Yes, the wealth of the rural community is still there, lying more or less dormant, and all the other means of a splendid civilization are there. But in the usual instance there is no one to assume the leadership in bringing about the reconstruction of the rural life. Now that he has accumulated such an abundance of material things, the typical farmer needs to be shown how to deal more fairly and helpfully with the various members of his family. Some farmers' wives are gradually being dragged to death with the over-burden of work, which might be obviated if the farmer and his wife were both shown specifically a better way of getting things done. Many boys and girls growing up in the country are being cheated out of their natural heritage of good health, spontaneous play, and the joy of social intercourse, all because of the fact that farm products are too much regarded as an end rather than a means to the higher development of the members of the rural family. So a good soil and excellent crops are essentials for a substantial rural society, but they are not a certain evidence of such thing. It is possible to go into some of the country communities where these material things are accumulated in great abundance and yet find the people there living a little, mean, and narrow form of life, and that chiefly because they do not quite understand how to use the splendid means at hand in the accomplishment of some high and worthy purposes. WORK FOR THE MINISTRY And so we hereby issue a call and a challenge for workers to enter the great fallow field just named and make it blossom with new social and spiritual life. And it is the conviction of some that the ministers of the town and village churches can undertake this work much better than any other class of persons, for they are already in many respects trained leaders. Let these ministers be provided if possible with an assistant, a layman it may be, for both their town and country work. Then let each of them have a rural appointment to which they may go from one to four times each month; and, inspired by a vision of all the possibilities ahead of them and endued with divine power and guidance, enter earnestly into the great work of rehabilitating the country community. It is evident that the minister who will leave his town congregation with perhaps only one Sunday sermon and go to a country church and preach to the adults, and teach and lead the young, while his assistant takes charge of the second Sunday service at home--it is evident that such a minister will not only wear longer in the locality in which he is stationed, but that he will find in the rural work just mentioned such a flood of zeal and inspiration as will more than make up for and repay the effort. Many of the town ministers are preaching to audiences that are more or less irresponsive to what they have to say. Under present conditions they are compelled to preach to the same audiences too much. Their sermons grow stale.