he preacher's message is not widely varied. It is the
interpreting of tradition, gospel and dogma. His sources can all be
neatly arranged on a book shelf. One suspects that the greater the
preacher, the fewer his books. On the contrary, the pastor's work is
necessitated by growing differences of his people. He must be all things
to many different kinds of men. In the country community this intimate
intercourse and varying sympathy take him through a wider range of human
experience than in a more classified community. He must plow with the
plowman, and hunt with the hunter, and converse with the seamstress, be
glad with the wedding company and bear the burden of sorrow in the day
of death. Moreover, nobody outside a country community knows how far a
family can go in the path to poverty and still live. No one knows how
eccentric and peculiar, how reserved and whimsical the life of a
household may be, in the country community, unless he has lived as
neighbor and friend to such a household. The preacher cannot know this.
Not all the experience of the world is written even in the Bible. The
spirit shall "teach us things to come." It is the pastor who learns
these things by his daily observation of the lives of men.

The communities themselves in the country differ widely, even in
conformity to given types, and when all is said by the general student,
the pastor has the knowledge of his own community. It belongs peculiarly
to him. No one else can ever know it and there are no two communities
alike. In the intense localism of a community, its religious history is
hidden away and its future is involved. The man who shall touch the
springs of the community's life must know these local conditions with
the intimate detail which only he commands who daily goes up and down
its paths. This man is the pastor. Except the country physician, no
other living man is such an observer as he.

The end of the pioneer days means, therefore, to religious people, the
establishment of the pastorate. The religious leader for the pioneer was
the preacher, but the community which clings to preaching as a
satisfactory and final religious ministry is retrograde. In this
retarding of religious progress is the secret of the decline of many
communities. The great work of ministering to them is in supplanting the
preacher, who renders but a fractional service to the people, by a
pastor whose preaching is an announcement of the varied ministry in
which he