Excerpt from An Answer to the New England Country Church Question Dr. Samuel W. Dike has blazed the trail in a truly scientific manner, but he has called himself only a beginner. Pioneer statistical work of great merit has been done by Dr. Henry Fairbanks. Dr. Josiah Strong and Wilbert L. Anderson have made valuable contributions as interpreters of the industrial phases of the environment of our changing church life. The rapidly developing sciences of rural sociology and economics, under such men as President Kenyon L. Butterfield and Professor G. N. Lauman, promise to be of great help in the near future. It is devoutly to be hoped that the statistical work of the denominational home missionary societies and the Sunday-school associations, and the researches of the Young Men's Christian Association in country territories, are about to emerge into their scientific stage. Before taking up the leading seemingly inadequate interpretations of the country church problem, the Christian church itself must be defined. It is not enough to say that the Christian church is simply the social institution of the religious life: there are religious social institutions that arc not churches. Neither is it always true that the most specialized social institutions of religion are Christian churches. It makes some difference what religion we are talking about. Scientific sociology may call the church that portion of the social constitution which seeks the ethical and religious betterment of men. This certainly would include the modern Christian church as we understand it. But it does not seem sufficiently to honor the Christian history of the particular institution which we commonly designate as the church. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.