of truth and beauty. This acquaintanceship should be promoted until the child is able to pass his hand around the arm of one of the saints and go with him down the long path which leads to the haven of all good. While on one of these pilgrimages his cheeks will be aglow and his eyes will shine with the light that glorifies the face of the devout peasant when he gazes enraptured on the Christ mother as painted by Raphael.

He must learn while yet young that there are two atmospheres in this world; the one is physical and fills our lungs, the other is spiritual and gives a new and better life to our souls. The first serves its purpose in the act which makes use of it; the second remains with us through all time; it comes to us from God, through his seers and prophets, making the divinity manifest in his children while they are here upon the earth.

He must be so taught and must so train himself that he can walk in Elysian fields, through jasper gates, along golden streets; kneel at the great white throne, and see sights never revealed to mortal eyes, because he has that vision which the imagination, warmed by sympathy, can bring to him of the Paradise seen by John Milton, and the Pilgrim created by John Bunyan.

The right reading of the thirty-eighth chapter of Job, the nineteenth, twenty-third and ninetieth Psalms, the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes, the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, the fifth chapter of Daniel, the Sermon on the Mount, the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. John, the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, and the twenty-first chapter of Revelation, will help him to see something of the power and wisdom of God, as well as his love for his children, and will permit him to trace in his ancestors the pathways he has travelled, and to catch glimpses of that undiscovered country toward which he is journeying.

The child has a right to know quite as much of the Christ who was born in a stable, cradled in a manger, who lived in a peasant's cottage, worked at a carpenter's bench, was so poor that he had not where to lay his head, and yet was heard gladly by the common people because he brought light and life into the world, as he is required to learn of the unsavory details of the gods of so-called heathen nations.

It would be well, from the pedagogical standpoint, if our teachers sat at the feet of the Great Teacher of Nazareth and learned some of the simple, homely lessons of daily life. Such instruction would make it impossible for them to devote so much time to the evils of

wrong-doing, but would induce them to win the children to a better life by showing them the blessings which come from righteous living. It would make them more hospitable toward truth wherever found, whether it be in the heart of a child or the teachings of the sage. It would give that kind of courage which would cast out all fear, except that which comes from the dread of being a coward. They would learn that it is not a difficult matter and not often an important item for one to have opinions, but it is vital that he be controlled by convictions, otherwise he will be carried into devious and dangerous paths by the foolish teachings of the unwise. They would discover how to become rich without wealth, and happy without luxury. Under these influences the whisperings of the message of the spirit will be heard, while the clamor of its physical embodiment will be but little heeded. They will grow so sensitive for others that they will have no time to be sensitive for themselves; they will come to know that life is alive as long as it is used to give life to others; they will see that the world needs to-day, more than ever before, not the'arrogance of knowledge, but the graciousness of culture; and that above all, and giving the motive to all, will be the faith that the love which cleanses the lover will purify the world.

The school will help the church when it helps the child to grow, to master himself and his tasks, to feel the pulse of nature, to live in close communion with the wise of heart, to rejoice in the companionship of those who have pointed the way and gone on before, to receive truth and embalm it in daily living, and to be glad to be alone with God and his own heart.

ment.

A nation born in righteousness must live righteously. The menace of to-day is not ignorance, but the lack of a controlling moral sentiWe cannot endure as a people if we place a higher estimate on learning than we accord to virtue. The time has come when we would better teach less cube root and devote more attention to the fundamental principles of right living. That training of the will which keeps us in the right path is more to be desired than the wisdom found in books. That school serves the child best which helps him to do instinctively the right thing; to feel approval for the act done; and at the same time to have an intelligent understanding of the issues involved.

The school that does this work gives to all organizations that are seeking to make good things better, the help they have a right to demand.

THE SOCIAL MISSION OF THE COUNTRY CHURCH.'

PRES. WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE, LL. D., BOWDOIN COLLEGE,
BRUNSWICK, ME.

My experience in a country church is limited to three summer months in a New Hampshire town of one hundred and forty-four inhabitants. My success then, I am sure, was not sufficient to warrant me in giving counsel to my brethren. My first effort was a Memorial Day address. I had spent the last month in the seminary in making elaborate preparations for this my maiden speech. On the morning of the 30th of May I sallied forth, with my voluminous manuscript in hand. At the first farm-house the farmer was out in the barn-yard harnessing his horse. Unable to conceive any other destination for his journey, I greeted him with the question, intended not so much to elicit information as to give him a welcome to the intellectual feast I was about to provide, "Are you coming over to the services?" "No," was the gruff reply. "I ain't going near 'em. Who do you suppose you are going to do the most good to, the livin' or the dead? I don't think you will do much good to either on 'em." At the end of the three months I almost scored a victory; for my farmer friend, who had not been inside a church for forty years, actually condescended to grace with his presence a Sunday-school concert which was to mark the climax of my labors for the summer. At the conclusion of the exercises I went at once to my friend and confidently asked him how he liked it, thinking that at least the attractive decorations of the ladies, who had made the pulpit a perfect bower of ferns and flowers, must have caught his eye, even if the songs and recitations had failed to please his critical ear. But even here I was doomed to disappointment; for the only response I could elicit was given in the same gruff tones I had first heard in the barn-yard: "I don't like it at all. I've been working all these years to kill those darned old brakes out of my pasture; and when I come to the meet'n house, you stick 'em right under my nose."

Why, then, should I, with so brief and inauspicious an experience, presume to speak on the mission of the country church? Why

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should so eminently practical a subject be assigned to one who comes from a college? I suppose it is because college and parish, the university and the missionary frontier, are one; because the college has done only half its work until it has got its teaching applied in the smallest country parish; and because the missionary in the far-off outpost will never do his work aright, unless it is done in sympathy and insight into the essential principles for which our universities stand.

What the church shall do in the country community depends on what conception we hold of God. There are two contrasted conceptions of God current to-day: one which places God outside the world, and relegates his activity chiefly to a period of ancient history and a final judgment based on conditions anciently revealed; the other, which sees God's presence chiefly within the universe which science and history is progressively revealing, and recognizes his unfolding will in the ideal which moral and social evolution forever keep before our eyes.

If the first conception be the right one, then, of course, the ancient languages in which the sacred texts were written, the systems of thought which logical minds have deduced from these authoritative writings, the rites and ceremonies, the creeds and confessions in which this primitive revelation has been handed down, and the rhetorical skill to set forth persuasively the plan of salvation these writings, rites, and creeds contain, is the chief equipment of the minister. The traditional curriculum of the theological seminary was correct. The minister, whether in city or country, at home or in foreign lands, is literally a herald, bringing from afar tidings which, for all classes and conditions of men, for all lands and all ages, are substantially the same. The same barrel of sermons will serve equally well for a city or a country pastorate.

Now such a ministry may be fruitful of great blessing to a community. There are devout and unworldly souls who through such a ministry as this perform spiritual miracles; miracles which they could work through no other agencies, and without which the world would be a sadder and more sinful place. All honor to the holy men who, loyal to this conception of God, faithful to the special spiritual gifts with which they are endowed, bring these tidings of another and a better world, and withdraw their disciples from the allurements and temptations of this world of fever and passion in which most men live and move. Fortunate is the church which

enjoys the gracious presence and perpetual benediction of such a man of God.

Much as we admire and reverence this type of minister, we must nevertheless admit that it is a type which, in our denomination at least, is fast passing away. We have some left over from a former generation; we are importing more from Great Britain and from the Methodists; we are doubtless raising up a few in some of the feebler denominational institutions of the South and West. But among the young men of the East, the type is already almost extinct.

The Christian home does not beget them; the public schools do not train them; to neither Harvard nor Yale, Dartmouth or Bowdoin, Amherst or Williams, do they come in considerable numbers; and even the few who come, if they hear with understanding ears the teachings of Ladd, or Royce, or Garman, or Russell, are sure to have this disposition pretty thoroughly shaken up.

The seminaries of the old type cannot save these men, if for no other reason, simply because they cannot get them. Our college graduates stoutly refuse to go to seminaries which offer only the curriculum based on the conception of an absentee and ancient God. The type of minister I have been describing, much as we all owe to him, much as we shall miss him, is nevertheless a type which in the future will be the individual exception, not the general rule.

A dark picture this will seem to many of my hearers; a confirmation of their worst fears and forebodings. Yet as the conception of God on which it rests is only one of two conceptions, so, with the passing of this type, a new type is in process of creation. The colleges and universities are prepared to send you as many ministers of this new type as you are ready to effectually call.

Who, then, is this minister of the new type? and what is the work he will do in the country parish? At the outset let me say that neither he nor his work are altogether new. There are many men of his type who have long been at work in the country churches; and there is scarcely a country minister anywhere who has not always done more or less of the work I shall ascribe to him. For the sake of clearness of exposition and emphasis of salient features, I am obliged to draw a sharper line between these two types than actually exists.

Who, then, is the minister of this new type? He is the man who sees as the end of creation and the goal of human progress a per