ies in Ohio in
which there are more than 1,000 persons for each resident minister, of
which 13 are among the Eighteen Counties under consideration, and three
among the bordering counties. Noble County has a resident minister to
every 1,240 persons, Gallia to every 1,396, Lawrence to every 1,450,
Pickaway to every 1,458, while Hocking has only one to 1,693, or nearly
1,700 persons. Here, as in most rural sections, an absentee ministry is
necessarily ineffective. (See pages 50-51.)

The foregoing facts afford convincing evidence that the church in this
region is rendering poor service--how poor the reader may judge from the
following description of the religious and ecclesiastical conditions found
by Mr. Gill in his personal investigation on the ground.

For the most part the farm people of these Eighteen Counties are very
religious. This is attested not merely by the large number of churches,
but also by the frequency of well-attended revival services, held in
spring, summer, autumn, and winter. (In Pike County, for example, no less
than 1,500 revival services were held in thirty years, or an average of 50
each year.) Yet a normal, wholesome religion, bearing as its fruit better
living and all-round human development, and cherished and propagated by
sane and sober-minded people, is rarely known. The main function of a
church, according to the popular conception, is to hold these protracted
meetings, to stir up religious emotion, and, under its influence, to bring
to pass certain psychological experiences. The idea seems to be dominant
in nearly all the denominations and churches that the presence of the
Deity is made known mainly, if not solely, through states of intense
emotion which may be stimulated in religious assemblies. Such emotion is
held to be not only a manifestation of the Deity's presence, but also a
proof of His existence. No man is held to be religious or saved from evil
destiny unless he has had such experience. It becomes, therefore, the
business of the preacher of the church to create conditions favorable to
the experiencing of these emotions.

Officials of denominations to which more than two-thirds of the churches
belong encourage or permit the promotion of a religion of the excessively
emotional type, which encourages rolling upon the floor by men, women, and
children, and going into trances, while some things which have happened in
the regular services of a church in one of the largest denomination