In one of its districts, nearly half of the twenty or thirty ministers of the largest denomination in the State did not have a common school education. It is usual to find ministers intellectually inferior to a number of families whom they are supposed to lead and teach. In some districts a considerable proportion of the preachers have had no more than three or four grades of common school instruction. Some cannot write their own names correctly. Accordingly religious education is neglected. The people apparently have been untouched by the general advance in religious knowledge during the past century.
Many intelligent people in the Eighteen Counties deplore these conditions and would be glad to have churches of a different type. But it is also very common to find among the more prosperous, especially in the fertile river valleys, a spirit of utter indifference towards religion, and often of gross materialism. Under such circumstances it is not surprising to find that in several sections much hostility to institutional religion exists. It is given expression by rural hoodlums who cut to pieces harnesses and slash tires belonging to ministers or laymen who attend religious gatherings, while in some communities stones are thrown through the windows of buildings where public worship is being held.
While it is true that out of the poorest and most unfortunate districts bright boys and girls frequently emerge, escape their surroundings, and become good citizens, it is none the less true that a large proportion of those who remain have no reasonable chance for wholesome development.
The bad influence of the Eighteen Counties extends far beyond their borders. Out of them many farm laborers have gone to communities to the north and northwest, often with deplorable results to the social, religious, and moral conditions of the communities where they are employed. (See [Table B].) It is calculated that no less than 61,000 persons emigrated in the ten-year period from 1900 to 1910 from the strictly rural districts of sixteen of the Eighteen Counties.
In Madison, a fertile county near the center of the State, in an area sixteen miles long and from seven to eleven miles wide, there are three closed and no active churches. One of the causes of this condition is the fact that the farm laborers imported by the owners of large tracts of lands were never made familiar, before they came, with a normal type of religion. These men come from the Eighteen Counties or from sections across the Ohio River where the conditions are very much the same. In parts of several other counties the situation brought about by similar immigration is extremely bad.
The Eighteen Counties demand missionary activity on the part of the church as a whole, not only for the sake of the unfortunate people who live in them, but also for the sake of the other regions whose welfare is threatened by the transfer of low standards of all kinds, which, like a forest fire, are creeping away from the region where they originated.
Among the large number of intelligent persons who know and deplore the situation in typical communities of southeastern Ohio, very few seem to cherish hope of improvement. Such pessimism appears to be unjustified. Good work is now being done by missionaries of the American Sunday School Union. What is more important, there is much promise that the trouble can be reached and cured by the modern country church movement, which is already making real progress in Ohio. As a result of this movement, for example, the Board of Home Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church has, for the first time, appropriated missionary funds to be used in this section, while one of the District Superintendents of the same denomination is carrying out a radically changed program for the churches under his supervision.
Map A
Where Conditions Demand Missionary Aid
