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 coöperation of a multitude of individuals each intent with singleness of vision on his own individual ends. It is by such unconscious coöperation 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: