ommunity, has been unfavorable to the country church at the present
time.

It may be said at this point that a state of transition is for the time
being unfavorable to ethical and moral growth. Moral conditions are
sustained by custom, and where customs are in change, moral standards
must themselves be in transition. The country community is moral so far
as adhering to the standards of the past is concerned. But the
population themselves who have to do with the country are undergoing
extraordinary moral change, with incidental loss, and many of the
problems of the United States as a whole are made more acute by the
waste of the country community. Among these should be cited the
amusement question in the small town, the decadence of the theatre in
the cheaper vaudeville, the white slave traffic and the social disorders
peculiar to unskilled laborers, many of whom come from country
communities of the United States and Europe.

It must be remembered, too, that the rural free delivery and the
telephone have entered the country community in the past twenty years
and their effect has not yet been recorded. It has probably been in the
direction of chilling instead of warming the social life of the
country. The old acquaintance and the intimate social relations of the
country community have not been helped by the telephone: and along with
the presence of aliens in the community, one-fourth or one-half or
three-fourths of the population, the telephone has had the effect of
lowering the standards of intimacy and separating the households in the
country one from another. The rural free delivery has put country people
into the general world economy and for the time being has loosened the
bonds of community life.

In those states in which the trolley system has been extended into the
country, for instance Ohio and Indiana, the process of weakening the
country population has been hastened. Sunday becomes for country people
a day of visiting the town and in great numbers they gather at the
inter-urban stations. The city and town on Sunday is filled with
careless, hurrying groups of visitors, sight-seers and callers, who have
no such fixed interest as that to be expressed in church-going or in
substantial social processes. For the time being inter-urban trolley
lines have dissipated the life of the country communities.

The duty of the church in the country under these conditions can be
accomplished only under a widened horizon. Th