It surely will not be misunderstood if a layman should call to mind that the genius of Christianity is its perennial Gospel--just good news--to the poor, the broken in life’s struggle. If a fitter multitude than these tenants for the good tidings of the Christ can be found on the face of the earth, I would like to learn of them. The ordinary life of these outcasts, these wanderers from spot to spot seeking the sun that refuses to shine, has precisely all of those breakdowns which the Christian religion promises to repair--poverty, invalidism, death, sin. It seems to me that these pariahs are just naturally made to order for the kind of religion that the American church has to offer; but as I see it, and I have looked this thing in the face from angle after angle, they haven’t got a ghost of a show at it the way the church system of the country at present works out. Speaking straight from the shoulder, the devil wins, unless--And where is the person who will rise and name the great “unless” that can fix this church system up and set the heel of the church on Satan’s neck? The history of the church, running back through the centuries, is, as I read it, dotted with awakenings, with the rise of a thought, of a hope-dream, with the rise of a man who out of the very fog and blackness of popular waywardness, wantonness, unbelief, depravity, has stood up and successfully denied that human life must be all to the strong and that the poor must live unillumined. This has been the type of man who has lit the torch of love and solicitude and faith in the world that has lighted the race generation after generation. Is this not the time in the life of the American church and this the occasion in America for such a man to arise and call a halt upon the detour of the church around the farm tenant? CHAPTER IV “Hireling!” A sour epithet to hand a preacher; but the word is not mine. Look at it, if you will, in its original setting and judge for yourself: “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth.... The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep.” So spake the Man of Sorrows, who, as he went about preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, spake as never man spake. And nineteen centuries of unbroken Christian usage look down upon “pastor and flock” as an almost perfect characterization of preacher and parish. Passing quickly through the gateway leading up to the porch of my tale, let me in a few words taken from “Town and Country Church in the United States,” set before you the pastor-and-flock-hard-luck story in rural America: “The total number of communities within the town (town refers to places of 5,000 people or less) and country area is 73,230.”