I went through the form of marking and planting, and though I couldn’t see the rows very well, I quieted my discontent by saying to myself, “It will be all right when I get it hoed.”
But when the corn came up, it was accompanied by such a community of weeds, briers, grass, and small bushes, that I couldn’t cultivate because I couldn’t see the corn.
After I had in much perplexity stared at the cultivator and then at the field, I looked that piece of work square in the face and averred:
“If I ever plow again, I am not going to kid myself into thinking that the cultivator will straighten out the sins of the plow.”
This raw-boned farmer and his wife, possessed of the fairest intentions in the world for their children, had become trapped in a godless community before they were aware of it; all because the seed-bed of human life had not been plowed deep with social religion at the very outset. Is this community a fair example of bibleless country groups? I believe it is. I am sorry to admit it, but I believe it is a fair type.
When the Bible Has No Interpreter
If a nation can not build civilization securely without a knowledge of history, neither can children build character without a knowledge of those men and women of history who have essayed to know God. The Bible is the story of such persons. It is biography. It is lives of those in whom the soul of man in his search for God has risen to its highest levels. There is no substitute for this Bible biography,—except, if you please, another Bible.
And perhaps, in point of Bible illiteracy, next to the community which has no Bible in it, lies the community in which, though there is a Bible, the leaders in teaching the Bible, or rather in explaining the Bible to the children, are themselves grossly ignorant, if not demoralized. The Bible is a book of many stories, of a host of incidents, of innumerable ideas. Selection is vital. To select from the Bible and hand on its meaning in grave ignorance is to run the risk that all ignorance runs. Here is where many a rural community suffers, when it is commonly thought to be provided with a knowledge of God.
It fell to my lot recently to visit a small rural community of twenty-five families of this type. Only three of the families were totally without church connections, or at least church traditions. One church building has fallen in. One lies torn down. The third, still standing, is rotting. It is supposed to be “haunted.” Splits disorganized and discouraged the people. A fourth rude church structure has come, but splitting up from within has begun. Ignorance of a crass sort rules. The Bible has had no well-balanced soul to interpret its wonderful truths.
The family histories of this settlement run—to speak very grimly indeed—like an anthology of despair and depravity. Listen: