The farmers compose a large part of our country's population and vote.
They still believe in healthful religion and its power to affect human
life. They can best be reached on Sunday and very often better through
the church than in any other way. The reason that the great cities have
not responded so quickly and so enthusiastically to our movement as the
country districts is that vice, crime and disease in the great cities
have, to a large extent, eaten away the capacity for appreciating
justice and brotherhood, and destroyed in a large class the fundamental
virtues of courage, manliness, patriotism and belief in the supremacy
of good. It is to the country, where these virtues are still fresh and
normal, that our movement must appeal principally. In the city there
are a thousand places of amusement and dissipation for every idle hour.
The boy coming from school or work, the mechanic after his day's labor
pass the open saloon, filled with music and merry-making, the theatre,
with its novelties, laughter and appeals to all the emotions, the
gambler's den, the game tables, the dives and a hundred other places,
always open, some positively and immediately hurtful to both health and
morals, others absorbing time, attention and vitality.
In the country, however, work or study done, a man or boy has not so
many places of amusement. There is much more inducement than in the
city to attend some church entertainment, some healthful neighborhood
ball, and much more time and energy left for meetings at the school or
church for the discussion of social problems and questions of national
or class well-being.
Thus the Volunteer who would teach farmers and villagers must accept
the church as one very promising field of work.
SUNDAY WORK.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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