Laicus

A layman moves to a country town, joins the church committee, and discovers how a parish is actually run — the pew rents, the building fund, the minister's salary, the feuds. Abbott followed Henry Ward Beecher into the most famous pulpit in America and edited The Outlook, from which he told a suspicious public that Darwin need not be the enemy. This is church administration as comedy, and it is affectionate. Fifty-eight paintings from 1832 to 1895, among them Winslow Homer and George Inness, gather the American parish and its landscapes around a story of pew rents and building funds.