ithout whose encouragement they would not have been undertaken;
also to his teachers in Columbia University, especially Professors
Franklin H. Giddings and John Bates Clark whose teachings in the Social
Sciences furnish the beginning of a new method in investigating
religious experiences.

NEW YORK, July, 1912.

EVOLUTION OF THE COMMUNITY

I

THE PIONEER

The earliest settlers of the American wilderness had a struggle very
different from our own, who live in the twentieth century. Their
economic experience determined their character. They appear to us at
this distance to have common characteristics, habits and reactions upon
life; in which they differ from all who in easier times follow them.
They have more in common with one another than they have in common with
us. They differ less from one another than they differ from the modern
countryman. The pioneer life produced the pioneer type.

To this type all their ways of life correspond. They hunted, fought,
dressed, traded, worshipped in their own way. Their houses, churches,
stores and schools were built, not as they would prefer, but as the
necessities of their life required. Their communities were pioneer
communities: their religious habits were suitable to frontier
experience. Modern men would find much to condemn in their ways: and
they would find our typical reactions surprising, even wicked. But each
conforms to type, and obeys economic necessity.

There have been four economic types in American agriculture. These have
succeeded one another as the rural economy has gone through successive
transformations. They have been the pioneer, the land farmer, the
exploiter and the husbandman. Prof. J. B. Ross of Lafayette, Ind., has
clearly stated[1] the periods by which these types are separated from
one another. It remains for us to consider the communities and the
churches which have taken form in accordance with these successive
types.

Prof. Ross has spoken only of the Middle West. With a slight
modification, the same might be said of the Eastern States, because the
rural economy of the Middle West is inherited from the East. His
statement made of this succession of economic types should be quoted in
full:

"The agrarian occupation of the Middle West divides itself into three
periods. The first, which extends from the beginnings of immigration to
about the year 1835, is of significance chiefly because of the type of
immigrants who preempted the soi