the gentle assurances offered by the
"apostolic succession" theory of a superior authority and prerogative
with which they had become invested. The numerous accessions to the
Episcopal Church from other communions have, of course, been in large
part reinforcements to the already dominant party.

In the Roman Catholic Church of the United States, during this stormy
period, there was by no means a perfect calm. The ineradicable feeling
of the American citizen--however recent his naturalization--that he has
a right to do what he will with his own, had kept asserting itself in
that plausible but untenable claim of the laity to manage the church
property acquired by their own contributions, which is known to Catholic
writers as "trusteeism." Through the whole breadth of the country, from
Buffalo to New Orleans, sharp conflicts over this question between
clergy and laity had continued to vex the peace of the church, and the
victory of the clergy had not been unvarying and complete. When, in
1837, Bishop John Hughes took the reins of spiritual power in New York,
he resolved to try conclusions with the trustees who attempted to
overrule his authority in his own cathedral. Sharply threatening to put
the church under interdict, if necessary, he brought the recalcitrants
to terms at last by a less formidable process. He appealed to the
congregation to withhold all further contributions from the trustees.
The appeal, for conscience' sake, to refrain from giving has always a
double hope of success. And the bishop succeeded in ousting the
trustees, at the serious risk of teaching the people a trick which has
since been found equally effective when applied on the opposite side of
a dispute between clergyman and congregation. In Philadelphia the long
struggle was not ended without the actual interdicting of the cathedral
of St. Mary's, April, 1831. In Buffalo, so late as 1847, even this
extreme measure, applied to the largest congregation in the newly
erected diocese, did not at once enforce submission.

The conflict with trusteeism was only one out of many conflicts which
gave abundant exercise to the administrative abilities of the American
bishops. The mutual jealousies of the various nationalities and races
among the laity, and of the various sects of the regular clergy,
menaced, and have not wholly ceased to menace, the harmony of the
church, if not its unity.

One disturbing element by which the Roman Catholic Church in some