"The church was organized in June, 1855, in a stone schoolhouse. The present house of worship was erected and dedicated in 1861. Five ministers served the church as supplies until 1865, when the Rev. J. S. Braddock, D. D., became the pastor and carried on a splendid work for forty-two years, when he laid down his pastorate in 1907, at the age of ninety."
"This community was settled by homesteaders and pioneers in the early days of the West. Many of them came from Pennsylvania and some of them were of Scotch descent. The history of the community has been but the history of the development of a fertile Western Prairie country. It was settled by strong Presbyterian men, and their descendants are now the backbone of the community. There has been little change, but steady growth."
The second element in the community of husbandmen is mutual support. Professor Gillin of the University of Iowa has described to me the community of Dunkers whom he has studied,[16] being deeply impressed with their communal solidarity. Whenever a farm is for sale these farmers at the meeting-house confer and decide at once upon a buyer within their own religious fellowship. In the week following the minister or a church member writes back to Pennsylvania and the correspondence is pressed, until a family comes out from the older settlements in the Keystone State to purchase this farm in Iowa and to extend the colony of his fellow Dunkers. Reference is made elsewhere to the communal support given to their own members who suffer economic hardship. The serious tillage of the soil necessarily involves mutual support and the husbandman's life is in his community.
The third factor in communal husbandry is progress. Everyone testifies to the leadership of the "best families" in the transformation of the older modes of the tillage of the soil to the newer. It is impossible for the scientific agriculturist to make much improvement upon a country community until the more progressive spirits and the more open minds have been enlisted. Thereafter the better farming problem is solved. There can be no modern agriculture in a community in which all are equal. The communities of husbandmen will be as sharply differenced from one another, so far as I can see, as men are in the great cities. Leadership is the essential of progress. Gabriel Tardé has clearly demonstrated that only those who are at the top of the social scale can initiate social and economic enterprises. The cultivation of the soil for generations to come must be highly progressive. To recover what we have lost and to restore what has been wasted will exhaust the resources of science and will tax the intelligence of the leaders among husbandmen.
For this reason the ministers, teachers, and social workers in the country should be not discouraged, but hopeful, when confronted with rural landlords and capitalists. The business of the community leader is to enlist in the common task those persons whose privileges are superior and inspire them with a progressive spirit. Without their leadership the community cannot progress. Without their privileges, wealth and superior education, no progress is possible in the country.
If these pages tell the truth, then agriculture is a mode of life fertile in religious and ethical values. But it must be husbandry, not exploitation. Religious farming is a lifelong agriculture, indeed it involves generations, and its serious, devoted spirit waits for the reward, which was planted by the diligent father or grandfather, to be reaped by the son or grandson. Men will not so consecrate themselves to their children's good without the steadying influence of religion. So that agriculture and religion are each the cause, and each the effect, of the other.
If this is true, then the country church should promote the husbandry of the soil. The agricultural college should be brought into the country parish, for the church's sake. Indeed the minister would do well if his scholarship be the learning of the husbandman. No other science has such religious values. No other books have such immediate relation to the well-being of the people. The minister is not ashamed to teach Greek, or Latin,—dead languages. Why should he think it beneath him "to teach the farmer how to farm," provided he can teach the farmer anything? If he be a true scholar, the farmer, who is a practical man, needs his learned co-operation in the most religious of occupations, that the land may be holy.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Rural Economics, by Prof. Thos. Nixon Carver.
[13] "The Country-Life Movement," by L. H. Bailey.