We are in the habit of regarding the farming population of the
country as the most moral and religious of any, yet if we look at
them critically, we shall find that their piety is of a negative,
rather than a positive character. They are men in the first place
who have very few temptations, either from without or from within.
There are no professional tempters around them to lure them into
the more seductive paths of sin. The woman whose steps take hold
on hell does not pass their doors; the gambler spreads no snares
for them; no gilded palace invites them to music and intoxicating
draughts; they are not maddened by ambition; and they have no
vanity that leads them to degrading and ruinous display. If they
are little assailed from without, they are not more moved toward
vice from within. The fact that their vital energies are all
expended upon labor relieves them from the motives of temptation.
Men whose muscles are overworked have no vitality to expend upon
vices. The devil cannot make much out of a man who is both tired
and sleepy. If we inquire of the ministers who have charge of
rural parishes, they will usually tell us that an audience of
mechanics is better than an audience of farmers, and that the
miscellaneous audience of a city is better than either. It is
impossible for men who have devoted every bodily energy they
possess to hard labor during the waking hours of six days, to go
to church and keep brightly awake on the seventh. Country
ministers will also admit that they have in their parishes less
help in social and conference meetings than the pastors of city
parishes, and that no great movements of benevolence ever
originate in, or are carried on by, rural churches.

As a matter of course, life cannot have much dignity or much that
is characteristically human in it unless it be based upon active