come to the land to do," he declared in a loud voice
and his short figure straightened and he thought that
something like a halo of Godly approval hung over him.

* * *

It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men and
women of a later day to understand Jesse Bentley. In
the last fifty years a vast change has taken place in
the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken
place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the
roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of
millions of new voices that have come among us from
overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of
cities, the building of the inter-urban car lines that
weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses, and now
in these later days the coming of the automobiles has
worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the
habits of thought of our people of Mid-America. Books,
badly imagined and written though they may be in the
hurry of our times, are in every household, magazines
circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers are
everywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove
in the store in his village has his mind filled to
overflowing with the words of other men. The newspapers
and the magazines have pumped him full. Much of the old
brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of
beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever. The
farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the
cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as
glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us
all.

In Jesse Bentley's time and in the country districts of
the whole Middle West in the years after the Civil War
it was not so. Men labored too hard and were too tired
to read. In them was no desire for words printed upon
paper. As they worked in the fields, vague, half-formed
thoughts took possession of them. They believed in God
and in God's power to control their lives. In the
little Protestant churches they gathered on Sunday to
hear of God and his works. The churches were the center
of the social and intellectual life of the times. The
figure of God was big in the hearts of men.

And so, having been born an imaginative child and
having within him a great intellectual eagerness, Jesse
Bentley had turned wholeheartedly toward God. When the
war took his brothers away, he saw the hand of God in
that. When his father became ill and could no longer
attend to the running of the farm, he took that also as
a sig