Dr. Donald Sage Mackay remarks on the effects on communities of neglect
of church attendance:
One of the papers in New York has been making a personal
examination into the political morals of a certain New England
State. It has been alleged that politically that State is
rotten, that its voters are regularly bought and sold at every
election. A detailed description of each of the most corrupt
towns in that State was given, and this was the appalling fact
brought out: The worst towns (some of them with a few hundred
inhabitants), where bribery was most persistent, where illegal
liquor-selling was most rampant, where immorality was most
flagrant, were those towns in which there was no resident
minister and where no Christian service was regularly held. For
instance, in one town known as “darkest Exeter,” there were
twenty years ago six churches; four of them are in ruins to-day,
two are occasionally used, but there is no resident minister.
The result is “darkest Exeter”--a New England farming town, once
peopled by the sturdy sons of the Pilgrim, heir to all the noble
qualities of a sturdy race.--“The Religion of the Threshold.”
(443)