itinerant preacher, thundering at them of the wrath of God; and on
the cultural what Aunt Dalmanutha calls the "pindling" district
school. In the teachings of both is an over-weight of sternness
and superstition, little "plain human kindness," almost nothing
that points the way to decent, happy, healthy living.

The results are both grotesque and pitiful. Is it strange that the
feud should flourish in a land ruled by a "God of wrath?" Is
anything but sickness and death to be expected where both are
looked on as visitations of an angry God?

Among these victims of our neglect and our blundering methods of
teaching the settlement school has gone. It goes to stay. Not
three months, but twelve months its teaching goes on; not one
Sabbath in the month, but three hundred and sixty-five days in the
year it preaches. Literally it is a new world which the settlement
opens to the mountaineers, one ruled by cleanliness, thrift,
knowledge and good-will. The beauty of it is that living day after
day under this order they come to know that its principles are
practical truths; that they work out. To be told that the baby is
dying not because the Lord is angry with the family but because the
milk is impure may seem little better than impiety at first, but
save the baby by proper care and you have gone a long way to
proving that pure milk is God's law and that all the prayers in the
world will not change His ruling.

For distorted imaginings of the way the world is run the settlement
is giving to the mountaineers something of the harmony and beauty
of science.