are published by mutual arrangement among the home and foreign mission boards, to whom all orders should be addressed They are bound uniformly and ar* sold at 60 cents in cloth, and 40 cents in paper ; prepaid. New The Whole World for Its Scope. Promotes World Peace. Cultivates the Missionary Spirit. Unique Contains True Stories of Life, Ac- tion, and Bravery. Develops High Ideals. Describes the Customs of Peoples in All Lands. Attractive Bound in a Beautiful, Appropriate Cover in Colors. Abundantly Illustrated with Original Drawings and Photographs. Printed on Excellent, High-finish Paper. EVERYLAND in the Home. Why not supplement your influence among boys and girls? EVERYLAND in the Sunday-school. A rich source for missionary story material. An excellent award, Christmas, or birthday gift EVERYLAND is issued quarterly, sixty- four pages and cover. Subscription price, 50 cents a year, 10 cents extra for Canada, and 20 cents extra for foreign postage. EVERYLAND, 156 Fifth Ave., New York City ADULT MISSION STUDY TEXT-BOOKS The New Home Missions BY H. PAUL DOUGLASS Dr. Douglass in his treatment of the new home missions displays a masterly knowledge of the whole social program of the Christian Church in the United States. He traces the expansion of home mis- sions and the social by-products of pioneer effort. He shows the new social program necessary in rural communities and city centers. Two chapters deal with the problem of social justice in industrial life, and race problems. The final chapters discuss the social reaction of home missions upon the Church and the social realiza- tion of Christianity in America. India Awakening BY GEORGE SHERWOOD EDDY A vital discussion of many of India's present problems. Mr. Eddy, as secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association for India, and as a missionary in a regular station, has had exceptional opportunity to study all phases of present-day life in India and knows his subject as few other men do. The Social Aspects of Foreign Missions BY WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE Dr. Faunce has packed into this volume his observations of a world tour. In his introductory chapters he treats the relation of the individual to society, and contrasts the social life of the East and the West. Five chapters record the remarkable social achieve- ments of Christian Missions in non-Christian lands. In the dosing chapter he discusses the relations of the East and the West. Korea in Transition BY JAMES S. GALE "Of all the books on Korea, the body of this one by Mr. Gale, despite his learning as lexicographer and translator, has the most red blood in it. It pulses on every page. It is written by a man whose heart overflows through his pen from the well of deep ex- periences. Edited with skill, and ideal for purposes of study, it is the best presentation of Christian Korea in our language." The Independent. The American Indian on the New Trail BY THOMAS C. MOFFETT Dr. Moffett is the recognized authority on Indian missions in the United States. He writes from an intimate knowledge based upon actual work and extensive observation. He treats race rela- tionships, social, moral and religious conditions, and the splendid results of education and the Gospel. One chapter is devoted to Alaskans. The book contains a number of original maps and statis- tical tables. The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions BY JOHN R. MOTT Dr. Mott probably has as wide an acquaintance as any man of this generation, through travel and observation, with the present religious condition of the world. These discussions, based on the reports of the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh, July, 1910, constitute the latest and most authoritative presentation of the present missionary situation. The Emergency in China BY F. L. HAWKS POTT Napoleon said, "When China moves, she will move the world." Conditions in China are changing so rapidly that an up-to-date stu- dent will welcome the clear and authoritative survey as furnished by Dr. Pott in this book. The manuscript was not completed until after the opening of the Chinese Parliament, March, 1913. It therefore provides a statement of the present situation and fore- shadows the future. Immigrant Forces BY WILLIAM P. SHRIVER This survey of the people now coming to the shores of America emphasizes the contribution of the immigrant population to Ameri- can development and civilization. It also suggests the opportunity of the Church in determining the future of these new citizens. The best and most up-to-date book on the subject. The Church of the Open Country BY WARREN H. WILSON Dr. Wilson is superintendent of the Department of Church and Country Life of the Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church, and is recognized as the foremost leader in the presentation of practical plans for the solution of the problem of the country churches. The modern economic development of our nation has brought the church face to face with the seriousness of the problem of the rural community. In this book Dr. Wilson shows that the Church has a fundamental relation to the development of modern country life. Mexico To-Day BY GEORGE B. WINTON A condensed survey of Mexico, with emphasis on the present. The book discusses the social, moral, educational, political and religious conditions, and closes with a statement of the contribution Protestantism is making in the solution of Mexico's problems. Price, cloth, 60 cents; paper, 40 cents; postpaid. University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. Pf . _J UNIVhksii Y OT AT LOS Ai\r,Ll,ES LIBRARY A 001 240108 9