A History of American Christianity

L >> Leonard Woolsey Bacon >> A History of American Christianity

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One disturbing element by which the Roman Catholic Church in some
European countries has been sorely vexed makes no considerable figure in
the corresponding history in America. There has never been here any
"Liberal Catholic" party. The fact stands in analogy with many like
facts. Visitors to America from the established churches of England or
Scotland or Germany have often been surprised to find the temper of the
old-country church so much broader and less rigid than that of the
daughter church in the new and free republic. The reason is less
recondite than might be supposed. In the old countries there are
retained in connection with the state-church, by constraint of law or of
powerful social or family influences, many whose adhesion to its
distinctive tenets and rules is slight and superficial. It is out of
such material that the liberal church party grows. In the migration it
is not that the liberal churchman becomes more strict, but that, being
released from outside pressure, he becomes less of a churchman. He
easily draws off from his hereditary communion and joins himself to some
other, or to none at all. This process of evaporation leaves behind it a
strong residuum in which all characteristic elements are held as in a
saturated solution.

A further security of the American Catholic Church against the growth of
any "Liberal Catholic" party like those of continental Europe is the
absolutist organization of the hierarchy under the personal government
of the pope. In these last few centuries great progress has been made by
the Roman see in extinguishing the ancient traditions of local or
national independence in the election of bishops. Nevertheless in
Catholic Europe important relics of this independence give an effective
check to the absolute power of Rome. In America no trace of this
historic independence has ever existed. The power of appointing and
removing bishops is held absolutely and exclusively by the pope and
exercised through the Congregation of the Propaganda. The power of
ordaining and assigning priests is held by the bishop, who also holds or
controls the title to the church property in his diocese. The security
against partisan division within the church is as complete as it can be
made without gravely increasing the risks of alienating additional
multitudes from the fellowship of the church.[312:1]

* * * * *

During the whole of this dreary decade there were "fightings without" as
well as within for the Catholic Church in the United States. Its great
and sudden growth solely by immigration had made it distinctively a
church of foreigners, and chiefly of Irishmen. The conditions were
favorable for the development of a race prejudice aggravated by a
religious antipathy. It was a good time for the impostor, the fanatic,
and the demagogue to get in their work. In Boston, in 1834, the report
that a woman was detained against her will in the Ursuline convent at
Charlestown, near Boston, led to the burning of the building by a
drunken mob. The Titus Oates of the American no-popery panic, in 1836,
was an infamous woman named Maria Monk, whose monstrous stories of
secret horrors perpetrated in a convent in Montreal, in which she
claimed to have lived as a nun, were published by a respectable house
and had immense currency. A New York pastor of good standing, Dr.
Brownlee, made himself sponsor for her character and her stories; and
when these had been thoroughly exposed, by Protestant ministers and
laymen, for the shameless frauds that they were, there were plenty of
zealots to sustain her still. A "Protestant Society" was organized in
New York, and solicited the contributions of the benevolent and pious to
promote the dissemination of raw-head-and-bloody-bones literature on the
horrors of popery. The enterprise met with reprobation from sober-minded
Protestants, but it was not without its influence for mischief. The
presence of a great foreign vote, easily manipulated and cast in block,
was proving a copious source of political corruption. Large concessions
of privilege or of public property to Catholic institutions were
reasonably suspected to have been made in consideration of clerical
services in partisan politics.[313:1] The conditions provoked, we might
say necessitated, a political reform movement, which took the name and
character of "Native American." In Philadelphia, a city notorious at
that time for misgovernment and turbulence, an orderly "American"
meeting was attacked and broken up by an Irish mob. One act of violence
led to another, the excitement increasing from day to day; deadly shots
were exchanged in the streets, houses from which balls had been fired
into the crowd were set in flames, which spread to other houses,
churches were burned, and the whole city dominated by mobs that were
finally suppressed by the State militia. It was an appropriate climax
to the ten years of ecclesiastical and social turmoil.[314:1]

FOOTNOTES:

[296:1] Johnson, "The Southern Presbyterians," p. 359.

[297:1] For the close historical parallel to the exscinding acts of 1837
see page 167, above. A later parallel, it is claimed, is found in the
"virtually exscinding act" of the General Assembly of 1861, which was
the occasion of the secession of the Southern Presbyterians. The
historian of the Southern Presbyterians, who remarks with entire
complacency that the "victory" of 1837 was won "only by virtue of an
almost solid South," seems quite unconscious that this kind of victory
could have any force as a precedent or as an estoppel (Johnson, "The
Southern Presbyterians," pp. 335, 359). But it is natural, no doubt,
that exscinding acts should look different when examined from the muzzle
instead of from the breech.

[304:1] Tiffany, chap. xv.

[305:1] The intense antagonism of the New England Congregationalists to
Jefferson and his party as representing French infidelity and Jacobinism
admits of many striking illustrations. The sermon of Nathanael Emmons on
"Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin" is characterized by
Professor Park as "a curiosity in politico-homiletical literature." At
this distance it is not difficult to see that the course of this clergy
was far more honorable to its boldness and independence than to its
discretion and sense of fitness. Both its virtues and its faults had a
tendency to strengthen an opposing party.

[306:1] Hobart's sermon at the consecration of Right Rev. H. U.
Onderdonk, Philadelphia, 1827.

[312:1] For a fuller account of the dissensions in the Catholic Church,
consult, by index, Bishop O'Gorman's "History." On the modern
organization of the episcopate in complete dependence on the Holy See,
consult the learned article on "Episcopal Elections," by Dr. Peries, of
the Catholic University at Washington, in the "American Catholic
Quarterly Review" for January, 1896; also the remarks of Archbishop
Kenrick, of St. Louis, in his "_Concio in Concilio Vaticano Habenda at
non Habita_," in "An Inside View of the Vatican Council," by L. W.
Bacon, pp. 61, 121.

[313:1] A satirical view of these concessions, in the vast dimensions
which they had reached twenty-five years later in the city and county of
New York, was published in two articles, "Our Established Church," and
"The Unestablished Church," in "Putnam's Magazine" for July and
December, 1869. The articles were reissued in a pamphlet, "with an
explanatory and exculpatory preface, and sundry notices of the
contemporary press."

[314:1] A studiously careful account of the Philadelphia riots of 1844
is given in the "New Englander," vol. ii. (1844), pp. 470, 624.

This account of the schisms of the period is of course not complete. The
American Missionary Association, since distinguished for successful
labors chiefly among the freedmen, grew out of dissatisfaction felt by
men of advanced antislavery views with the position of the "American
Board" and the American Home Missionary Society on the slavery question.
The organization of it was matured in 1846. A very fruitful schism in
its results was that which, in 1835, planted a cutting from Lane
Seminary at Cincinnati, in the virgin soil at Oberlin, Ohio. The
beginning thus made with a class in theology has grown into a noble and
widely beneficent institution, the influence of which has extended to
the ends of the land and of the world.

The division of the Society of Friends into the two societies known as
Hicksite and Orthodox is of earlier date--1827-28.

No attempt is made in this volume to chronicle the interminable
splittings and reunitings of the Presbyterian sects of Scottish
extraction. A curious diagram, on page 146 of volume xi. of the present
series, illustrates the sort of task which such a chronicle involves.

An illustration of the way in which the extreme defenders of slavery and
the extreme abolitionists sustained each other in illogical statements
(see above, pp. 301, 302) is found in Dr. Thornwell's claim (identical
with Mr. Garrison's) that if slavery is wrong, then all slave-holders
ought to be excommunicated (vol. vi., p. 157, note). Dr. Thornwell may
not have been the "mental and moral giant" that he appears to his
admirers (see Professor Johnson in vol. xi., p. 355), but he was an
intelligent and able man, quite too clear-headed to be imposed upon by a
palpable "ambiguous middle," except for his excitement in the heat of a
desperate controversy with the moral sense of all Christendom.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE GREAT IMMIGRATION.

At the taking of the first census of the United States, in 1790, the
country contained a population of about four millions in its territory
of less than one million of square miles.

Sixty years later, at the census of 1850, it contained a population of
more than twenty-three millions in its territory of about three millions
of square miles.

The vast expansion of territory to more than threefold the great
original domain of the United States had been made by honorable purchase
or less honorable conquest. It had not added largely to the population
of the nation; the new acquisitions were mainly of unoccupied land. The
increase of the population, down to about 1845, was chiefly the natural
increase of a hardy and prolific stock under conditions in the highest
degree favorable to such increase. Up to the year 1820 the recent
immigration had been inconsiderable. In the ten years 1820-29 the annual
arrival of immigrants was nine thousand. In the next decade, 1830-39,
the annual arrival was nearly thirty-five thousand, or a hundred a day.
For forty years the total immigration from all quarters was much less
than a half-million. In the course of the next three decades, from 1840
to 1869, there arrived in the United States from the various countries
of Europe five and a half millions of people. It was more than the
entire population of the country at the time of the first census;--

A multitude like which the populous North
Poured never from her frozen loins to pass
Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous sons
Came like a deluge on the South and spread
Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.

Under the pressure of a less copious flood of incursion the greatest
empire in all history, strongest in arts and polity as well as arms, had
perished utterly. If Rome, with her population of one hundred and twenty
millions, her genius for war and government, and her long-compacted
civilization, succumbed under a less sudden rush of invasion, what hope
was there for the young American Republic, with its scanty population
and its new and untried institutions?[316:1]

An impressive providential combination of causes determined this great
historic movement of population at this time. It was effected by
attractions in front of the emigrant, reinforced by impulses from
behind. The conclusion of the peace of 1815 was followed by the
beginning of an era of great public works, one of the first of which was
the digging of the Erie Canal. This sort of enterprise makes an
immediate demand for large forces of unskilled laborers; and in both
hemispheres it has been observed to occasion movements of population out
of Catholic countries into Protestant countries. The westward current
of the indigenous population created a vacuum in the seaboard States,
and a demand for labor that was soon felt in the labor-markets of the
Old World. A liberal homestead policy on the part of the national
government, and naturalization laws that were more than liberal,
agencies for the encouragement of settlers organized by individual
States and by railroad corporations and other great landed proprietors,
and the eager competition of steamship companies drumming for steerage
passengers in all parts of Europe--all these cooeperated with the growing
facility and cheapness of steam transportation to swell the current of
migration. The discovery of gold in California quickened the flow of it.

As if it had been the divine purpose not only to draw forth, but to
drive forth, the populations of the Old World to make their homes in the
New, there was added to all these causes conducive to migration the
Irish famine of 1846-47, and the futile revolutions of 1848, with the
tyrannical reactions which followed them. But the great stimulus to
migration was the success and prosperity that attended it. It was
"success that succeeded." The great emigration agent was the letter
written to his old home by the new settler, in multitudes of cases
inclosing funds to pay the passage of friends whom he had left behind
him.

The great immigration that began about 1845 is distinguished from some
of the early colonizations in that it was in no sense a religious
movement. Very grave religious results were to issue from it; but they
were to be achieved through the unconscious cooeperation of a multitude
of individuals each intent with singleness of vision on his own
individual ends. It is by such unconscious cooeperation that the
directing mind and the overruling hand of God in history are most
signally illustrated.

In the first rush of this increased immigration by far the greatest
contributor of new population was Ireland. It not only surpassed any
other country in the number of its immigrants, but in the height of the
Irish exodus, in the decade 1840-50, it nearly equaled all other
countries of the world together. The incoming Irish millions were almost
solidly Roman Catholic. The measures taken by the British government for
many generations to attach the Irish people to the crown and convert
them to the English standard of Protestantism had had the result of
discharging upon our shores a people distinguished above all Christendom
besides for its ardent and unreserved devotion to the Roman Church, and
hardly less distinguished for its hatred to England.

After the first flood-tide the relative number of the Irish immigrants
began to decrease, and has kept on decreasing until now. Since the Civil
War the chief source of immigration has been Germany; and its
contributions to our population have greatly aggrandized the Lutheran
denomination, once so inconsiderable in numbers, until in many western
cities it is the foremost of the Protestant communions, and in Chicago
outnumbers the communicants of the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, and
the Methodist churches combined.[318:1] The German immigration has
contributed its share, and probably more than its share, to our
non-religious and churchless population. Withal, in a proportion which
it is not easy to ascertain with precision, it added multitudinous
thousands to the sudden and enormous growth of the Roman Catholic
Church. But there is an instructive contrast between the German
immigrations, whether Catholic or Protestant, and the Irish immigration.
The Catholicism of the Irish, held from generation to generation in the
face of partisan and sometimes cruelly persecuting laws, was held with
the ardor, if not of personal conviction, at least of strong hereditary
animosity. To the Germans, their religious sect, whether Catholic,
Lutheran, or Reformed, is determined for them by political arrangement,
under the principle _cujus regio, ejus religio_. It is matter of course
that tenets thus acquired should be held by a tenure so far removed from
fanaticism as to seem to more zealous souls much like lukewarmness.
Accustomed to have the cost of religious institutions provided for in
the budget of public expenses, the wards of the Old World state-churches
find themselves here in strange surroundings, untrained in habits of
self-denial for religious objects. The danger is a grave and real one
that before they become acclimated to the new conditions a large
percentage will be lost, not only from their hereditary communion, but
from all Christian fellowship, and lapse into simple indifferentism and
godlessness. They have much to learn and something to teach. The
indigenous American churches are not likely to be docile learners at the
feet of alien teachers; but it would seem like the slighting of a
providential opportunity if the older sects should fail to recognize
that one of the greatest and by far the most rapidly growing of the
Protestant churches of America, the Lutheran, growing now with new
increments not only from the German, but also from the Scandinavian
nations, is among us in such force to teach us somewhat by its example
of the equable, systematic, and methodical ways of a state-church, as
well as to learn something from the irregular fervor of that revivalism
which its neighbors on every hand have inherited from the Great
Awakening. It would be the very extravagance of national self-conceit if
the older American churches should become possessed of the idea that
four millions of German Christians and one million of Scandinavians,
arriving here from 1860 to 1890, with their characteristic methods in
theology and usages of worship and habits of church organization and
administration, were here, in the providence of God, only to be
assimilated and not at all to assimilate.

* * * * *

The vast growth of the Roman Catholic Church in America could not but
fill its clergy and adherents with wonder and honest pride. But it was
an occasion of immense labors and not a little anxiety. One effect of
the enormous immigration was inevitably to impose upon this church,
according to the popular apprehension, the character of a foreign
association, and, in the earlier periods of the influx, of an Irish
association. It was in like manner inevitable, from the fact that the
immigrant class are preponderantly poor and of low social rank, that it
should for two or three generations be looked upon as a church for the
illiterate and unskilled laboring class. An incident of the excessive
torrent rush of the immigration was that the Catholic Church became to a
disproportionate extent an urban institution, making no adequate
provision for the dispersed in agricultural regions.

Against these and other like disadvantages the hierarchy of the Catholic
Church have struggled heroically, with some measure of success. The
steadily rising character of the imported population in its successive
generations has aided them. If in the first generations the churches
were congregations of immigrants served by an imported clergy, the most
strenuous exertions were made for the founding of institutions that
should secure to future congregations born upon the soil the services of
an American-trained priesthood. One serious hindrance to the noble
advances that have nevertheless been made in this direction has been the
fanatical opposition levied against even the most beneficent enterprises
of the church by a bigoted Native-Americanism. It is not a hopeful
method of conciliating and naturalizing a foreign element in the
community to treat them with suspicion and hostility as alien enemies.
The shameful persecution which the mob was for a brief time permitted to
inflict on Catholic churches and schools and convents had for its chief
effect to confirm the foreigner in his adherence to his church and his
antipathy to Protestantism, and to provoke a twofold ferocity in return.
At a time when there was reason to apprehend a Know-nothing riot in New
York, in 1844, a plan was concerted and organized by "a large Irish
society with divisions throughout the city," by which, "in case a single
church was attacked, buildings should be fired in all quarters and the
great city should be involved in a general conflagration."[321:1]

The utmost that could have been hoped for by the devoted but inadequate
body of the Roman Catholic clergy in America, overwhelmed by an influx
of their people coming in upon them in increasing volume, numbering
millions per annum, was that they might be able to hold their own. But
this hope was very far from being attained. How great have been the
losses to the Roman communion through the transplantation of its members
across the sea is a question to which the most widely varying answers
have been given, and on which statistical exactness seems unattainable.
The various estimates, agreeing in nothing else, agree in representing
them as enormously great.[321:2] All good men will also agree that in
so far as these losses represent mere lapses into unbelief and
irreligion they are to be deplored. Happily there is good evidence of a
large salvage, gathered into other churches, from what so easily becomes
a shipwreck of faith with total loss.

It might seem surprising, in view of the many and diverse resources of
attractive influence which the Roman Church has at its command, that its
losses have not been to some larger extent compensated by conversions
from other sects. Instances of such conversion are by no means wanting;
but so far as a popular current toward Catholicism is concerned, the
attractions in that direction are outweighed by the disadvantages
already referred to. It has not been altogether a detriment to the
Catholic Church in America that the social status and personal
composition of its congregations, in its earlier years, have been such
that the transition into it from any of the Protestant churches could be
made only at the cost of a painful self-denial. The number of accessions
to it has been thereby lessened, but (leaving out the case of the
transition of politicians from considerations of expediency) the quality
of them has been severely sifted. Incomparably the most valuable
acquisition which the American Catholic Church has received has been the
company of devoted and gifted young men, deeply imbued with the
principles and sentiments of the High-church party in the Episcopal
Church, who have felt constrained in conscience and in logic to take the
step, which seems so short, from the highest level in the Anglican
Church into the Roman, and who, organized into the Order of the Paulist
Fathers, have exemplified in the Roman Church so many of the highest
qualities of Protestant preaching.

He is a bold man who will undertake to predict in detail the future of
the Roman Church in America. To say that it will be modified by its
surroundings is only to say what is true of it in all countries. To say
that it will be modified for the better is to say what is true of it in
all Protestant countries. Nowhere is the Roman Church so pure from
scandal and so effective for good as where it is closely surrounded and
jealously scrutinized by bodies of its fellow-Christians whom it is
permitted to recognize only as heretics. But when the influence of
surrounding heresy is seen to be an indispensable blessing to the
church, the heretic himself comes to be looked upon with a mitigated
horror. Not with the sacrifice of any principle, but through the
application of some of those provisions by which the Latin theology is
able to meet exigencies like this,--the allowance in favor of
"invincible ignorance" and prejudice, the distinction between the body
and "the soul of the church,"--the Roman Catholic, recognizing the
spirit of Christ in his Protestant fellow-Christian, is able to hold him
in spiritual if not formal communion, so that the Catholic Church may
prove itself not dissevered from the Church Catholic. In the common
duties of citizenship and of humanity, in the promotion of the interests
of morality, even in those religious matters that are of common concern
to all honest disciples of Jesus Christ, he is at one with his heretic
brethren. Without the change of a single item either of doctrine or of
discipline, the attitude and temper of the church, as compared with the
church of Spain or Italy or Mexico, is revolutionized. The change must
needs draw with it other changes, which may not come without some jar
and conflict between progressive and conservative, but which
nevertheless needs must come. Out of many indications of the spirit of
fellowship with all Christians now exemplified among American Catholics,
I quote one of the most recent and authoritative from an address of
Archbishop Ryan at the Catholic Congress in Chicago in 1893. Speaking on
Christian union, he said:

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