t also from the Scandinavian
nations, is among us in such force to teach us somewhat by its example
of the equable, systematic, and methodical ways of a state-church, as
well as to learn something from the irregular fervor of that revivalism
which its neighbors on every hand have inherited from the Great
Awakening. It would be the very extravagance of national self-conceit if
the older American churches should become possessed of the idea that
four millions of German Christians and one million of Scandinavians,
arriving here from 1860 to 1890, with their characteristic methods in
theology and usages of worship and habits of church organization and
administration, were here, in the providence of God, only to be
assimilated and not at all to assimilate.

* * * * *

The vast growth of the Roman Catholic Church in America could not but
fill its clergy and adherents with wonder and honest pride. But it was
an occasion of immense labors and not a little anxiety. One effect of
the enormous immigration was inevitably to impose upon this church,
according to the popular apprehension, the character of a foreign
association, and, in the earlier periods of the influx, of an Irish
association. It was in like manner inevitable, from the fact that the
immigrant class are preponderantly poor and of low social rank, that it
should for two or three generations be looked upon as a church for the
illiterate and unskilled laboring class. An incident of the excessive
torrent rush of the immigration was that the Catholic Church became to a
disproportionate extent an urban institution, making no adequate
provision for the dispersed in agricultural regions.

Against these and other like disadvantages the hierarchy of the Catholic
Church have struggled heroically, with some measure of success. The
steadily rising character of the imported population in its successive
generations has aided them. If in the first generations the churches
were congregations of immigrants served by an imported clergy, the most
strenuous exertions were made for the founding of institutions that
should secure to future congregations born upon the soil the services of
an American-trained priesthood. One serious hindrance to the noble
advances that have nevertheless been made in this direction has been the
fanatical opposition levied against even the most beneficent enterprises
of the church by a bigoted Native-Americanism. It is not a ho