THE CHURCH IN THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 19
"Give me a place to stand and I will lift the earth with a lever," is the modest request of every worker on earth, only that we expect to lift ourselves rather than the earth. Now religious work, as soon as it gets beyond the first itinerant stage, makes the same demand, and makes it increasingly. The churches need land for their work. And if so, any legal or social condition affecting the availability of the land will affect church work.
To take the extreme case : the monopoly of land in a cer- tain district would give the owner the power of autocratic inter- ference in the religious affairs of the district owned. I understand that Lord Salisbury as lord of the manor refuses dissent a stand- ing place on his lands. Similar action has been attempted by corporations in this country.
Of course control so complete and so personal is rare, at least as yet. But it is not a rare thing for the conditions of land ownership to act at least as a check on church extension. If a church wishes to make itself socially useful to the community by erecting a parish house near the church, the first item to be con- sidered is the price of the land needed. If it wishes to begin a mission for evangelistic work, the first item again is the rent of the store or hall. If land is readily obtainable and rent low, such expansion of church work is comparatively easy. If land prices and rents are high, church expansion is checked to that extent, unless the wealth and liberality of the members have grown in the same ratio as land values. In smaller cities or in the suburbs churches often grow out of cottage meetings or Sunday schools held in private houses; but as population thickens and space grows dearer the former dwellers in houses become dwellers in tenements, and the free foothold is lost to church enterprises during their infancy. A certain church in New York thirty-five years ago maintained several missions simultaneously; several of these grew into churches, which in turn propagated. Recently the same church desired to enter into similar work once more. It is stronger now in membership and liberality, but it was found that no suitable store could be secured under fifty dollars a month and that amount was prohibitive.
