The needs of the minute-man are as great as his field. If the army sent its minute-men to the front as poorly equipped for battle as our army of minute-men often are, it would be defeated. The man needs, besides a home, a library and good literature up to date. Religious papers a year or two old make good reading, and biographies of good men are very stimulating. A full set of Parkman\'s works would be of inestimable value in keeping up his courage and helping his faith. The smaller the field, the greater the need of good reading; for on the frontier you miss the society of the city, and its ministers\' meetings, and the great dailies, and all the rush of modern life that is so stimulating. And yet you find men of all conditions and mental[190] stature. A man who can get up two good sermons a week that will feed the varied types that he will meet at church needs to be a genius.
 
When a man has access to all the great reviews, to fine libraries, public and private, and has the stimulation that comes from constant intercourse with others, besides an income that will allow him to buy the best books, when his services begin with forty-five minutes of liturgy and song, backed with a fine pipe-organ, when he enjoys two or three months vacation into the bargain, he must be a very small specimen of a man if he cannot write a thirty-minute sermon; but when all a man\'s books can be put on one shelf, when his salary barely keeps the pot boiling, and he has fifty-two Sundays to fill, year in and year out, it is no wonder that short pastorates are the rule. When a man reaches his new field with no better start than many have,—the majority without a college training, and some without even a high-school education,—it[191] is not long before some of his parish will be asking a superintendent or presiding elder whether he cannot send them a good man. "Our man here," he says, "is good, but he can\'t preach for shucks." The new man comes, and in three months he is in the same boat. And another comes; and after a little there is as much money spent for the sustaining of these families as would keep a good man.

So it goes on, year after year. Sectarian jealousies and sectarian strivings are as bad for the spiritual development of a country as saloons. So that we find to-day, in little towns of two thousand inhabitants, ten or eleven churches, all of them little starveling things, "No one so poor to do them reverence;" while the real frontier work is left with thousands of churchless parishes.

If a man properly fitted out for his field could go at first, it would often stop the multiplication of little sects whose chief article of faith is some wretched little button-hook-and-eye or feet-washing[192] ceremony. In the beginning, such is the weakness of the new community, a union church is inevitable, there not being enough of a kind to go around; and nothing but a lack of Christianity will break that church up.

For an example, here is a superintendent with a field a thousand miles by four hundred. He hears that a new town is started up in the mountains, a hundred and fifty miles from the railway. The stage is the only means of reaching it; no stopping on the road but twenty minutes for meals. After a tedious journey he reaches the place, and finds the usual conditions,—saloons, gambling-houses by the score, houses of every description in the process of erection.

He goes up to the hotel man, and asks whether he can procure a place for preaching. He is given the schoolhouse. He announces preaching service, and begins. The people crowd the little building; they sit or stand outside. Here are members of a dozen sects, and a solitary[193] feet-washer feeling lonely enough. The work crowds hi............