When Catholic and Protestant Agree
The chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, in a call published (in the April 1924 number of “St. Isadore’s Plow”) for the second annual Catholic Rural Life Conference, says:
“We have two distinct entities of population, and, we might say, of civilization in the United States—the urban and the rural. The church is decidedly urban. So far as the Church is concerned, the country towns and villages are still ‘pagani.’”
Thus you see Protestant and Catholic agree in seeing the menace of rural paganism within the borders of Christian America.
This is not the moment to settle the blame for this condition on any persons or sects. It is rather the time for a statesmanlike move to meet the menace. Bible instruction of worth, dignity, intelligence, in every community, made accessible to the last child, is an aim which alone can meet the case. But this is an herculean stunt, and requires some of the same sweep of coöperative, universal momentum as drove out yellow fever, malaria, and is fighting pellagra, hook-worm, and tuberculosis. Bible illiteracy ranks as a problem with book illiteracy; and as great a unanimity is required to root it out as to eradicate book illiteracy. A hundred different religious bodies in the United States have striven more or less fitfully in the past with this problem. But far more is needed than the hundred-headed effort. When, in the late war, the Allies came to their senses and found that their struggle was not a rope-pull nor a barbecue, but a life-or-death struggle, they elected Foch to give universality of will to the cause of defense.
The children of rural America deserve by good rights a Foch to lead the forces of Bible literacy against a creeping, godless paganism. I have refrained from presenting the religious case for this crusade. The menace is so great that the social appeal should be sufficient—and should reach every intelligent lover of America, be he fundamentalist, modernist, ethicist, or just plain man.
CHAPTER III
William James, the Harvard psychologist, used to say in his class-room: “I must fight the devil and his wiles, for God needs me. I may help save the day.”
In the same room, the next hour, Josiah Royce, the philosopher, would say, “I must set my heel on Satan’s neck, for God’s victorious spirit is in me.”
Whichever of these two schools of moral action one belongs to, one is bound, you see, to fight the devil and his guile; and in country life this is no joke, for as it turns out, the devil waved a mighty wicked wand over the American farm tenant when he jockeyed him on to the land into the shoes of the departing farm owner. It was a devilish, cunning trick to decoy the owner, body and soul, into town and into the town church—away from the little country church of his fathers. It was, however, the meanest lick of Satan against the peace of the tenant to bewitch him into flitting from farm to farm and from community to community. And now the situation has come to such a pass that, unless the American church has the grace and backbone and subtlety to outgeneral the devil in his game, the devil wins; for in matters of religion, the landless man is between the devil and the deep sea.