tion that furnishes
specific answers to their difficulties.

At present the average minister realizes that his training has been
philosophic rather than scientific. His outlook upon life is from a
different viewpoint than that from which most men face experience. He
often builds his service for men upon a basis which no other
professional man except the lawyer--and he in a smaller and decreasing
degree--is attempting to use in practical effort. If the minister had
been given more science in his preparation for life, there is little
doubt that the Church would have accepted, especially in small towns and
villages, its opportunity to popularize science by bringing men and
women skilful in presenting useful information into the community and by
this time would have been regarded as socially the most valuable
instrument for the distribution of science.

3. Another question the rural church must soon face. Must there not be
less emphasis given to individualism and more to social control? This is
a question the schools are already facing. A philosophic outlook
naturally tends toward an emphasis upon individual responsibility in a
way science does not justify. Science (medicine, abnormal psychology,
and the social sciences especially) is showing more and more why men act
as they do. One's very personality is social in origin. The pressure of
early influences and of later public opinion is very great. Moral
results follow influences that belong to diseases, abnormal experiences,
unfortunate suggestions, defective inheritance, and a multitude of
causes understood by science. If religion is the supreme experience of a
wholesome, normal individual, there can be no doubt that increasingly we
must regard our moral problems as social more deeply than individual.
This will force the rural church to give up its present unreasonable
emphasis upon individual conduct and lead it to assume a much larger
social responsibility.

4. Finally, do not the currents of modern thought and feeling appear to
lead to a greater emphasis upon Christianity as a service rather than as
a system of thought? Will not the rural church consider whether it must
not put more emphasis upon itself as a function and less upon itself as
an interpreter of doctrine? This is the big question. At present the
Church wishes to increase its service, but it has only slight
inclination to reduce the attention it gives to doctrine. The essential
element in Christianity, se