LAY PREACHING.
It is common in country districts for laymen, persons neither ordained nor licensed as ministers, to speak from Christian pulpits at regular church services. This custom should be utilized. A lecture in a church building on a week night may attract the more studious or the more curious of the community and supply them with rich materials for right thinking; but a lay sermon to a regular congregation, backed by the regular services and the presence of the minister, carries with it a force and authority possible on no other occasion. A Volunteer, by reciting, under such auspices, a simple story of the crimes against God and humanity perpetrated by the money power, and describing feelingly the effect of unnecessary poverty on the souls and characters of men, will not only stir the congregation to a new sense of patriotic duty, but will furnish material to the country minister enabling him to add a new flavor to the food of his flock for months to come. In those outlying districts where God has not been entirely superseded by gold in the church, a large part of the educational work of our movement can be accomplished in this way.
The farmers compose a large part of our country's population and vote. They still believe in healthful religion and its power to affect human life. They can best be reached on Sunday and very often better through the church than in any other way. The reason that the great cities have not responded so quickly and so enthusiastically to our movement as the country districts is that vice, crime and disease in the great cities have, to a large extent, eaten away the capacity for appreciating justice and brotherhood, and destroyed in a large class the fundamental virtues of courage, manliness, patriotism and belief in the supremacy of good. It is to the country, where these virtues are still fresh and normal, that our movement must appeal principally. In the city there are a thousand places of amusement and dissipation for every idle hour. The boy coming from school or work, the mechanic after his day's labor pass the open saloon, filled with music and merry-making, the theatre, with its novelties, laughter and appeals to all the emotions, the gambler's den, the game tables, the dives and a hundred other places, always open, some positively and immediately hurtful to both health and morals, others absorbing time, attention and vitality.
In the country, however, work or study done, a man or boy has not so many places of amusement. There is much more inducement than in the city to attend some church entertainment, some healthful neighborhood ball, and much more time and energy left for meetings at the school or church for the discussion of social problems and questions of national or class well-being.
Thus the Volunteer who would teach farmers and villagers must accept the church as one very promising field of work.