a sect, or denomination, having no restricted local
habitation but winning adherents here and there in various communes,
provinces, or nations, and having, therefore, a membership either
locally concentrated or more or less widely dispersed; either regularly
or most irregularly distributed. The culture group of the other type, or
kind, is a self-sufficing community. It may be a village, a colony, a
state, or a nation. Its membership is concentrated, its habitat is
defined.

To a very great extent, as everybody knows, American colonization
proceeded through the formation of religious communities. Such were the
Pilgrim and the Puritan commonwealths. Such were the Quaker groups of
Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Such were the localized societies of the
Dunkards, the Moravians, and the Mennonites.

As late as the middle of the nineteenth century the American people
witnessed the birth and growth of one of the most remarkable religious
communities known in history. The Mormon community of Utah, which,
originating in 1830 as a band of relatives and acquaintances, clustered
by an idea that quickly became a dogma, had become in fifty years a
commonwealth _de facto_, defying the authority _de jure_ of the United
States.

We are not likely, however, again to witness a phenomenon of this kind
in the civilized world. Recently we have seen the rise and the
astonishingly rapid spread of another American religion, namely, the
Christian Science faith. But it has created no community group. It has
created only a dispersed sect. It is obvious to any intelligent
observer, however untrained in sociological discrimination he may be,
that the forces of Protestantism, still dividing and differentiating as
they are, no longer to any great extent create new self-sufficing
communities. They create only associations of irregular geographical
dispersion, of more or less unstable or shifting membership. In a word,
the conflicting-idea forces, which in our colonial days tended to create
community groups as well as sects, tend now to create sectarian bodies
only--mere denominational or partisan associations.

A similar contrast between an earlier and a later stage of culture
group-making may be observed if we go back to centuries before the
Protestant Reformation, there to survey a wider field and a longer
series of historical periods.

It is a commonplace of historical knowledge that in all of the earliest
civilizations there was an approximate