A GIFT or THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS PROGRESS DANIEL DORCHESTER, D.D if NEW YORK: PHILLIPS & HUNT. CINCINNATI: WALDEN & S T O W E . DC, COPYRIGHT i3Si, FV dfc HTJISTT NEW YORK. CONTENTS. PROLOGUE (WHITTIER) .............................. Page g THE QUESTION OPENED. "The world going to the bad" "Spirituality declining in the Churches" "A break between modern thought and ancient faith" " Christianity outgrown by the population" "Protestantism out- grown by Romanism" "Protestantism the generator of skepti- cism" "Protestantism a deteriorater of morals" "A general collapse of religious belief at hand" "A moral interregnum at hand" .................................................... 13 THE PROBLEM. Protestantism on trial, from within and without A favorable so- lution indicated ........................................... 25 I. FAITH. CHAPTER I. BONDAGE. Spiritual despotism Papal scholasticism Protestant scholasti- cism ..................................................... 37 CHAPTER II. LIBERATING FACTORS. Modern skepticism Physical science Antitrinitarian Protestant ism Modern philosophy ......... ......... ................ 53 383326 4 CONTENTS. CHAPTER III. PHASES OF PROGRESS. Threatening aspects Safeguards Encouraging indications.. 79 CHAPTER IV. DELIVERANCE. Restatement Vindication Rejuvenation The true ideal . . 113 II. MORALS. CHAPTER I. TYPICAL PERIODS. Europe anterior to the Lutheran reformation England anterior to the Wesleyan reformation The United States from 1700 to 1800 143 CHAPTER IL THE PRESENT PERIOD. Specific tendencies Sabbath observance Slavery and barbarism Unchastity and divorce Impure literature Crime 189 CHAPTER III. THE PRESENT PERIOD, (CONTINUED.) Intemperance Dueling English morals New England morals Immigration Irreverence, etc. Pauperism The economic view Longevity Sanitary science Philanthropic agencies Penal in- flictions Criticisms and testimonies. 255 CONTENTS. S III. SPIRITUAL VITALITY. CHAPTER I. TYPICAL PERIODS. The eve of the Lutheran reformation The eve of the Wesleyan reformation The eve of the Edwardean revival The eve of the revival of 1800-1803 35 CHAPTER II. THE NEW SPIRITUAL ERA. New life The new life organizing The new life aggressive New lay activities City missions Home missions Young Men's Christian Associations Foreign missions Imperfections Type of religious character The outlook 331 IV. STATISTICAL EXHIBITS. CHAPTER I. STATISTICAL SCIENCE. Preliminary observations 37 CHAPTER II. RELIGIOUS PROGRESS AND STATUS. PROTESTANTISM AND ROMANISM. In Europe In Papal America : South America, Mexico, the British Dominion in North America, and portions of the United States formerly papal 385 6 CONTENTS. CHAPTER IIL RELIGIOUS PROGRESS AND STATUS IN THE UNITED STATES. Difficulties of the situation. I. The actual progress : The evan- gelical Churches The " Liberal " Churches The Roman Catholic Church. II. The relative progress : The Churches compared with the population The evangelical, "Liberal," and Roman Catholic Churches compared with each other The Churches and higher education Modern and early Christian progress Encouraging con- clusion 417 CHAPTER IV. FOREIGN MISSIONS. Inception Papal and Protestant mission funds Foreign mis- sions of the United States Foreign missions of Christendom Pa.. pal and Protestant missions Missions vindicated by testimony Results 475 CHAPTER V. THE WORLD-WIDE VIEW. Christian populations Christian governments Papal and Prot- estant governments Papal and Protestant areas The English- speaking populations Civil supremacy of Protestantism The ascending sun 513 CONTENTS. APPENDIX, ECCLESIASTICAL STATISTICS. THE UNITED STATES. TABLE I. The Churches and ministers in 1775 ................. 537 II. Churches, ministers, and communicants in 1800 ....... 538 III. " " " 1850 ....... 538 IV. " " " 1870 ....... 541 V. " " " 1880 ....... 543 VI. Recapitulation .................................... 545 VII. Sunday-schools ................................... 546 VIII. Unitarian societies ................................ 547 IX. Universalist ministers .............................. 548 X. Universalist societies .............................. 548 XI. The New Jerusalem Church ........................ 548 XII. The Roman Catholic Church ....................... 549 XIII. Church edifices and organizations .......... ......... 549 XIV. The colleges and the Churches ...................... 550 XV. Foreign mission receipts ........................... 552 XVI. Home mission receipts ............................ 554 XVII. Religious Publication receipts ..................... 556 THE BRITISH ISLANDS. XVIII. The Protestant Churches .......................... 561 XIX. Dissenters in England and Wales. .................. 563 XX. Romanism ....................................... 563 XXL Romanism, Protestantism, and the population in Ireland 564 8 CONTENTS. TABLE PAGR XXII. Romanism and the population in England and Wales 564 XXIII. Romanism and the population in England, "Wales and Ireland .... 564 THE BRITISH DOMINION IN NORTH AMERICA. XXIV. The official census of religion 567 ECUMENICAL STATISTICS. XXV. The Anglican communion in the whole world 571 XXVI. Baptists in the whole world 572 XXVII. Congregationalists in the whole world 573 XXVIII. Methodists in the whole world 574 XXIX. Moravians in the whole world 575 XXX. Presbyterians in the whole world 575 XXXI. The New Jerusalem Church in the whole world. . . 577 XXXII. Unitarian societies in the whole world 577 XXXIII. Sunday-schools in the whole world 578 XXXIV. Foreign missions of the United States in 1850 580 XXXV. " " " 1880 .... 581 XXXVI. " Europe and America, 1830 582 XXXVII. " " " 1850 584 XXXVIII. " " 1880 . ..585 XXXIX. States under Christian governments 588 DIAGRAMS. Diagram 1 389 " H 456 " HI 517 " IV 521 PROLOGUE PEOLOGTJE. THE outward rite, the old abuse, The pious fraud transparent grown, The good held captive in the use Of wrong alone These wait their doom, from that great law Which makes the past time serve to-day ; And fresher life the world shall draw From their decay. O backward-looking son of time ! The new is old, the old is new ; The cycle of a change sublime Still sweeping through. So wisely taught the Indian seer ; Destroying Seva, forming Brahm, Who wake by turn Earth's love and fear, Are one, the same. Idly as thou, in that old day Thou mournest, did thy sire repine ; So, in his time, thy child grown gray Shall sigh for thine. But life shall on and upward go ; The eternal step of Progress beats To that great anthem, calm and slow, Which God repeats. Take heart ! The waster builds again. A charmed life old Goodness hath ; The tares may perish, but the grain Is not for death. God works in all things ; all obey His first propulsion from the night ; Wake thou and watch ! the world is gray With morning light. 12 PROLOGUE. I, TOO, am weak, and faith is small, And blindness happeneth unto all. Yet, sometimes glimpses on my sight, Through present wrong, the eternal right; And, step by step, since time began, I see the steady gain of man ; That all of good the past hath had Remains to make our own time glad, Our common daily life divine, And every land a Palestine ! . . . O friend ! we need not rock nor sand, Nor storied stream of Morning-Land ; The heavens are glassed in Merrimack, What more could Jordan render back? We lack but open eye and ear To find the Orient's marvels here ; The still small voice in autumn's hush, Yon maple wood the burning bush. For still the new transcends the old. In signs and tokens manifold ; Slaves rise up men ; the olive waves, With roots deep set in battle graves ! Through the harsh noises of our day A low, sweet prelude finds its way ; Through clouds of doubt and creeds of fear, A light is breaking, calm and clear. That song of Love, now low and far, Ere long shall swell from star to star ! That light, the breaking day, which tips The golden-spired Apocalypse ! . . . Flow on, sweet river, like the stream Of John's Apocalyptic dream ! This maple ridge shall Horeb be, Yon green-banked lake our Galilee ! Henceforth my heart shall sigh no more For olden time and holier shore ; God's love and blessing, then and there, Are now and here and every-where. WHITTIER. THE QUESTION OPENED. THE PKOBLEM OF EELIGIOUS PEOGEESS, THE QUESTION OPENED. A POSTLES of complaint and despondency ^~~^- stand even in the pathway of progress. With lugubrious faces turned toward the past, they mut- ter dark predictions of approaching disaster. Not a new phenomenon, these seers constitute an unin- terrupted succession, under changing forms and names. Pessimism, the latest designation of this spirit, atheistic in origin, but broader in taint, has intensely pervaded the atmosphere of our times. We have had not only the pessimism of skeptics, but also of Roman Catholics, of Ritualists, of Premillennialists, and of disaffected and desponding Evangelicals. Criticism is the exhaustless heritage of Christian- ity. It has come both from within and without, Especially has Protestantism been subjected to crit- ical ordeals. " The Decline of Protestantism, and its Causes," was the topic of an address to the citi- zens of New York, by Archbishop Hughes, about 1 6 PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. thirty years ago, in which he asserted that " Prot- estantism had lost all central force and power over the masses of mankind." His uninspired auguries were caught up and echoed in High-Church circles; and in 1868 a bold volume "Protestantism a Failure" appeared, from the pen of Rev. F. C. Ewer, D.D., a very estimable and eminent ritual- istic clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Three years later, a writer in the " Catholic World," in a somewhat elaborate article on the " Statistics of Protestantism in the United States," with an un- discriminating and unpardonable carelessness, drew a comparison between two abnormal periods the one, of unnatural growth, under the Second Advent excitement, and the other, of declension, at the close of the civil war and from this defective basis, evincing a meager growth, made a suppositious demonstration of the probable number of Protestant communicants in the year 1900; and triumphantly inferred that Protestantism is hopelessly falling, and must inevitably fall, behind the progress of the population. It is a fact, not to be omitted in this connection, that the 10,844,576 Protestant commu- nicants, in the year 1900, according to the conject- ural calculations of this Roman Catholic writer, are not much in excess, as will be shown in our future pages, of the present number ; and twenty years yet remain before the close of the century. Father Thomas S. Preston, an ex-Protestant, now THE QUESTION OPENED. 17 high in the counsels of Rome, as Vicar-General in the Diocese of New York, has lately renewed the charge, that Protestantism is a failure ; and so says Pere Hyacinthe, in a recent lecture on Deism, in Paris, declaring that " neither Deism nor Protest- antism can be generally and permanently accepted by the French people," and that " a reformed Catholicism " confessedly a hitherto unknown ism t and too uncertain a basis for theorizing " is the only solution." Besides Romanists and High-Churchmen, skep- tical thinkers of various grades have represented Protestantism as having seen its best days, and as now rapidly losing its hold upon the world. Mr. Buckle, in his " History of Civilization," reiterated this view; and it has since been echoed in coarser and more vulgar forms. The advocacy of Protest- antism has been represented as faint and apolo- getic an indication of a loss of heart and internal demoralization. It is said that the scholars and thinkers are arrayed against its peculiar tenets ; that they are rapidly extracting from it the best part of its social ethics, and gradually reducing it to the lowest terms a kind of philosophic deism ; that only Roman Catholics and a few " seared and shriv- eled relics of Protestantism " now attend church ; and that, henceforth, the Bible, as an authoritative revelation, is to be discarded and laid upon the back shelf, as " a queer relic of an ancient faith," 2 1 8 PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. while the world moves on under the widening influ ence of modern ideas. In an elaborate address, in 1868, Rev. William J. Potter,* of New Bedford, claimed to demonstrate that the Protestant sects in the United States are gaining very little, only five per cent., in ten years, (1850-1860,) upon the population. In 1872 Rev. Henry W. Bellows, D.D.,f dis- coursed very eloquently upon the " Break between Modern Thought and Ancient Faith and Worship." Speaking of " the Church and its creed, on the one side, and the world and its practical faith on the other/' he said : " An antagonism has arisen be- tween them as of oil and water;" that "there are some millions of people in this country, not the least intelligent or useful citizens in all cases, who never enter a church door;" that " Church religion and general culture do not play any longer into each other's hands;" that " the professors in col- lege, the physicians, the teachers, the scientists, the reformers, the politicians, the newspaper men, the reviewers, the authors, are seldom professing Chris- tians, or even church-goers ; and, if they do go to church, from motives of interest or example, they are free enough to confess, in private, that they do * See First Annual Report of the Free Religious Association, Boston, 1868, p. 56. f " Christianity and Modern Thought." American Unitarian Association. THE QUESTION OPENED. ig not much believe what they hear." Dr. Bellows, nevertheless, expresses hope for the future of Christianity. But a later and more serious complaint has come from Rev. Dr. Ewer, who, after a lapse of ten years, has recently renewed his bold indictment against Protestantism in several discourses* delivered in Newark, N. J., " at the request of leading Epis- copal laymen in that city." He says that Protest- antism is only " a miserable raft, its fragments float- ing apart like the flying rack of the heavens ;" thr.t " the poor remnants only of the great nations are clinging to its parted and broken logs, and earnest, thinking men are at their wits' end to know what is truth." He stoutly claims that " the solemn in- dictment against Protestantism, drawn up " by himself, in 1868, "in the fear of God, and in behalf of dying souls, and uttered in Christ's Church, Mur- ray Hill, New York, was not met by argument, but only by a gale of holy malediction and impotent scorn;" that the volume passed through several editions, but has never been answered, and cannot be answered. Dr. Ewer says : " To say nothing of the specifica- tions in those eight discourses, what were two of the main counts in the indictment ? First, that where- as, 250 years ago, the Protestant religious dogmas held captive to themselves great thoughtful peoples * " Complete Preacher," June and July, 1878. 20 PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. of the Germanic, the Swiss, and the Anglo-Saxon man, those dogmas had failed to retain the hold they once had, and have, to an overwhelming ex- tent, lost at last the intellect of those peoples ; and that, while 250 years ago Protestantism held the masses as well as the intellect of those peoples, it has failed to hold and has lost those masses as well as the intellect ; that Protestantism, as a form of Christianity, stands to-day breast-deep in torrents of skepticism which itself hath let loose, which are deepening around it, and in which it is drowning ; and that it stands there to-day aghast and incom- petent. This was one count in the indictment. Gentlemen, you have seen that it has not been de- nied. A second count was that the fundamental religious premises of Protestantism were essentially anti-Christian, and must end, by inexorable logic, in infidel conclusions ; that if Calvin's and Luther's and Zwingli's premises were to be accepted, then Channing's conclusions were nearer right by logic than Cromwell's, and Theodore Parker's nearer right than Channing's, and Frothingham's and Adler's the rightest of all, and quite unanswerable by a Protestant ; that when the Calvinists burned Ser- vetus at the stake they burned Calvin's own brain- child. It was claimed that if this logical aspect of Protestantism was correct, it ought to have shown itself finally in practical historical results. And the charge was made that what thus ought to have THE QUESTION OPENED. 21 followed logically, had actually followed historically, and was patent to all in the comparatively empty churches and the wide-spread skepticism of thought- ful Germany, America, and Switzerland. This was another count." * Dr. Ewer also calls " the Protestant movement ' " a wide-spread destruction ;" not an improver, but a deterioraterf of morals; " not a reformation, but a deformation, and a hideous destruction." A writer in the "Atlantic Monthly," (October, 1878,) joins in this arraignment of the Churches. He says : " The disintegration of religion has pro- ceeded rapidly. . . . The Church is now, for the most part, a depository of social rather than relig- ious influences. Its chief force is no longer relig- ious. There are still, of course, many religious people in the Churches who sincerely believe the old doctrines embodied in all the creeds. But these are every-where a small minority, and they are mournfully conscious that the old religious life and power have departed from the Church. . . . They are alarmed to find the atmosphere and tone of the Church becoming more and more secular and business-like. These people, who thus represent the better elements of a former state of things, are the real strength of the evangelical Protestant Churches, so far as religion is concerned, and their * " Complete Preacher," June, 1878. p. 145. f "Complete Preacher," July, 1878, pp. 223, 224. 22 PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. character is one of the most wholesome and truly conservative forces of our national life. . . . But they are too few to regenerate the American Church, though their influence is highly valuable in resisting some of the evil tendencies of the age. Most of them are old, and they have few successors among the younger people. They have already done most of their work, and their number and strength diminish from year to year." " The morality based upon the religion popularly professed has, to a fatal extent, broken down. Multitudes of men who are religious are not honest or trustworthy. They declare themselves fit for heaven, but they will not tell the truth, or deal justly with their neighbors. The money of widows and orphans placed under their control is not safer than in the hands of highwaymen. There is no article of food, medicine, or traffic, which can be profitably adulterated or injuriously manipulated, that is not, in most of the great centers of trade, thus corrupted and sold by prominent members of Christian Churches." One of the latest of these gloomy utterances is that of Professor Goldwin Smith, who, in a thought- ful article, in the "Atlantic Monthly," for Novem- ber, 1879, discoursed upon "The Prospect of a Moral Interregnum," consequent upon the supposed de- cadence of religious faith. He says : " A collapse of religious belief, of the most com- THE QUESTION OPENED. 23 plete and tremendous kind, is apparently now at hand.j^ At the time of the Reformation the ques- tion was, after all, only about the form of Christian- ity ; and even the skeptics of the last century, while they rejected Christ, remained firm theists ; not only so, but they mechanically retained the main princi-. pies of Christian morality, as we see plainly in Rousseau's * Vicaire,' l Savoyard/ and Voltaire's * Letters on the Quakers.' Very different is the crisis at which we have now arrived. j~No one who has watched the progress of discussion, and the in- dications of opinion in literature and in social inter- course, can doubt that, in the minds of those whose views are likely to becomel and in an age when all thought is rapidly popularized sure to become ["the views of society at large, belief in Christianity as a revealed and supernatural religion has given way. . . .] " All English literature, even that which is so- cially and politically most conservative, teems with evidences of a change of sentiment, the rapid strides of which astonish those who revisit En- gland at short intervals. . . .{There is perhaps an increase of church-building and church-going, but the crust of outward piety is hollow, and growing hollower every day.'' From such assumed premises Mr. Smith pro- ceeds to prognosticate the disastrous " effects of this revolution on morality." 24 1'ROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. Mr. James Anthony Froude, in the " North Amer- ican Review," December, 1879, treats Protestantism as an exhausted factor : " Protestantism has failed. It is a hard saying. Protestantism, when it began, was a revolt against lies. It was a fierce declara- tion that men would no longer pretend to believe what in their hearts they did not and could not be- lieve. In this sense Protestantism has not failed, and can never fail, as long as there is left an honest man upon the globe. But we cannot live upon ne- gations ; but we must have convictions of a positive sort, if our voyage through earthly existence is to be an honorable and successful one. And no Prot- estant community has ever succeeded in laying down a chart of human life with any definite sailing directions. In every corner of the world there is the same phenomenon of the decay of established religions. In Catholic countries as well as Protest- ant ; nay, among Mohammedans, Jews, Buddhists, Brahmans, traditionary creeds are losing their hold. An intellectual revolution is sweeping over the world, breaking down established opinions, dissolv- ing foundations on which historical faiths have been built up. Science, history, philosophy have con- trived to create universal uncertainty." Neverthe- less, he adds, " Christianity retains a powerful hold, especially over the Anglo-Saxon race." Such are some of the allegations against Protest- antism and the times. THE PROBLEM, THE PROBLEM. 27 THE PROBLEM. IT is an important preliminary inquiry, What is comprised under the term Protestantism ? and what does Protestantism claim ? In the foregoing arraignment we find two com- plex and widely divergent parties on the one hand, Romanists and men of Romanizing tendencies; and on the other thinkers, who stand avowedly outside of Christianity, and those who, under the more indefinite name of " Liberal Christianity," maintain an attitude of criticism toward the generally ac- cepted Protestant theology. And yet the latter portion of both of these classes are connected with denominations, which, in the broad sense of the term, are Protestant. In the course of modern progress, the term Protestant has undergone some modification in its common use, although it still stands, historically, as the name given to all bodies of Christians which have sprung up out of the Reformation " the totality of the Churches which separated from the Romish communion." It also embraces those secondary protests against original Protestantism, such as Quakerism a protest against its ordinances ; Arminianism a protest against its Calvinism ; Methodism a protest against its Cal- 28 PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. vinism and its formalism ; and " Liberal Christian ity " a protest against its Trinitarian and sacrificial theology. But these are only the- subordinate di- visions of the great Protestant body, now, as ever, maintaining an unfaltering protest against the hier- archical prerogatives and exclusive functions of Ro- manism, which constituted the leading issues of the Reformation. In its broadest definition, then, and as the term is used by Dr. Ewer and the Romanists, Protest- antism embraces all avowedly Christian bodies out- side of the Roman Catholic Church. Jews and Mormons, professedly rejecting Christianity, are ex- cluded ; and Universalists, Unitarians, Christians, etc., are included. The tendencies of modern re- ligious thought, regarded by Dr. Ewer and others as so baleful, and as logically and historically the outgrowth of Protestantism, necessitates such an inclusion of the " Liberal " Churches. We accept this definition, and shall adhere to it, so far as pos- sible, in this volume ; but a narrower definition will sometimes be necessary, restricting the term Prot- estantism to those Churches distinctively holding the sacrificial and Trinitarian theology, which gave vital impulse and moral unity to the Reformation, and which even now identifies them with that period. The reason for this is twofold : firstly, the scanty statistics published in the *' Year-books " of the " Liberal" Churches, entirely omitting many items THE PROBLEM. 29 furnished in the "Annual Minutes" of the Evangel- ical or Orthodox Churches, make it impossible to carry out, at many points, on the broader defini- tion, comparisons which are important in testing the question? of progress, spiritual vitality, etc. ; and secondly, because, in the foregoing indict- ments, eminent representatives of "Liberal" relig- ion have sharply arraigned the " Evangelical " Churches, and made heavy allegations of their de- cline, decrepitude, disintegration, and decay. We have seriously pondered the foregoing charges, scrupulously scrutinizing the tendencies of the times, collating exact data, reviewing the origin and progress of Protestantism, internally and externally, and its relation to Christianity, as a whole, in its entire history, and are fully convinced that the foregoing indictment is both faulty and false ; that it is predicated upon wrong assumptions as to the genius and mission of Protestantism ; that many of the assumed facts are only hasty and un- discriminating collections of the most meager data, many well-attested facts and statistics being wholly overlooked and ignored. That part of the indictment which comes from Romanists and Romanizing Ritualists implies that the Christian religion has had a perfect ideal devel- opment in the Church on the earth ; that this de- velopment existed at some time in the past ; that the aim of the modern Church should be to attain to 3o PROBLEM o^ RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. the ancient ideal ; and that there can be no future unfolding of any thing richer or deeper in the spirit, the import, or the power of Christianity, because the fullness of its meaning was exhausted long ago. It also supposes that Protestantism has claimed and still professes to be a finality the perfect ideal of Christian life and experience, the last and perfect word of truth an assumption not only false but impossible. Protestantism claims the holy Script- ures as the complete and final word of religious truth, though not of all truth, but that new and deeper discoveries of their meaning and power will be wrought out by the progressive studies and ex- perience of the Church. An early representative of Protestantism, Rev. John Robinson, of Leyden, said: "I am confident that the Lord has more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy word." Protestantism has ever been conscious of imper- fections and weaknesses, making necessary some kind of siftings, modifications, and restatements, that it may be purged from unreasonable and unscriptural features, from relics of Popery and mediaeval civilization, to say nothing of the ages anterior; and that its life has been a growth, an evolution, in which, notwithstanding some pain- ful deformities, it is steadily attaining,' in its actual life and workings, fuller realizations of the ideal of Christianity presented in the holy Scriptures. THE PROBLEM. 31 Protestantism has been doing its work under great disadvantages, under sudden and radical changes of conditions. As a reformation and re- volt against old errors, it has had extremes, reac- tions, and other incidental evils. Doubts, disor- ders; and experiments are inevitable in such proc- esses. The work of modification and restatement, gradually going on in connection with the advance- ment of general intelligence, has been a task of the most delicate and difficult character, sorely testing the highest wisdom, stability and piety of its adher- ents, and also its hold upon the confidence and respect of the masses. But this is not all. In its divorce from the State, in the United States, and in some European countries, it lost the advantage of prestige and influence over the popular mind, which the State afforded, and was cast upon fluctu- ating outward sources of voluntary support. Hence the natural inquiry, whether it could maintain its influence with the masses. But another and still more important element has entered into the case the Protestant religion considered as internal spiritual exercises between the individual and his God, with no priestly or hier- archical dependence. Under Protestantism, relig- ion became purely a personal thing, passing out from under the exclusive control of the sacraments, and the arbitrary sway of assumed prerogatives, into irrepressible conflicts with individual lusts and 32 PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. worldly influences. Instead of pompous rituals, each soul was thrown upon its God and the deep realities of its inner life. The scourge of the hie- rarchy disappeared, but the struggle with sense and self went on. Still recognizing the validity of the Church, as a divinely instituted body a brother- hood and a guide Protestantism pressed with pow- erful tenacity upon each individual the fact of hi* personal responsibility; that he must bear the weight of his own guilt to the foot of the cross ; that he must seek within himself and for himself access to God, and, in the spirit of adoption begotten by the Holy Ghost, find a satisfaction which will meet the soul's deepest needs. Since its primitive days, ex- cept among small groups, Christianity had not ex- isted under such conditions. What was to be the effect of these new religious conditions among large masses of people ? It was predicted that religion, wholly dependent upon the fluctuations of individual affections, and the vacil- lations of individual wills, would be characterized by inconstancy and alternations, until its influence would be utterly wasted. In Europe, Protestantism has been tested only under the latter conditions, the voluntary spiritual action being supplemented by the support of the State. Such, too, was the situation of American Protestantism during the colonial era ; but after the Revolution the civil bands were sundered, and it adjusted itself to whol- THE PROBLEM. 33 ly voluntary conditions, externally and internally, and has undergone the trial of the transition, and the operation of the voluntary principle in its full measure. There has been still another source of trial. These capricious and fluctuating voluntary sources of sup- port have been tested in a country which every- where yields to the supremacy of public opinion. We have passed out from under the tutelage of authority, and a" new power, until late years little known, has risen up, exercising supreme sway even the functions of empire. With vast, complicated, religious, moral, educational, social, and political interests, our young nation ventured upon its career under the supreme guidance of public opinion. Nothing is more irresponsible, or liable to be more capricious and destructive ; and yet, in these un- steady hands are such great interests held. How experimental and perilous, in the judgment of many, the task of Protestantism, under these new conditions ! Those most sanguine of its success have expected vacillations, reactions, disorders, and even much decay. They are incidental and inevi- table, necessary to her life and higher development. Those who have written this terrible indictment against Protestantism do not correctly apprehend the case. No paralysis has come upon her, nor are there any indications of dissolution, as will be fully demonstrated, but the best symptoms of life and 34 PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. progress. The struggles of Protestantism are only the normal contests of the vital forces, expelling from the system disorders inherited from Rome, whose deadly taint has long disfigured and embar- rassed her: and the evidences of decay, which some see, are only the devitalized elements, which vigor- ous life throws off, in its higher advances. Opening wide our eyes, and wisely interpreting the signs of the times, in the light of the whole his- tory of Christianity, we see indications, in the con- dition and progress of American Protestantism, which convey encouraging lessons. The past eighty years ; at farthest, the past century ; and, in some respects, the past thirty years, have been distin- guished by a most rapid and marked development, in the actual life and workings of the Protestant Churches in the United States, of the true ideal of Christianity, which during long centuries was almost wholly lost out of the world. In no other period y if we except the brief period following the