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The closing years of the nineteenth century, both in Europe and the United States, are characterized by a religious life as phenomenal with respect to development and influence as those of the eighteenth were phenomenal for lethargy and decline. “Never,” says a writer in the North British Review, “has a century risen on England so void of soul and faith as that which opened with Anne (1702), and reached its misty noon beneath the second George (1732–1760),—a dewless night succeeded by a sunless dawn. The Puritans were buried and the Methodists were not born.” In this opinion, all historians and essayists concur.

Among the clergy were many whose lives were of the Dominie Sampson order, described in Scott’s “Guy Mannering”—men whose lives were the scandal and reproach of the church; who openly taught that reason is the all-sufficient guide; that the Scriptures are to be received only as they agree with the light of nature; pleading for liberty while running into the wildest licentiousness. Montesquieu, indeed, did not hesitate to charge Englishmen generally with being devoid of every genuine religious sentiment. “If,” he says, “the subject of religion is mentioned in society, it excites nothing but laughter. Not more than four or five members of the House of Commons are regular attendants at church.”

From the colleges and universities, the great doctrines of the Reformation were well-nigh banished, a refined system of ethics, having no connection with Christian motives, being substituted for the principles of a divinely revealed law.

On every side faith seemed to be dying out; indeed, would have died out but for the tremendous reformation in life and morals induced by the self-denying and heroic labors of the Wesleys and their coadjutors, to whom, more than to any beside, England owes her salvation from a relapse into barbarism,—a service which in later years won for the Wesleys a memorial in Westminster Abbey.

On the Continent, religious conditions were no better. In France the masses were yet reeling amid the excesses of the Revolution. Voltaire and Rousseau were the oracles and prophets of their times,—the popular idols of the hour. Voltaire, indeed, openly boasted that he alone would laugh Christianity out of the court of public opinion, declaring the whole system to be outgrown and powerless. Germany, given over to theological speculation, crushed beneath the weight of the Napoleonic wars, and torn by internal dissensions, gave but little hope that upon her altars the dying fire of the great Reformation would ever again flame forth as in the older and more heroic days.

In the United States, similar conditions prevailed, especially during the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth. Forms of infidelity the most radical and revolting prevailed throughout the land. Many of the leading statesmen, in private at least, did not scruple to confess themselves atheists or deists. Thomas Paine was the popular idol; his “Age of Reason” almost as common as the Bible itself. The majority of the men taking part with him in the founding of the government, with but few exceptions, held theological sentiments akin to his, although declining to participate in his violent and brutal assaults upon the Scriptures and the institutions of Christian society.

BIRMINGHAM MEETING-HOUSE (ANCIENT).

Speaking of the earlier days of the century, Chancellor Kent, in one of his published works, declared that in his younger days the men of his acquaintance in professional life who did not avow infidelity were comparatively few. Bishop Meade, of Virginia, in his autobiography, states that “scarcely a young man of culture could be found who believed in Christianity.”

The colleges and universities were so filled with youthful skeptics that when, in 1795, Timothy Dwight assumed the presidency of Yale, he found but four or five willing to admit that they were members of churches. So far did they go in their devotion to the French infidelity prevalent at the time, that the seniors of the college were commonly known among themselves by the names of Diderot, D’Alembert, Robespierre, Rousseau, Danton, and the like. Harvard, Princeton, William and Mary, the University of Virginia,—all the colleges indeed,—were as thoroughly hotbeds of skepticism as nurseries of learning.

The period, too, was one of internecine strife among the feeble churches themselves. Divisions on doctrinal lines were incessant; departures from the faith as numerous as they were disastrous. Of the missionary spirit so gloriously characteristic of the nineteenth century there was not even a trace. Up to 1793, not a missionary society was in existence on either side of the ocean. The same was true of hospitals, asylums, of every form of organized effort for the reclamation of the masses or the amelioration of human ill.

In Boston, as late as 1811, men of literary or political distinction, eager to listen to the marvelous revival preaching of the celebrated Dr. Griffin, attended his services surreptitiously, or in disguise, fearful lest knowledge of attendance upon religious services of such vulgar character should detract from the dignity of their social standing.

If, however, the times were bad, the outlook for Christianity dark, the period, nevertheless, was not wholly without gleams of light. The spiritual leaven imparted by Whitefield in his mighty preaching tours, by Edwards, Dwight, Asbury, Griffin, and others of equally heroic stamp, gradually began to work,—slowly at first, but with ever accelerating movement,—until at last the triumphant successes of the present century began their stately march. By degrees a new life appeared among the churches, heralding the dawn of a new and brighter day. Revivals of religion, many of them powerful and sweeping, broke out in many parts of the country. Massachusetts, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, were in succession the theatres of movements which, before they had spent their force, had completely revolutionized the conditions of unfaith, immorality, and spiritual apathy so long prevailing. These upheavals of spiritual power, continuing during the first twenty-five years of the century, laid broad and deep the foundations of the mighty achievements of the church which we are now to consider. How extensive, how wonderful, have been these achievements can perhaps best be understood by a consideration of the changed conditions marking the close of the century.

In the first place, that the people of the United States are a religious people may be inferred from the amazing number and variety of religions abounding and flourishing within our borders. It may be doubted that in any other Christian country of the earth there can be found so many varieties of religion, so many church organizations, so many and diverse peculiarities of doctrine, polity, and usage, as here. It is a land of churches; churches for whites, churches for blacks; churches large and churches small; churches orthodox and churches heterodox; churches Christian and churches pagan; churches Catholic and churches Protestant; churches liberal and churches conservative, Calvinistic and Armenian, Unitarian and Trinitarian; representing nearly every phase of ecclesiastical and theological thought. As Americans have distanced the world in the extent and variety of their material inventions, so have they distanced the world in the extent and variety of their theological and ecclesiastical forms. The state cannot control the church, and the church is as free as the state. As a man may freely transfer his citizenship from one State to another, to each in turn, so may he, if he shall so desire, pass from one ecclesiastical communion to another, until he shall have exhausted the list. If, perchance, no one of the one hundred and forty-three distinct denominations enumerated in the census tables shall suit him, there remain innumerable separate, independent congregations, no one of which lays claim to denominational name, creed, or connection, in some one of which he yet may find an ecclesiastical home. The principle of division, indeed, has been carried so far in America that it would be a difficult task to find the religious body so small as, in the judgment of some, to be incapable of further division.

CATHEDRAL OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE (PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL) UNDER PROCESS OF ERECTION IN NEW YORK.

It is to be observed, however, that the differences of the one hundred and forty-three denominations into which our religious population is divided are, in many instances, so slight that, should consolidation be attempted, the one hundred and forty-three could easily be reduced to a comparatively small number, and this with but little change in doctrine, polity, or usage. Consolidation into organic union, however, is hardly likely to occur in the near future, even were such consolidation desirable. In the first place such a result would be contrary to the genius of Protestantism, based, as it is, on the absolute right of private judgment with respect to matters of faith and morals, and, in the second place, it would be contrary to human experience. “Religious controversies,” as Gladstone says, “do not, like bodily wounds, heal by the genial forces of nature. If they do not proceed to gangrene and mortification, at least they tend to harden into fixed facts, to incorporate themselves into laws, character, and tradition, nay, even into language; so that at last they take rank among the data and presuppositions of common life, and are thought as inexorable as the rocks of an iron-bound coast.” In religion, when men separate, the severance is like the severance of the two early friends of whom the poet speaks:—

“They parted, ne’er to meet again,

But neither ever found another

To free the hollow heart from paining.

They stood aloof, the scars remaining,

Like cliffs which have been rent asunder,

A dreary sea now rolls between.”

FATHER DAMIEN, MISSIONARY TO HAWAIIAN LEPER COLONY.

If, however, the diversities are great—increasing rather than diminishing—the “unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace” with respect to all essentials of doctrine is as remarkable as the diversity in the outward form. Never, indeed, since the dawn of Christianity, were the members of the diversified bodies of the general church of Christ in such thorough accord, in such closeness of attachment, with such generous recognition of all that is good in each of the several bodies, as now. Even the Roman Catholic Church, intolerant in all lands where its sway is practically undisputed, in the United States, at least, has caught something of the broader toleration of Protestants, giving to its millions of communicants a better and truer gospel than in those countries where it does not come into contact with Protestantism, while freely coöperating with other churches in various works of philanthropy and reform.

In the next place, that we are a religious, a Christian people may be argued from the steady and enormous increase during the century of the material and spiritual forces of the church of Christ, an increase phenomenal even amid the wonders of a phenomenal century. Whether we look at the increase of edifices or the multiplication of communicants, the results in either case are sufficient for both congratulation and amazement. Were it possible to obtain from the earlier records exact statistics of the actual number of edifices and communicants existing at the opening of the century, comparison would be comparatively easy. Such, however, is not the case, the records having been imperfectly kept and indifferently preserved. The census of 1890, indeed, was the first to furnish exhaustive and really reliable results.

Taking that census as a basis, and adding to its figures those to be obtained from the year books of the various bodies up to and including 1894, the religious strength of the United States may be summarized as follows: Churches, 189,488; religious organizations, 158,695; ordained ministers, 114,823; members or communicants, 15,217,948; value of church property, $670,000,000; seating capacity of churches, 43,000,000, while in the 23,000 places where organizations which own no edifices hold their services, accommodations could be found for 2,250,000 more. In the majority of the Protestant churches, at least two services are held on each Sabbath; in the Catholic, six or seven.

Granting these premises, it is but reasonable to say that if, on any given day, the entire population of the country should desire to attend at least one religious service, accommodations could readily be found for the entire number,—ample proof that the spiritual interests of the millions are by no means neglected so far as privileges of worship are concerned. It is a showing all the more remarkable when we consider that all this vast provision is furnished on the basis of voluntary offerings, the state contributing not a dollar for religious purposes. It is probable that in these churches and edifices, on Sabbaths and on weekdays, not less than 15,000,000 services are held each year, to say nothing of sessions of Sunday-schools, meetings of Young People’s Associations, and gatherings of kindred character. In them, too, not less than ten millions of sermons and addresses on religious themes are annually delivered.

The number of enrolled communicants, or members, however, by no means expresses the real strength of the religious life of the nation. To get at that, we must multiply each Protestant communicant by the 2.5 adherents allowed in all statistical calculations. Proceeding on this basis, omitting for the time all Catholics, Jews, Theosophists, members of Societies for Ethical Culture, Spiritualists, Latter-Day Saints, and kindred bodies, and multiplying the 15,200,000 Protestant members by 2.5, we have over 50,000,000 as the total Protestant population of the country. Adding to these 50,000,000 the Catholic population, estimated by Catholic authorities as being 15 per cent. larger than the number of Catholic communicants, we have 57,062,000 as the total Christian population, leaving only about 7,000,000 who are neither communicants nor adherents. Of the 7,000,000 opposed, for various reasons, to the churches, comparatively few are to be reckoned as either infidels or atheists; while, on the other hand, it is true that of the 57,000,000 reckoned as either communicants or adherents, millions are Christians only in name, either never attending the services of the churches, or at the best only at rare intervals. Gratifying as is this splendid exhibit of religious devotion on the part of the American people, the fact that there are millions in our land whose allegiance to Christian doctrine is but nominal, with millions more upon whose lives religion exercises no appreciable influence whatever, is a sufficient proof of the enormous task yet confronting the churches of Christ, if we are to stand before the nations as the great distinctive Christian nation of the world. The stupendous gain, however, in ninety-four years, of over 14,853,076 in Protestant churches alone is a record of religious progress unparalleled in the history of the world.

SALISBURY CATHEDRAL, ENGLAND. (WEST FRONT.)

Advancing to the question of distribution of the religious forces enumerated, we find that while these forces are distributed throughout every State and under one hundred and forty-three denominational names, they are, nevertheless, massed largely in a few denominations and in a comparatively few States. Competent authorities estimate that the five largest denominations comprise fully 60 per cent. of the entire number of communicants; the ten largest, 75 per cent. With respect to communicants, the Catholic Church is first, with 7,510,000; the Methodist (all bodies) second, with 5,405,076; the Baptist third, with 3,717,373; the Presbyterian fourth, with 1,278,332; the Lutheran fifth, with 1,233,072.

YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION BUILDING, PHILADELPHIA.

With respect to population, reckoning the Catholic population at 7,510,000—which figures include children under ten years of age—and adding to the communicant strength of the four other bodies mentioned the 2.5 adherents allowed for each communicant, we have the following: Methodist population, 18,918,466; Baptist, 12,990,805; Presbyterian, 5,525,162; Lutheran, 4,358,752; total Protestant population, 50,000,000; Catholic, 7,510,000.

With respect to value of church property, the Methodists are first with $132,000,000; the Catholics second, $118,000,000; the Presbyterians third, with $95,000,000; the Episcopalians fourth, with $82,835,000; the Baptists fifth, with $82,390,000. The total value of church property, reckoning all denominations, reaches the enormous sum of $670,000,000.

To further particularize with respect to the lesser groups into which the religious forces are divided is impossible within the limits allowed for this chapter. To do it would require a volume instead of a chapter. The following summary, however, may suffice to show the gain of a century of religious effort:—

Year.	Ministers.	Organizations.	Communicants or Members.
1800	2,651	3,030	364,872
1850	25,555	43,072	3,529,988
1870	47,609	70,148	6,673,396
1880	69,870	97,090	10,065,963
1890	98,185	151,172	13,823,518
1894	114,823	158,695	15,217,948

When one remembers that one hundred years ago it was a common boast of infidels that “Christianity would not survive two generations in this country,” the above exhibit shows a religious progress unequaled in the history of the kingdom of God in any land or any age.

Turning to the field of missionary effort, we find that the spread of the Christian religion by missionary efforts, particularly during the last one hundred years, forms one of the brightest chapters in the records of human progress. Within this period, the triumphs of the first three centuries have been far more than repeated.

Following these early victories of the Christian faith came on, as all know, ages of darkness, dreary centuries, during the progress of which the power of the church gradually waned, and, with respect to purely spiritual activities, seemed to die away. The voice of exhortation ceased to be heard. Christian song was hushed. Even prayer closed its supplicating lips, and the church, overladen with corruption, worldliness, and human ambition, passed into the thick darkness of the long and disastrous eclipse of the Middle Ages. But amid the widespread darkness enveloping the world, even the ages known as the “Dark Ages” were not without their gleams of light. Among the Saracens and in the lands of the Orient, always were to be found heroic men and women toiling ceaselessly for the conversion of heathen nations to the Christ. Later on, subsequent to the thirteenth century, and especially during the centuries immediately following the discovery of the New World, the desire for the Christianizing of the world flamed into an all-absorbing passion. The tremendous labors of Xavier, of Loyola, and their followers, in every quarter of the globe, have long been the wonder and admiration of the world. Checked in Europe by the rise of the great Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church turned its energies to the acquisition of spiritual power in other lands, and with enormous success. Along the banks of the St. Lawrence, amid the wilds of Canadian forests, far away on the shores of the Great Lakes, thence southward to the Ohio, along the Mississippi, even to the Gulf; in far Cathay, in Ceylon, in Japan, in China, in Africa,—everywhere its missionaries could be found, heedless of hunger, of cold, of peril, reckless even of life, if by any means, whether by life or by death, they might “sprinkle many nations” and establish the holy emblem of the Christian faith.

BAPTIST MISSION SCHOOL, JAPAN.

Absorbed in the struggles going on in their own lands, Protestants made but little effort for the extension of the gospel in foreign fields, save the few but successful attempts made by the Moravians of Germany, always the most zealous of all Protestant bodies in lines of missionary service. What, however, was lacking in the way of missionary effort in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been more than made good in the glorious nineteenth, the distinctive missionary century of the Christian era. In the room of seven societies organized for world-wide gospel evangelization at the end of the last century, there are now in Europe and America between seventy and eighty organizations, employing a force of nearly three thousand American and European missionaries, and perhaps four times that number of native assistants. Full $10,000,000 are annually raised among the Protestant bodies alone for missionary service, while the great Roman Catholic Church prosecutes its work with a zeal equally unflagging. A brief survey of the progress of a hundred years of missionary effort will make it clear to all minds that the day is not far distant when the declaration of the prophet, “The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, even as the waters cover the sea,” shall have abundant and magnificent realization.

At the beginning of this century, every island of the vast Pacific was closed against the gospel. To-day, nearly every one is under the influence, more or less extended, of Christian civilization. India, from Cape Comorin to the Punjaub, from the Punjaub to the Himalayas, from the Himalayas to Thibet,—at whose gates the gospel is now knocking,—has been covered with a network of mission stations, schools, colleges, and churches, closer by far in its interlacings than that which at the close of the third century had spread itself over the vast empire of the Cæsars. Of the Indian Archipelago, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Celebes, New Guinea, not to mention smaller groups of islands, are feeling the new life ever imparted by the advent of the Cross. Japan, too, hungry for reform, and full of the stir of the age, by granting entrance to the gospel, has within its borders already a numerous Christian population with scores of evangelical congregations. The same is true of the hermit nation, Corea. In the lands of Islam, from Bagdad to the Balkans, from Egypt to Persia, and throughout all Turkey, are to be found centres of missionary enterprise, the vast influence of which is now being sensibly felt in the changing life of those remarkable peoples. In Burmah, and recently in Siam, after years of patient and apparently hopeless service, fields are everywhere “white unto the harvest.” China, most populous of all heathen lands, is open to missionary effort from Canton to Peking, from Shanghai to Hon-Chow. Africa also, once, in its northern sections at least, the home of the learning, the art, the science, the religion of the world, awakening from the sleep of long and dreary centuries under the influence of Christian civilization, again demands the attention of the great nations of the world. Everywhere, east, west, north, south, it is being invaded all along the line of Cecil Rhodes’ great railway, stretching northward from Cape Town for three thousand miles, to meet the twenty-six hundred pushing down from the north,—from Senegal to Gaboon and from Gaboon to the Congo; on the shores of Tanganyika and along the banks of the Zambesi shine the lights of the gospel, which, wherever it has gone, has been the harbinger of a new and brighter day. Within the mighty domains of our own continent, upon the immense plains reaching from Labrador to the Pacific, upon the sterile coasts of Alaska, in the land of the Montezumas, in Central America, in South America, from Panama to Terra-del-Fuego, equally marvelous have been the steady gains resulting from a Christianity the forces of which, like the waters that enrich the continent, penetrate all the bays and estuaries of human society and influence all classes and conditions of men. Looking upon the transformations effected by the labors of a single century of Christian effort, one may surely say, “The peoples that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”

Equally wonderful have been the vast contributions of the church in America to the great causes of education, philanthropy, and reform, particularly in the line of educational work. The service of the church in the great cause of education has never yet been fully recognized. Men forget, when charging the church with hostility to human progress, to freedom of thought and action, that until within a period of seventy years nearly everything accomplished for popular education was carried out under the auspices of the churches rather than under the direction of the state. Until 1825, the state had done next to nothing even in the development of its common schools. In the great State of Pennsylvania, the system had no existence until the year 1835. Even to-day, among the four hundred and fifty institutions of higher education in the various States, nearly all owe their foundation to the energy and sacrifice of Christian men and women. The total gifts of the churches to the cause of education, still existent in plant, in grounds and buildings, or in the form of endowment funds, reach the enormous aggregate of nearly $350,000,000, while the total of gifts to institutions of learning, largely from Christian sources, aggregate nearly $10,000,000 per year.

METHODIST EPISCOPAL HOSPITAL, PHILADELPHIA.

The religious activity of the century is further manifested in the enormous sums raised and expended for purposes of charity, reform, and general philanthropy. It would require an octavo volume of four hundred pages to catalogue the various benevolent and charitable organizations in the city of New York alone. Add to that volume the hundreds more which would be required to enumerate the additional thousands to be found in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston,—in fact in every city, town, and hamlet from the Atlantic to the Pacific, nine tenths of which are distinctively Christian,—and you have a faint idea, at least, of the vastness of the spiritual forces at work in these closing years of the century for the amelioration of human ill, the dispelling of moral and spiritual darkness, and the ushering in of the era of peace and good will, for the coming of which the church has so ceaselessly prayed. What these philanthropies are we cannot in detail enumerate. Classified, they are for the poor, for the laboring classes, for the sick, for fallen women, for free schools, for the aged, for the blind, the deaf, the insane, the impotent, the degraded, the outcast, for sailors, for the protection of animals, for city evangelization, for home missions, for foreign missions, for religious publications, for the publishing of the Holy Scriptures, for peace, for Young Men’s Associations, Young Women’s Associations, for every cause that appeals to the sentiment of brotherhood so characteristic of the age. In number they are legion. In origin, three fourths are the outgrowth of that spirit of Christian love without which they could not have been originated, and by which they are maintained and perpetuated. Those who assert that within this century Christianity has done more for humanity than in all the centuries preceding are doubtless correct. It has made men kind, made them humane. It has penetrated prisons, and with beneficent change. It has lifted the prisoner from damp and dreary dungeons into commodious structures, the pride of city and State. So far, indeed, have the reforms inspired by the gospel been carried, that men are beginning to inquire whether the limit has not been reached beyond which it may be dangerous to go.

Such are the general facts of the religious progress of a century in the United States. Reviewing them, we can easily discern the vast and commanding influence of religion—the Christian religion—upon the character and fortunes of our people. Among the forces working for the upbuilding of the Republic, religion stands preëminent, the most powerful, the most pervasive, the most irresistible of them all. A free church in a free state, all its edifices have been built by private contribution, all its magnificent benefactions sustained by voluntary offerings, induced in every instance by the principle of Christian love. A corporation, it holds its vast properties for the common good of all. A relief society, the scope of its sympathies is as wide as the wants of man. A university, it does more for the education of the masses than the public school system itself. An employer of labor, it utilizes the brains and energies of the most highly educated body of men to be found in the Republic’s broad domain. An organized beneficence, it outwatches Argus with his hundred eyes, outworks Briareus with his hundred arms. An asylum, it gathers within its protecting arms the halt, the maimed, the wounded of life’s great battle, comforting them in trouble, sustaining them in adversity, while ceaselessly pointing them to Him “who taketh away the sins of the world.” “Every corner-stone it lays,” as one has said, “it lays for humanity; every temple it opens, it opens for the world; every altar it establishes, it establishes for the salvation of men. Its spires are fingers pointing heavenward; its ministers are messengers of good tidings; its ambassadors, ambassadors of hope; its angels, angels of mercy.” Under all our institutions rest the Bible and the school-house,—Christianity and Education. Without them, the Republic is impossible; with them, we have Republican America for a thousand years.