ces, both material and personal, among the Catholics,
were attended with compensating drawbacks. With these advantages they
could not have the immense advantage of the popular initiative. In
Protestantism the people were the church, and the minister was chief
among the people only by virtue of being servant of all; the people were
incited to take up the work for their own and carry it on at their best
discretion; and they were free to make wasteful and disastrous blunders
and learn therefrom by experience. With far greater expenditure of
funds, they make no comparison with their brethren of the Roman
obedience in stately and sumptuous buildings at great centers of
commerce and travel. But they have covered the face of the land with
country meeting-houses, twice as many as there was any worthy use for,
in which faithful service is rendered to subdivided congregations by
underpaid ministers, enough in number, if they were wisely distributed,
for the evangelization of the whole continent; and each country
meeting-house is a mission station, and its congregation, men, women,
and children, are missionaries. Thus it has come about, in the language
of the earnest Catholic from the once Catholic city of New Orleans, that
"the nation, the government, the whole people, remain solidly
Protestant."[331:1] Great territories originally discovered by Catholic
explorers and planted in the name of the church by Catholic missionaries
and colonists, and more lately occupied by Catholic immigrants in what
seemed overwhelming numbers, are now the seat of free and powerful
commonwealths in which the Catholic Church is only one of the most
powerful and beneficent of the Christian sects, while the institutions
and influences which characterize their society are predominantly
Protestant.

In the westward propagation of Protestantism, as well as of Catholicism,
the distinctive attributes of the several sects or orders is strikingly
illustrated.

Foremost in the pioneer work of the church are easily to be recognized
the Methodists and the Baptists, one the most solidly organized of the
Protestant sects, the other the most uncompact and individualist; the
first by virtue of the supple military organization of its great corps
of itinerants, the other by the simplicity and popular apprehensibleness
of its distinctive tenets and arguments and the aggressive ardor with
which it inspires all its converts, and both by their facility in
recruiting thei