The religious attraction of the community has just as real a value for the satisfaction of individual life as the economic or ethical or the educational. "Mankind is incurably religious," and the life from birth to death cannot be complete in average cases without religious experience. Indeed the conscious testimony of men to the community's religious value for them is greater than any of the others. Religious experience is indeed a form of community conscience. To many men the church and the community are one. We cannot within our definition grant this; but the testimony to the religious character of the country community is a classic in American thought. The early days of every community are hopeful and optimistic. The tendency has been therefore for each religious communion to establish its own church. These early Protestant churches were expressions of the community sense on behalf of these people. The average American can best think of the community in terms of a church and a school. For building up the community, therefore, the maintenance of religious institutions is essential. We are concerned in these chapters most of all with the American community in the country. Not because it is more important, but because it is easier to understand and affords a better model for interpreting other communities more complex and highly organized. In it one may see the processes which affect the town and city communities; shifting of population, economic changes, educational improvement or retrogression and the processes of social life which express themselves in moral conditions. The community is the field in which may be observed the prosperity of the people as a whole. It is the local exhibit in which the average man shows what has come to pass throughout the commonwealth as a whole. American rural communities have been under the influence of swift and sudden changes during the years of railroad development. This is exhibited in the country community very clearly. There almost all the causes which are at work in the city are seen and their operation is easier to observe and to measure than in a city community. It is the general impression that the country community has suffered greatly though the loss of population. This is probably due to the diminishing agricultural activity of the country. Thirty-four counties in Ohio are producing less than the same counties were producing before the Civil War. It is natural that the population of these counties should be on the whole smaller than at that time. But it is more probable that the social, educational and moral life of the people of these counties who stayed in the country is slacker and less vigorous than in 1860. Sometimes the population of a community remains stationary but the economic weakness expresses itself in a retarded social, ethical and religious life.