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 In those outlying districts where God has not been entirely superseded by gold in the church, a large part of the educational work of our movement can be accomplished in this way.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.
SUNDAY WORK.
No day is more appropriate for effective work in behalf of human brotherhood than Sunday. By common consent it has been set aside by the majority of civilized races for serious thought, meditation and worship, and what is more befitting this day than to think out, study out and talk out the solution to the great problem of human justice and brotherhood. To speak for the New Democracy on Sunday is no more than to gather in the fruit of all the great religions that have come down to us. The New Democracy is not religion and those who proclaim its truths are neither preachers nor priests, but it is religion's highest product. The great religions of the world, nurtured by God's hand and growing out of the fertile and sympathetic souls of the men and women of all climes and all centuries, have at last produced a practical ideal capable of being realized in actual life. This product is the New Democracy. It is the answer to the prayers of the ages. It is God's gift granted in answer to the cries of suffering of injustice and poverty throughout the world. It is God's method of redeeming society, of saving our nation, now well-nigh unto death, from greed and sin. Let each retain his attachment to his own sect and religion, but instead of quarreling about sectarian differences, let us unite in realizing our common dreams of brotherhood. Instead of building new walls to separate us, let us make one platform so large that on it all earnest sons of God can stand erect, confident of His presence.
Centuries before Jesus Christ traversed the plains of Galilee and bathed in the troubled waters of the Jordan, there was one Buddha who, despising the superstitions of his time, gathered about him others who, like him, believed that the larger part of human suffering was unnecessary and could be extinguished by human agency. This band traveled throughout the most populous districts of Western Asia teaching the great truth that the object of life's endeavor should be to lessen pain and to increase joy. Their one command was "cease causing pain; do not kill or cause to suffer any man or animal." And within two hundred years, from this little band and from this one whole-hearted man, an enthusiasm for mercy and love and justice overspread a third of the human race. Buddha's teachings were free from the multitude of miserable superstitions that haunt the people who bear his name to-day. His teachings, with those of Zoroaster, Confucius, Mencius, Moses and Christ, in their purity, attempted primarily to induce men to live as brothers, to teach men that individual good is social good and that both duty and true happiness consist in devotion to others—to the commonwealth.
Some preachers, however, get so in the habit of prophesying that, when their prophecies are fulfilled, they think it wicked and heretical to believe it. They refuse to believe their own eyes when they see the answer to their prayers. So deep-rooted has grown their habit of prayer that the means has become an end. They ask no longer to get what they ask for but for the exercise of asking, which they call pious. Their prayers answered, they are astounded. Now that their prophecies are fulfilled, they open their unbelieving eyes in wonderment and condemn those who stop asking for what is already given.
DON'T ASK FOR WHAT YOU HAVE.
Christ many times used the relation of a child to its father to represent the relation of man to God. When a boy begs his father for a sleigh and pony, and, after much pleading, the father grants his request, the boy stops asking, accepts the gift with thanks and proceeds to take a ride. If he were to continue on his knees pleading for them after being told they were in the back yard subject to his orders, we should call him a simpleton. What is the use of his saying, "Oh, papa, please, dear papa, give me a pony and sleigh," when papa has already given it and is anxious to see it driven past the house. If the boy has any sense at all, upon first seeing his father drive his new pony toward home, he will stop praying, take off his hat, throw it up in the air, and hallo a "Hurrah for pop." He will jump into the sleigh, go for his best girl, and not show up again till two o'clock in the morning.