This missionary work, coming at the critical time, needs to be extended and dignified. It should be so enlarged that it would be possible to reach in some way the great mass of the newcomers, where now it touches comparatively few. There should be a great interdenominational headquarters building, thoroughly equipped for every kind of helpful service. A large force of trained workers of different nationalities should be employed, so that all kinds of needs might be met. It is entirely possible to establish a center that would powerfully impress the immigrants with the worth and importance of the Christian religion. But no small affair will do. Our great denominations have the money in plenty, and certainly have the talent to organize such a work as the world has never yet seen. And what a chance for personal service such an institution would afford. This would be a living object lesson of Christianity helping the world, that might fitly stand beside the statue of "Liberty enlightening the world."
III. Protestantism and the Alien
Present Work for the Foreigners
How are the evangelical denominations meeting their imperative obligation to evangelize the multitudes brought to their very doors? When the immigrant has passed through the gates, what attention is paid to him? Take it in the centers of population, where the mass of the immigrants go, and the showing is not very imposing as yet.
Abandoned Fields
The truth is that as the foreigners have moved into down-town New York the old-time Protestant churches have moved out, in great measure abandoning the field, on the assumption that there was no constituency to maintain an American church. It did not seem to dawn upon the rich churches which moved up town that the new population needed evangelization and could be evangelized. The result is that the immigrant accustomed to imposing churches and splendid architecture and impressive ritual, sees little to impress him with the existence of Protestant Christianity. Go through that teeming East Side in New York, and here and there you will find a mission supported in desultory fashion by some church or city mission society or mission board, and in quarters conducive to anything but worship or respect. There is nothing to make the new arrival feel the presence and power of the religious faith that created this free Republic and still predominates in its best life. So it is wherever you go. The home mission work is in its beginnings, and these are manifestly feeble and inadequate.
An Example
The Roman Catholics teach us some practical lessons. They build large and impressive churches for the immigrants. They abandon no fields, and immediately occupy those left by Protestants. They expend money where it will go furthest. The Protestants of New York should have been far-sighted enough to plant strong evangelistic and philanthropic institutions in the fields from which they withdrew their churches. Valuable ground has been lost for want of this missionary insight and impulse.
Need of an Awakening
The conditions in New York are symptomatic of those obtaining generally, in country as well as city. The Protestant churches, not recognizing the supreme home mission opportunity to Christianize the immigrants, have in many cases become weak where a zealous evangelism would have kept them strong. Too many of the American Churches have been satisfied with their own prosperity and unmindful of the growing need of the gospel all around them. As a missionary worker says:[93] "There are plenty of Christians who believe that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation in a vague and general way; but there are not enough people who clearly believe that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to the Italian working on the railroad, or the Hungarian in the shops, or the German on the farm. Too many of us have no faith at all in foreign missions at home."