ed into the
full swing of the age of science and practical achievement. What the
work, the usefulness, and the destiny of the Protestant churches shall
henceforth be will depend entirely upon their own vision, their common
sense, and their adaptability to a new order of things. Embodying as
they do resources, organization, the devotion and the energy of earnest
minds, they are in a position to achieve results of wellnigh
incalculable value if they apply themselves diligently and wisely to the
task of holding communities and individuals up to the high standard of
that "Good Life" which the most gifted social philosopher of all ages
told us, more than two thousand years ago, is the object for which
social activities and institutions exist.

In one vast field of our social territory the problem of maintaining the
good life has become peculiar in its conditions and difficult in the
extreme. The rural community has suffered in nearly every imaginable way
from the rapid and rather crude development of our industrial
civilization. The emigration of strong, ambitious men to the towns, the
substitution of alien labor for the young and sturdy members of the
large American families of other days, the declining birth rate and the
disintegration of a hearty and cheerful neighborhood life, all have
worked together to create a problem of the rural neighborhood, the
country school and the country church unique in its difficulties,
sometimes in its discouragements.

To deal with this problem two things are undeniably necessary. There
must be a thorough examination of it, a complete analysis and mastery of
its factors and conditions. The social survey has become as imperative
for the country pastor as the geological survey is for the mining
engineer. And when the facts and conditions are known, the church must
resolutely set about the task of dealing with them in the practical
spirit of a practical age, without too much attention to the traditions
and the handicaps of an age that has gone by.

It would not be possible, I think, to present these two aspects of the
problem of the country parish with more of first hand knowledge, or with
more of the wisdom that is born of sympathy and reverence for all that
is good in both the past and the present than the reader will find in
Dr. Wilson's pages. I welcome and commend this book as a fine product of
studies and labors at once scientific and practical.