The farmer’s social system in America has broken down under the strain of new forces. He needs the social help of men and women who will share his life, his privations, his hopes and fears. But they are to be men and women who see the farmer’s plight and, giving themselves to the task, struggle to organize a modern rural social system. It is fruitless here to recite the tale of an underpaid country clergy, with its sequel of a socially visionless, untrained set of honest parsons; fruitless to point out how denominational strife has cut down the preacher’s salary to less than a living wage. True, the country parson has his poverty, and needs not to take any extra “vow of poverty.” This sort of thing will go on and on until there is a right-about on the part of those preachers who flee the country as if it were the plague. Strong men of social vision, men who have come to understand the farmer’s social and economic plight, must turn their back on the city, and take up labors for the country flock. _A New Type of Training School_ But will there ever be such a right-about-face of virile, holy men until we have in America a new type of theological seminary for the training of country-bound ministers of Christ? I doubt it. The present schools of training are city-set, city-wise, city-satisfied; not but that a score or more of them give some “rural courses”; not but that a trickle of men has started already from them toward the country. You can better understand the case if I were to ask what hope there would have been for agricultural science, if total reliance had been placed upon the great city universities, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, Pennsylvania, to develop the practice of farming. Each of these universities has already made some notable contribution to agriculture in one form or another; but the great hope of agriculture lay in a farming college, and fortunately, the common sense of this country perceived this truth. In like manner, the hope of the rural ministry, in my estimation, lies in a rural theological seminary under the eaves of one of our great colleges of agriculture--preferably a college of agriculture in close proximity to a great state university. Here is the farmer’s intellectual center. Here are gathered men and women of hope for farm life. Here are the men and women who have social vision for rural society. In touch with these men and women, under the spell of the intelligent hope for the American farm and farmer, a school of religion can grow up which will train men to go into the country and help redeem it from its present social chaos. They can carve out community churches of distinction. They can create a line of such churches, wholly in rural territory, which will furnish steps of promotion for the most strenuous and ambitious pastors. Flight is not the cure of the plight of country parsons. The cure is rather intelligent consecration to the country flocks. CHAPTER V