This work of the Congregationalists is entitled to mention, not as exceptional, but only as eminent among like enterprises, in which few of the leading sects have failed to be represented. Extravagant expectations were at first entertained of immediate results in bringing the long-depressed race up to the common plane of civilization. But it cannot be said that reasonable and intelligent expectations have been disappointed. Experience has taught much as to the best conduct of such missions. The gift of a fund of a million dollars by the late John F. Slater, of Norwich, has through wise management conduced to this end. It has encouraged in the foremost institutions the combination of training to skilled productive labor with education in literature and science.
The inauguration of these systems of religious education at the South was the most conspicuously important of the immediate sequels of the Civil War. But this time was a time of great expansion of the activities of the church in all directions. The influx of immigration, temporarily checked by the hard times of 1857 and by the five years of war, came in again in such floods as never before.[357:1] The foreign immigration is always attended by a westward movement of the already settled population. The field of home missions became greater and more exacting than ever. The zeal of the church, educated during the war to higher ideas of self-sacrifice, rose to the occasion. The average yearly receipts of the various Protestant home missionary societies, which in the decade 1850-59 had been $808,000, rose in the next decade to more than $2,000,000, in the next to nearly $3,000,000, and for the seven years 1881-87 to $4,000,000.[358:1]
In the perils of abounding wealth by which the church after the war was beset, it was divine fatherly kindness that opened before it new and enlarged facilities of service to the kingdom of heaven among foreign nations. From the first feeble beginnings of foreign missions from America in India and in the Sandwich Islands, they had been attended by the manifest favor of God. When the convulsion of the Civil War came on, with prostrations of business houses, and enormous burdens of public obligation, and private beneficence drawn down, as it seemed, to its "bottom dollar" for new calls of patriotism and charity, and especially when the dollar in a man's pocket shrank to a half or a third of its value in the world's currency, it seemed as if the work of foreign missions would have to be turned over to Christians in lands less burdened with accumulated disadvantages. But here again the grandeur of the burden gave an inspiration of strength to the burden-bearer. From 1840 to 1849 the average yearly receipts of the various foreign missionary societies of the Protestant churches of the country had been a little more than a half-million. In the decade 1850-59 they had risen to $850,000; for the years of distress, 1860-69, they exceeded $1,300,000; for the eleven years 1870-80 the annual receipts in this behalf were $2,200,000; and in the seven years 1881-87 they were $3,000,000.[359:1]
We have seen how, only forty years before the return of peace, in the days of a humble equality in moderate estates, ardent souls exulted together in the inauguration of the era of democracy in beneficence, when every humblest giver might, through association and organization, have part in magnificent enterprises of Christian charity such as had theretofore been possible "only to princes or to men of princely possessions."[359:2] But with the return of civil peace we began to recognize that among ourselves was growing up a class of "men of princely possessions"—a class such as the American Republic never before had known.[359:3] Among those whose fortunes were reckoned by many millions or many tens of millions were men of sordid nature, whose wealth, ignobly won, was selfishly hoarded, and to whose names, as to that of the late Jay Gould, there is attached in the mind of the people a distinct note of infamy. But this was not in general the character of the American millionaire. There were those of nobler strain who felt a responsibility commensurate with the great power conferred by great riches, and held their wealth as in trust for mankind. Through the fidelity of men of this sort it has come to pass that the era of great fortunes in America has become conspicuous in the history of the whole world as the era of magnificent donations to benevolent ends. Within a few months of each other, from the little State of Connecticut, came the fund of a million given by John F. Slater in his lifetime for the benefit of the freedmen, the gift of a like sum for the like purpose from Daniel Hand, and the legacy of a million and a half for foreign missions from Deacon Otis of New London. Great gifts like these were frequently directed to objects which could not easily have been attained by the painful process of accumulating small donations. It was a period not only of splendid gifts to existing institutions, but of foundations for new universities, libraries, hospitals, and other institutions of the highest public service, foundations without parallel in human history for large munificence. To this period belong the beginnings of the Johns Hopkins University and Hospital at Baltimore, the University of Chicago, the Clarke University at Worcester, the Vanderbilt University at Nashville, the Leland Stanford, Jr., University of California, the Peabody and Enoch Pratt Libraries at Baltimore, the Lenox Library at New York, the great endowed libraries of Chicago, the Drexel Institute at Philadelphia, and the Armour Institute at Chicago. These are some of the names that most readily occur of foundations due mainly to individual liberality, set down at the risk of omitting others with equal claim for mention. Not all of these are to be referred to a religious spirit in the founders, but none of them can fail of a Christian influence and result. They prepare a foothold for such a forward stride of Christian civilization as our continent has never before known.
The sum of these gifts of millions, added to the great aggregates of contribution to the national missionary boards and societies, falls far short of the total contributions expended in cities, towns, and villages for the building of churches and the maintenance of the countless charities that cluster around them. The era following the war was preëminently a "building era." Every one knows that religious devotion is only one of the mingled motives that work together in such an enterprise as the building of a church; but, after all deductions, the voluntary gifts of Christian people for Christ's sake in the promotion of such works, when added to the grand totals already referred to, would make an amount that would overtax the ordinary imagination to conceive.
And yet it is not certain that this period of immense gifts of money is really a period of increased liberality in the church from the time, thirty or forty years before, when a millionaire was a rarity to be pointed out on the streets, and the possession of a hundred thousand dollars gave one a place among "The Rich Men of New York." In 1850 the total wealth of the United States was reported in the census as seven billions of dollars. In 1870, after twenty years, it had more than fourfolded, rising to thirty billions. Ten years later, according to the census, it had sixfolded, rising to forty-three billions.[361:1] From the point of view of One "sitting over against the treasury" it is not likely that any subsequent period has equaled in its gifts that early day when in New England the people "were wont to build a fine church as soon as they had houses for themselves,"[361:2] and when the messengers went from cabin to cabin to gather the gifts of "the college corn."
The greatest addition to the forces of the church in the period since the war has come from deploying into the field hitherto unused resources of personal service. The methods under which the personal activity of private Christians has formerly been organized for service have increased and multiplied, and old agencies have taken on new forms.
The earliest and to this day the most extensive of the organizations for utilizing the non-professional ministry in systematic religious labors is the Sunday-school. The considerable development of this instrumentality begins to be recognized after the Second Awakening in the early years of the present century. The prevailing characteristic of the American Sunday-school as distinguished from its British congener is that it is commonly a part of the equipment of the local church for the instruction of its own children, and incidentally one of the most important resources for its attractive work toward those that are without. But it is also recognized as one of the most flexible and adaptable "arms of the service" for aggressive work, whether in great cities or on the frontier. It was about the year 1825 that this work began to be organized on a national scale. But it is since the war that it has sprung into vastly greater efficiency. The agreement upon uniform courses of biblical study, to be followed simultaneously by many millions of pupils over the entire continent, has given a unity and coherence before unknown to the Sunday-school system; and it has resulted in extraordinary enterprise and activity on the part of competent editors and publishers to provide apparatus for the thorough study of the text, which bids fair in time to take away the reproach of the term "Sunday-schoolish" as applied to superficial, ignorant, or merely sentimental expositions of the Scriptures. The work of the "Sunday-school Times," in bringing within the reach of teachers all over the land the fruits of the world's best scholarship, is a signal fact in history—the most conspicuous of a series of like facts. The tendency, slow, of course, and partial, but powerful, is toward serious, faithful study and teaching, in which "the mind of the Spirit" is sought in the sacred text, with strenuous efforts of the teachable mind, with all the aids that can be brought from whatever quarter. The Sunday-school system, coextensive with Protestant Christianity in America, and often the forerunner of church and ministry, and, to a less extent and under more scrupulous control of clergy, adopted into the Catholic Church, has become one of the distinctive features of American Christianity.
An outgrowth of the Sunday-school system, which, under the conduct of a man of genius for organization, Dr. John H. Vincent, now a bishop of the Methodist Church, has expanded to magnificent dimensions, is that which is suggested by the name "Chautauqua." Beginning in the summer of 1874 with a fortnight's meeting in a grove beside Chautauqua Lake for the study of the methods of Sunday-school teaching, it led to the questions, how to connect the Sunday-school more intimately with other departments of the church and with other agencies in society; how to control in the interest of religious culture the forces, social, commercial, industrial, and educational, which, for good or evil, are affecting the Sunday-school pupils every day of the week. Striking root at other centers of assembly, east, west, and south, and combining its summer lectures with an organized system of home studies extending through the year, subject to written examinations, "Chautauqua," by the comprehensive scope of its studies and by the great multitude of its students, is entitled to be called, in no ignoble sense of the word, a university.[363:1] A weighty and unimpeachable testimony to the power and influence of the institution has been the recent organization of a Catholic Chautauqua, under the conduct of leading scholars and ecclesiastics of the Roman Church.