“Our children don’t need to go to school to learn to read. The Spirit teaches them to read.” The people of these families looked, in the face, like people you meet in any fair group of folks; but their minds, their deeds, their hopes, their fears! There’s the rub. Is this group of twenty-five families typical of country communities where the Bible is fought over by blind leaders of the blind? I am afraid it is. I admit it with shame, but I admit it. The Bible,--as if it were a plow found by persons who knew not its use, but who scrapped hard for its possession as an ornament of their dooryards,--the life-giving Bible in these hands is still a closed book and a locked-up treasure. _Pedigreed Austerity Better Than Ignorance_ Human life at its best is no mere accident which may happen anywhere under any conditions. The best has its pedigree. It is the result of infinite pains with children as with crops and animals. Even the austere, narrow-gaged leadership having a pedigree is far better than this ignorant, illiterate type. I remember well as a lad how my father, a country minister, collegebred and trained in the theological school of his particular denominational stripe, stood rock-like in his parish for temperance. It was a grape country, with several wine distilleries. My father taught abstention from wine-drinking and preached against the distilleries. One church pillar was in the wine business and furnished the sacramental wine. My father finally carried his logic to the point where he made announcement: “Next Sunday at the Communion we shall not use fermented wine.” Sunday came. A larger congregation than usual assembled. There was a tenseness of silent emotion in the stiff Sunday-dressed village and farmer folk, which I can feel yet, after forty years. The communion-table was set. I see my father now, as he picked up the flagon of wine and poured into the chalice. He paused--on his face a sudden look of bewilderment. Then slowly he poured the chalice of wine back into the flagon, strode to the door, and emptied the contents on the ground. Quietly resuming the ceremony he said: “We will commune without wine to-day.” The distiller had done his dirty work and put one over on the country parson. But the parson, although he caused a sense of consternation to creep over the church folk,--akin to the horror in the multitude when _Count Antonio_, in Anthony Hope’s tonic story, laid hands on the Sacred Bones in midstream,--by this daring act helped plug the bung-holes and spike the spigots in the cellars of that county. And the whole countryside, be it said, responded to the resolute will of my father to make God known to a community steeped in wine.