three, or four teachers are common in the state of Washington and in California. North Dakota has a large number. St. Louis County, Minnesota, provides separate cottages and in some cases combines in one building schoolrooms and living quarters for two or three teachers. In many states there are isolated experiments. Sometimes old school buildings are remodeled for this purpose. Again, a school board will rent a dwelling and sublet it to teachers. A privately financed teachers' house in an Illinois village is said to pay 8 per cent on the investment. Most of these housing provisions, however, are made in connection with rural schools either of the oneroom type or of the small, graded sort. The Alberta house is significant for its city-apartment character, its proximity to the school, its close relation to the school work, its completely official nature, its social as well as educational value.

The speakers who at the Alberta dedication insisted that the day had national importance were not merely flattering local pride. They meant that rural education is of vital concern to the country as a whole. If the countryside is to be saved from tenancy and its consequences, is to be a source whence able individuals may be drawn into the service of all, rural education must be put upon a level with urban training. The conditions of good education are: competent, loyal teachers, expert supervision, proper housing, and modern equipment. Consolidation of rural schools is solving for the country the last two problems; the second is being urged with some success. Many factors will contribute to the solution of the first. Among these the teachers' house must be reckoned next to professional training and adequate salaries. The dedication at Alberta was of national significance. Within a few years the teachers' house will be included as a matter of course in the bond issue for consolidated rural school plants.

It may be well to add that the General Education Board has no thought of making offers to a large number of districts. Arrangements have been made with two other schools. Bulle

tins containing house plans, financial statements, reports upon various phases of the experiments, will in due time be published in large editions and given wide distribution. The Board will rest content with making available for School Boards and the public trustworthy data concerning the operation of a few teachers' houses in connection with typical consolidated rural schools.

THE RURAL CHURCH THE CENTER OF THE

RURAL COMMUNITY 1

WOODROW WILSON

I FEEL an unaffected diffidence in coming into this conference without having participated in its deliberations. I wish that I might have been here to learn the many things that I am sure have been learned by those who attended these conferences. I feel confident that nothing that I say about the rural church will be new to you. I want you to understand that I am here simply because I wanted to show my profound interest in the subject which you have been considering and not because I thought I had anything original to contribute to your thought.

But I think, as we have witnessed the processes of our civilization in recent years, we have more and more realized how our cities are tending to draw the vitality from the countryside; how much less our life centered upon the country districts; how much upon more crowded cities. There was a time when America was characteristically rural; when practically all her strength was drawn from quiet countrysides, where life ran upon established lines and where men and women and children were familiar with each other in a long-established neighborliness. But our districts are not now just what they used to be, and have partaken in recent years something of the fluidity that has characterized our general life, so that we have again and again been called upon, from one point of view or another, to study the revitalization of the countryside.

There was a time no longer ago than the youth of my own

1 An address delivered before the annual meeting of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, at Columbus, Ohio, December 10, 1915.

father, for example, when pastors found some of their most vital work in country churches. I remember my dear father used to ride from church to church in a thickly populated country region and minister to several churches with a sense of ministering to the most vital interests of the part of the country in which he lived.

And after all, the most vitalizing thing in the world is Christianity.

The world has advanced, advanced in what we regard as real civilization, not by material, but by spiritual means. And one nation is distinguished from another by its ideals, not by its possessions; by what it believes in, by what it lives by, by what it intends, by the visions which its young men dream and the achievements which its men of maturity attempt. So that each nation exalts, when it writes its poetry, or writes its memoirs, the character of its people and of those who spring from the loins of its people.

There is an old antithesis on which I do not care to dwell because there is not a great deal to be got from dwelling on it, between life and doctrine. There is no real antithesis; a man lives as he believes he ought to live or as he believes that it is of advantage to live. He lives upon a doctrine — upon a principle - upon an idea; sometimes a very low principle, sometimes a very exalted principle.

I used to be told when I was a youth that some of the old casuists reduced all sin to egotism. And I have thought as I have watched the career of some individuals that the analysis had some vital point to it.

An egotist is a man who has got the whole perspective of life wrong. He conceives of himself as the center of affairs; he conceives of himself as the center of affairs even as affects the providence of God. He has not related himself to the great forces which dominate him with the rest of us, and therefore has set up a little kingdom all his own in which he reigns with unhonored sovereignty.

And so there are some men who set up the principle of individual advantage as the principle, the doctrine of their life, and live generally a life that leads to all sorts of shipwreck. Whatever our doctrine be, our life is conformed to it, but what I want to speak of is not the contrast between doctrine and life, but the translation of doctrine into life.

After all Christianity is not important to us because it is a body of conceptions regarding man and God, but because it is a vital body of conceptions which can be translated into life for us; life in this world and a life still greater in the next.

And except as Christianity changes and inspires life, it has failed of its mission. That is what Christ came into the world for, to save our spirits, and you cannot have your spirit altered without having your life altered.

When I think of the rural church, therefore, I wonder how far the rural church is vitalizing the lives of the community in which it exists. We have had a great deal to say recently, and it has been very profitably said, about the school as a social center, by which is meant the schoolhouse as a social center; about making the house which, in the daytime, is used for the children, a place which their parents may use in the evenings and at other disengaged times for the meetings of the community, where the people are privileged to come together and talk about anything that is of community interest, and talk about it with the utmost freedom.

Some people have been opposed to it because there are some things that they do not want talked about. Some boards of education have been opposed to it because they realized that it might not be well for the board of education to be talked about. Talk is a very dangerous thing. Community comparisons of views are a very dangerous thing to the men who are doing the wrong thing. But I, for my part, believe in making the school the social center, the place that the community can use for any kind of coördinating that it wants to do in its life.

But I believe that where the schoolhouse is inadequate,