One does not get the real inwardness of this fact until one appreciates that these 1,600,000 of pagan children are not scattered evenly, or more or less evenly, among the other millions of children who are in contact with the Bible, but are in a great measure homed in bibleless, godless communities. The nation might possibly assimilate a million bibleless children if they were brought up among several millions of children who know the concepts of religion; but absorbing godless children in great numbers from whole godless groups is a bird of a different feather. What is still more disconcerting, the trend, we are led to suppose, is not from bad to better, but from bad to worse.
“There is no national passion for seeking out the godless community and setting the Bible there,” we hear on every hand.
“The promoters of Bible study are too apologetic to business, to education, to pleasure, even, and go not about their tasks as those who have a commission from the nation,” many say.
But these bare statements fail, perhaps, to get hold of us. We must have particulars and the pulse of the thing. And so I wish to take a page out of my own experience and let you read it.
Trapped in a Godless Community
My duties, a while back, took me into the clover-bearing hills of a promising county in a dairy State. I stayed the night with a farmer’s family, enjoying the hospitality and confidences of the home. Never shall I forget two episodes of the evening.
The milking was finally over—twelve mighty good cows. I had been allowed to milk three, taking the mother’s place on her favorite milking-stool. Certain cows were “tender” and responded kindly to her gentler touch.
The house was on a side hill sloping steeply to the road, and across the road was a thinly timbered twenty-acre lot. The warm milk had been poured into ten-gallon cans and carried up to the house, where stood, in a neat little milk-house, a cream separator. When all was ready, the separator began to sing, the cream came trickling out, the skim-milk poured into a ten-gallon can, as the gaunt six-foot-three, narrow-shouldered farmer turned the crank. At the first whirring tune-up of the separator, I hear a scurrying of feet in the timber lot below, and soon a regiment of hogs and pigs were at the fence, standing with hind feet in the long trough, front feet over the top rail of the fence, black heads in a row, beady little eyes peering up the hill, open mouths giving vent to a long-drawn squeal of jubilant petition. As the whir of the separator grew into a liquid hum, the squealing chorus rose to heaven, filling the valley, investing the farm, like a piece of symbolism, with the imperious demands of animals and crops upon the total energies of the family. Finally the last drop of milk went through the separator. Then the father put his hands to two handles of two ten-gallon cans of skim-milk; one son grasped the other handle of one can; another son caught hold of the handle of the second can; while each son in his remaining hand held a pail of the milk. Then they three, with two cans and two brimming pails, took up their stately march abreast down the hill to the squealing chorus at the trough. It looked for all the world like some priestly ritual. The milk was poured into the trough. The pigs ceased to chant and began to suck, guzzle, push, and grunt. So the day’s work was over, and we sought the house. Darkness fell over the hill and valley and the filled pigs lay down to sleep; while the farmer gathered his family about him, took up his Bible and read the Scriptures, even as did the cotter, whom Burns, the farmer Scot, made us know:
The priest-like father reads the sacred page,
How Abram was the friend of God on high;