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, bu