Article December 27, 1900 Issue

Religious Items

Rev. George W. Solley has an article in the (Unitarian) Christian Register on "The Country Town Problem," in which he says: "The New England country towns need converting over again to another philosophy. To-day our country people are, almost to a man, fatalists and pessimists. These beliefs are the parents of no reforms. Pessimism and fatalism are the agents of death. It is not the emigration to the West nor the small families at home, nor the poverty of the country towns (although they are poor enough), nor the changed conditions of country towns which is the trouble: it is their change of belief. Our fathers looked toward the future, and labored with a vision in their minds. It might take a week to travel to Boston. Letters were scarce and newspapers scarcer, but still they believed in great things. It is not a question of railroads or mail systems or markets or climate or any other condition, and it never has been since Paul and Barnabas set out to evangelize the Roman Empire. It is the question of belief."

The Springfield Republican prints the following: "An Ohio mother, whose daughter had been killed in a most cruel manner by a jealous woman, consented that the murderess should be tried on the charge of manslaughter instead of murder in the first degree, the penalty for which is death; and she gave this as her reason:—

' "I could not rest content that the crime which had cost my daughter's life should go unpunished, but it could bring to me and mine no comfort, nor could it lessen our sorrow that another life be taken in vengeance for our loss. This could not restore my daughter to us. nor blot out the weeks of anguish which have been made her and our portion. I know what suffering means as no one can who has not undergone affliction such as mine; and a vengeance adding to the sufferings of others who are innocent of wrong themselves could bring no balm to my heart.'

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