More than one thing must be taken into consideration in any fair-minded attempt to answer these questions. For instance, there is the fact that during the past few years the number of tenant-farmers in the United States has steadily increased, until now thirty-eight per cent. of the farms are tenant operated, most often on the basis of the one-year lease. Any fact that tends to make the farmer more or less a transient in the community naturally deters him from forming social or religious relationships. Another reason frequently given for the low average of rural church attendance is that so high a percentage--nearly 30 per cent.--of the nation’s land workers are new Americans, the foreign-born, or the children of the foreign-born. There are States, such as North Dakota, where nearly every other farmer belongs to other than American nativity, and whole sections of the country, as in the Middle West, where foreigners are in excess of two-fifths of the population. It is estimated that at the present time more than fifty per cent. of these people are unministered to by any church, Catholic or Protestant. Where anything like an earnest and comprehensive attempt has been made by churches to be of aid to them, as among the Mexicans of California, it has been marked by astonishing results. Then why have the churches done practically nothing for the foreign-born in rural sections? If the new American can make good on the land, is it too much to ask the church to make good with the new American? When I hear it said that no one is really interested in religion any more, I cannot help thinking of an elderly Yankee farmer in the State of Vermont, one J. C. Coolidge, father of our President, a man who talks little about religion, but who for years has given virtually all his leisure time, and a considerable slice of time not leisure at all, to keeping alive the little white church near his farm at Plymouth Notch. He hauls the wood from his own land that the congregation of that little church may listen in comfort to the Word of God; he even, I am told, does the janitor work himself, since the church has no funds for a janitor. There is nothing especially remarkable in this. There are thousands of such men all over our country, men to whom the church is a thing to make sacrifices for, to keep alive at whatever cost. But in many districts it really seems that the fewer churches a county is able to afford, the more it is apt to have. Out of the 211 churches financially aided by home-missions societies in several counties where intensive studies were made by the Institute of Social and Religious Research, I am told that it was found that 149 of these churches could have been dispensed with without essential loss to anyone. All but thirty-four were competitive. _Untrained Country Preachers_ Another grave charge is made against the church to-day in our country districts. Farmers feel that they are neglected by the ministers of their churches.