The tracts published at the Spiritual Clarion office, Auburn, New York, put forward Spiritualism as a religion which is to stand toward existing churches as did Christianity toward Judaism, and announce a new dispensation to the peoples of the earth “who have sown their wild oats in Christianity,” but they spell supersede with a “c.”
This strange religion has long since left behind the rappings and table-turnings in which it took its birth. The secret of its success is that it supplies to every man the satisfaction of the universal craving for the supernatural, in any form in which he will receive it. The Spiritualists claim two millions of active believers and five million “favorers” in America.
The presence of a large German population is thought by some to have an important bearing on the religious future of America, but the Germans have hitherto kept themselves apart from the intellectual progress of the nation. They, as a rule, withdraw from towns, and, retaining their language and supporting local papers of their own, live out of the world of American literature and politics; taking, however, at rare intervals, a patriotic part in national affairs, as was notably the case at the time of the late rebellion. Living thus by themselves, they have even less influence upon American religious thought than have the Irish, who, speaking the English tongue, and dwelling almost exclusively in towns, are brought more into contact with the daily life of the republic. The Germans in America are in the main pure materialists under a certain show of deism, but hitherto there has been no alliance between them and the powerful Chicago Radical Unitarians, difference of language having thus far proved a bar to the formation of a league which would otherwise have been inevitable.
On the whole, it would seem that for the moment religious prospects are not bright; the tendency is rather toward intense and unhealthily-developed feeling in the few, and subscription to some one of the Episcopalian churches—Catholic, Anglican, or Methodist—among the many, coupled with real indifference. Neither the tendency to unity of creeds nor that toward infinite multiplication of beliefs has yet made that progress which abstract speculation would have led us to expect, but so far as we can judge from the few facts before us, there is much likelihood that multiplication will in the future prove too strong for unity.
After all there is not in America a greater wonder than the Englishman himself, for it is to this continent that you must come to find him in full possession of his powers. Two hundred and fifty millions of people speak or are ruled by those who speak the English tongue, and inhabit a third of the habitable globe; but, at the present rate of increase, in sixty years there will be two hundred and fifty millions of Englishmen dwelling in the United States alone. America has somewhat grown since the time when it was gravely proposed to call her Alleghania, after a chain of mountains which, looking from this western side, may be said to skirt her eastern border, and the loftiest peaks of which are but half the height of the very passes of the Rocky Mountains.
America is becoming not English merely, but world-embracing in the variety of its type; and, as the English element has given language and history to that land, America offers the English race the moral directorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue. Through America, England is speaking to the world.