class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 26]"/> have remained, but the farmer has added typical methods of his own.

The effect of this individualism is exhibited in the multiplication of churches among farmers. So long as it is admitted that the church is for personal salvation, it does not need to be a social institution. A small group is as effective as a large one for securing salvation for individuals. Two churches or three may as well serve a community as one, if personal salvation be the service rendered. The gospel is for the farmer good tidings,—not a call to social service. The result of the farmer period has been, therefore, the multiplication of competitive country churches. An instance of this competitive condition is: the community in Kansas in which among four hundred people resident in a field, there are seven churches, each of them attempting to maintain a resident pastor. In Centre County, Pa., in a radius of four miles from a given point, there are twenty-four country churches. In the same territory within a radius of three miles are sixteen of these country churches. This condition is satisfactory to the ideals of the farmer. If the farmer type were permanent these churches might serve permanently for the ministry of personal salvation. They are well attended by devout and religious-minded people. Their condemnation is not in the farmer economy but in the inevitable coming of the exploiter and the husbandman with their different experience and different type of mind.

In this period the minister frequently is himself a tiller of the soil. Many of the older churches had land, ten or twenty or forty acres, which the minister was expected to till, and from it to secure a part of his living. A church at Cranberry, N. J., had a farm of one hundred acres until the close of the nineteenth century. But with the coming of the exploiter and the husbandman the minister ceases to be an agriculturist.

Like unto the tillage of the soil by the minister was the "donation" to the minister, of vegetables, corn, honey and other farm products. At one time this filled a large place in the supply of the minister's living. In various communities the custom has remained with fine tenacity in the presentation to the minister of portions of farm produce throughout the year. But the portions so given are fewer, as years pass, and the total quantity small. The donation of vegetables and farm produce has survived in but a few places. The modes of life which succeeded to the farmer economy are dependent on cash for the distribution of values, and the "donation," if it remain at all, is a gift of money. Frequently the "donation" has survived as a social gathering, being perpetuated in one of its functions only, its earlier purposes and its essential form being forgotten.

The church of the land farmer corresponded by logical social causation to the social economy of this type. It was seated with family pews generally rented by the family group and sometimes owned in fee. In the South the slave-holding churches, which have all passed away, had galleries for the slaves, who worshipped thus under the same roof with their masters. The preaching of this period was directed to the development of group life. Its ethical standards were those of the household group, in which private property in land, domestic morality, filial and domestic experiences furnished the stimuli.

The land-farmer's church had some organizations to correspond to the differences in social life. The presence of the children in the family group is represented in the Sunday schools and parochial schools built during this period. The schools are in many cases highly organized, with separate recognition of infancy, adolescence and middle life. In Protestant churches the particular concerns of women and the religious service rendered by them take form in women's societies in the churches, mostly charitable and missionary.

Finally, at the close of the land-farmer period, about 1890, there sprang up the young people's societies, which in the ten closing years of the land-farmer period reached a membership of hundreds of thousands among the Protestant churches. These societies of young people were organized in the churches to correspond to the growing self-consciousness among adolescent members of the land-farmer's household. The young men and women in the maturing of the family group came to have a life of their own. As frequently happens, the family group reached its highest development and perfection just before it was to pass away.

The church of the land-farmer is the typical Protestant church of the United States. So influential has the farmer been in national life that organized religion has idealized his type of church. It has been transported to villages and towns. It has become the type of church most frequent in the cities.

Nearly all the Protestant churches in New York City are land-farmer churches; "and that," says a noted city pastor, "is what ails them."[6] This church centers its activities in preaching, rents or assigns its pews to families, and organizes societies for the various factors of the family group. It has Sunday schools, women's, men's and young people's societies, with only one minister to supervise them all.

The transformation of this type of church, so deeply rooted in the idealism of the whole people, into a church better suited to city, factory, town and mining settlement, has been the problem for Protestant bodies to solve in the past twenty years. The beginning of this transformation, it is striking to observe, came at the end of the land-farmer period, about 1890.

The land-farmer, then, whose period according to Prof. Ross, extended from 1835 to 1890 in the Middle West, is the best known agricultural type. He is the typical countryman as the countryman is imagined in the cities and recorded in our literature. It has been the American hope that he should be the land-owner of the days to come. In East Tennessee the farmer is still the type of landowner in country communities. In some portions of Michigan and Minnesota the farmer type gives character to the whole population, but generally throughout the country the processes described by Prof. Ross have undermined the integrity of the farmer type and broken his hold upon leadership of the country population. Within the last two decades, since 1890, the farmer has been gradually discouraged and has realized that his economy is not suited to survive. The most representative farming communities today are those of Scotch or Scotch-Irish people, whose instinctive tenacity, their "clannishness," has perpetuated longer than in other instances the rural economy and the country community.

In using the term land-farmer I am aware of its close resemblance to the term exploiter. The word itself points to exploitation of land. The land farmer has used the raw materials of the country. He has tilled the soil until its fertility was exhausted and then moved on to the newer regions of the West, again to farm and to exploit the virgin riches of a plenteous land. The planter in the South, possessing frequently more than a thousand acres, was accustomed to till a portion of one hundred, two