The Harvest and the Reapers Author:Harvey Newcomb Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 18 DARK CORNERS. that it may be presumed to be general. Nor is it confined to our cities. In the new countries of the South and West, extensive settlements ar... more »e found, which have no regular means of grace. In the valleys among the mountains, neighborhoods have been found where a sermon has not been preached for twenty years. In one of these remote valleys, the first clergyman who ever visited it, was requested to preach a funeral sermon for a person who had been dead twenty years! Nor is this state of things confined to the new countries of the West and South. In almost every township in the Eastern States, not excepting the most highly favored portions of New England, there are dark corners and remote settlements, whose inhabitants live in almost total neglect of public worship and of all religion; and high up in the mountains are people who live in a state of abject and heathenish degradation. Nay, more, there are families living within the sound of the church- going bell who neglect the ordinances of God's house, and spend his sacred day in the pursuit of pleasure or in listless inactivity. When I commenced this investigation, knowing NEGLECT OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 19 what masses are to be seen in our cities every Sabbath seeking their pleasure, and having some personal acquaintance with the heathenism that abounds, I supposed that the neglect of public worship was greater in the cities than in the country. But, from the facts that I have obtained, it appears that the reverse is true. Actual surveys have been made in different parts of New England, which agree so well as to furnish reliable data for an estimate. The following statements may be relied upon as accurate, so far as they go. Maine. — A report was made on this subject to the General Conference of Maine, in ...« less