Other instances there are of co-operation among churches in the country, but their number is not great. There is a supplementary co-operation in the division of territory in some states. The church at Hanover, N. J., has a territory six miles by four, in which no other church has been established. This old Presbyterian congregation has peopled its countryside with its chapels and has assembled the chapel worshippers regularly at its services in the old church at the graveyard and the manse.
In Rock Creek, Illinois, the Presbyterian Church has a community to itself, and ministers in its territory with the same efficiency with which the Baptist church across the creek ministers to its territory, in which it also has a religious monopoly. These two congregations respect one another and have a sense of supplementing one another, which is a form of co-operation. The ideal expressed in these two instances is cherished by many. It is hoped that religious bodies may agree in time to divide the territory, to give up churches, to sell or transfer property rights and to shift their ministers from communities which have too many to those communities not served at all. But the way for this co-operation as an active principle has not yet opened. Its value is in those communities which have had it from the first as an inheritance. It has so far not proven a remedy to be applied for the cure of existing evils.
The writer believes that the path of co-operation is the efficient and slow one of economic and social organization rather than the delusive short-cut of religious union. People cannot be united in religion until they are united in their social economy. The business of the church is to organize co-operative enterprises, economic, social and educational, and to school the people in the joy, to educate them in the advantages, of life together. Co-operation must become a gospel. Union requires to be a religious doctrine. It will be well for a long time to come to say but little about organic union of churches and to say a great deal about the union in the life of the people themselves.
FOOTNOTES:
[32] "Rural Denmark and Its Lessons," by H. Rider Haggard. See also the Bulletins of the International Institute of Agriculture at Rome, Italy.
XI
COMMON SCHOOLS
The weakness of the common schools in American rural communities shows itself in their failure to educate the marginal people of the community, in their failure to train average men and women for life in that community, in their robbing the community of leadership by training those on whom their influence is strongest, so that they go out from the community never to return; and in their general disloyalty to the local community with its needs and its problems.