e in any social life
in our church. Socialism never saved anybody." Exactly. Such churches
ought to die and certainly will.

The perfectly natural craving in all healthy young people for social life
is a fact the rural districts fail to appreciate. By years of drudgery the
farmers and their wives may starve to death this social craving in
themselves. The work-slave forgets how to play and outlives his social
hungers. But his children are not born that way. They have natural human
instincts and appetites and these imperiously demand opportunity for
expression. The religion that imagines that these things are born of Satan
and must be repressed, is a religion of death not life.

It is worse than useless for the church to discourage the social life
among its young people. If it tries to starve their social hungers and
furnishes no chance in the church for young people to meet freely in
friendly intercourse, those young people will meet elsewhere, as surely as
the moon shines. To put the ban of the church on dancing and all other
popular amusements, and then offer no substitute whatever, is not only
unreasoning cruelty, it is pure foolishness.

You cannot hope to dam a stream and make no other outlet. Undoubtedly the
country dance is usually a bad social enterprise; but the only way to
fight it successfully is with social competition, not opposition. The
loyalty of young people to the church often begins when they discover the
church people really understand their social cravings and are doing
something sensible to meet them. Happy the village where the young people
have all their best times under Christian leadership.

But unfortunately rural life is seriously lacking, both in and out of the
church, in social opportunities; and the condition is far worse than in
generations past. To begin with, farmers' families are perhaps only
two-thirds as large as they used to be.[25] There are fewer children in
the home and in the school. Farm machinery has displaced three-fourths of
the hired men. Fewer older boys are really needed on the father's farm; so
they are free to go to the city where the social life strongly attracts
them. The same is all too true of the farm daughters.

The incoming of urban standards has helped to displace the old-fashioned
rural recreations which were natural to country life, and the taste for
vaudeville, the public dance, amusement parks and picture shows has
developed instead. The husking-bees and