e
strong and healthy nursing mothers to newer churches yet.

There is an instructive contrast, not only between the working of the
voluntary system and that of the Old World establishments, but between
the methods of the Catholic Church and the Protestant no-method. Under
the control of a strong cooerdinating authority the competitions of the
various Catholic orders, however sharp, could never be allowed to run
into wasteful extravagance through cross-purposes. It is believed that
the Catholics have not erected many monuments of their own unthrift in
the shape of costly buildings begun, but left unfinished and abandoned.
A more common incident of their work has been the buying up of these
expensive failures, at a large reduction from their cost, and turning
them to useful service. And yet the principle of sectarian competition
is both recognized and utilized in the Roman system. The various
clerical sects, with their characteristic names, costumes, methods, and
doctrinal differences, have their recognized aptitudes for various sorts
of work, with which their names are strongly associated: the Dominican
for pulpit eloquence, the Capuchin for rough-and-ready street-preaching,
the Benedictine for literary work, the Sulpitian for the training of
priests, and the ubiquitous Jesuit for shifty general utility with a
specialty of school-keeping. These and a multitude of other orders, male
and female, have been effectively and usefully employed in the arduous
labor _Romanam condere gentem_. But it would seem that the superior
stability of the present enterprise of planting Catholicism in the
domain of the United States, as compared with former expensive failures,
was due in some part to the larger employment of a diocesan parish
clergy instead of a disproportionate reliance on the "regulars."

On the whole, notwithstanding its immense armies of immigrants and the
devoted labors of its priests, and notwithstanding its great expansion,
visible everywhere in conspicuous monuments of architecture, the
Catholic advance in America has not been, comparatively speaking,
successful. For one thing, the campaign was carried on too far from its
base of supplies. The subsidies from Lyons and Vienna, liberal as they
were, were no match for the home missionary zeal of the seaboard States
in following their own sons westward with church and gospel and pastor.
Even the conditions which made possible the superior management and
economy of resour