A Tennessee Rally by Arthur W. Spaulding

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Sep 5, 1912

A Tennessee Rally

By Arthur W. Spaulding

IT is the custom of the farm mission schools in Tennessee to hold quarterly conventions in their different groups, for consultation and for the study of the questions and conditions in which they are mutually interested. The last of July the usual gathering of the Summer County group was connected with an agricultural rally for the benefit of the farmers and neighbors.

The rally was held on the grounds of the Fountain Head school, where Brethren Mulford and West have for four years been building up a work whose value to the community has been recognized by many influential citizens. In these four years not only have a church and a flourishing Sabbath-school been established, and a prosperous day-school been in operation, but the material conditions of the people, physical and economic, have been fostered through the many forms of influence which the school has exercised.

The meeting was presided over by Prof. E. A. Sutherland, president of the Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute. Several teachers and students from this school were also in attendance, as well as Prof. Chas. F. Alden and wife, from the Ridgetop school, representatives from the Sumner County schools, and about one hundred of the neighbors.

The exercises were held outdoors, under the great oaks and chestnuts, where also a hygienic dinner was served to the company. The visitors, after an inspection of the farm and buildings and the expanding canning industry of the school, expressed much surprise and gratification at the evidences they saw of a definite work being done by this school for its community, the importance of which the government, and they as its representatives have of recent years begun to see.

The question is often asked how the expenditure of such efforts for the material betterment of the people is of value in teaching them the last gospel message. The answer is that the higher the physical and material conditions of a man, the better opportunity is given him for comprehending and accepting spiritual truth. You may preach against tobacco, but so long as tobacco seems to the farmer to be his only profitable money crop, he is likely to persist in raising it and in using it. Right here our schools are striking at the foundation of the habit, by establishing canneries and advocating the raising of tomatoes, beans, and other vegetables, which make a better profit with less work than tobacco, while at the same time, in their schoolrooms, they are showing the physiological and economic evils of the weed. They tell of the danger, and they provide the way of escape.

This far-sighted policy, combined with care for the sick, and other phases of the self-supporting school work, has shown fruits already in the beginning of a change in public sentiment and customs. And in view of the favorable attitude of public-spirited officials toward a few of our schools with which they have become acquainted, we see in these schools a mighty lever for the truth, not only in their immediate communities, but to an extent that can not now be accurately measured.

The agricultural rally closed in the afternoon, and was followed, that evening and the next morning, by a most inspiring council relating to the spiritual efforts and the development of the self-supporting auxiliary work.

ARTHUR W. SPAULDING.