in the fact, when notable gains to the Catholic
Church are distinctly traced to the reaction of honest men from these
fraudulent polemics.[327:1]

The danger to the Republic, which was thus malignantly or ignorantly
exaggerated and distorted, was nevertheless real and grave. No sincerely
earnest and religious Protestant, nor even any well-informed patriotic
citizen, with the example of French and Spanish America before his eyes,
could look with tolerance upon the prospect of a possible Catholicizing
of the new States at the West; and the sight of the incessant tide of
immigration setting westward, the reports of large funds sent hither
from abroad to aid the propagation of the Roman Church, and the accounts
of costly and imposing ecclesiastical buildings rising at the most
important centers of population, roused the Christian patriotism of the
older States to the noblest enterprises of evangelization. There was no
wasting of energy in futile disputation. In all the Protestant
communions it was felt that the work called for was a simple, peaceful,
and positive one--to plant the soil of the West, at the first occupation
of it by settlers, with Christian institutions and influences. The
immensity of the task stimulated rather than dismayed the zeal of the
various churches. The work undertaken and accomplished in the twenty
years from 1840 to 1860 in providing the newly settled regions with
churches, pastors, colleges, and theological seminaries, with
Sunday-schools, and with Bibles and other religious books, was of a
magnitude which will never be defined by statistical figures. How great
it was, and at what cost it was effected in gifts of treasure and of
heroic lives of toil and self-denial, can only be a matter of vague
wonder and thanksgiving.

The work of planting the church in the West exhibits the voluntary
system at its best--and at its worst. A task so vast and so momentous
has never been imposed on the resources of any state establishment. It
is safe to say that no established church has ever existed, however
imperially endowed, that would have been equal to the undertaking of it.
With no imposing combination of forces, and no strategic concert of
action, the work was begun spontaneously and simultaneously, like some
of the operations of nature, by a multitude of different agencies, and
went forward uninterrupted to something as nearly like completeness as
could be in a work the exigencies of which continually w