urch has been
established. This old Presbyterian congregation has peopled its
countryside with its chapels and has assembled the chapel worshippers
regularly at its services in the old church at the graveyard and the
manse.

In Rock Creek, Illinois, the Presbyterian Church has a community to
itself, and ministers in its territory with the same efficiency with
which the Baptist church across the creek ministers to its territory, in
which it also has a religious monopoly. These two congregations respect
one another and have a sense of supplementing one another, which is a
form of co-operation. The ideal expressed in these two instances is
cherished by many. It is hoped that religious bodies may agree in time
to divide the territory, to give up churches, to sell or transfer
property rights and to shift their ministers from communities which have
too many to those communities not served at all. But the way for this
co-operation as an active principle has not yet opened. Its value is in
those communities which have had it from the first as an inheritance.
It has so far not proven a remedy to be applied for the cure of existing
evils.

The writer believes that the path of co-operation is the efficient and
slow one of economic and social organization rather than the delusive
short-cut of religious union. People cannot be united in religion until
they are united in their social economy. The business of the church is
to organize co-operative enterprises, economic, social and educational,
and to school the people in the joy, to educate them in the advantages,
of life together. Co-operation must become a gospel. Union requires to
be a religious doctrine. It will be well for a long time to come to say
but little about organic union of churches and to say a great deal about
the union in the life of the people themselves.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote 32: "Rural Denmark and Its Lessons," by H. Rider Haggard. See
also the Bulletins of the International Institute of Agriculture at
Rome, Italy.]

XI

COMMON SCHOOLS

The weakness of the common schools in American rural communities shows
itself in their failure to educate the marginal people of the community,
in their failure to train average men and women for life in that
community, in their robbing the community of leadership by training
those on whom their influence is strongest, so that they go out from the
community never to return; and in their general disloyalty to the lo