usic, this art was successfully cultivated
in the Moravian communities and missions. In past times these have had
comparatively few points of contact and influence with the rest of the
church; but when the elements of a common order of divine worship shall
by and by begin to grow into form, it is hardly possible that the
Moravian traditions will not enter into it as an important factor.

A combination of conditions which in the case of other bodies in the
church has been an effective discouragement to literary production has
applied with especial force to the Roman Catholic Church in America.
First, its energies and resources, great as they are, have been
engrossed by absolutely prodigious burdens of practical labor; and
secondly, its necessary literary material has been furnished to it from
across the sea, ready to its hand, or needing only the light labor of
translation. But these two conditions are not enough, of themselves, to
account for the very meager contribution of the Catholic Church to the
common religious and theological literature of American Christendom.
Neither is the fact explained by the general low average of culture
among the Catholic population; for literary production does not
ordinarily proceed from the man of average culture, but from men of
superior culture, such as this church possesses in no small number, and
places in positions of undisturbed "learned leisure" that would seem in
the highest degree promotive of intellectual work. But the comparative
statistics of the Catholic and the Protestant countries and universities
of Germany seem to prove conclusively that the spirit and discipline of
the Roman Church are unfavorable to literary productiveness in those
large fields of intellectual activity that are common and free alike to
the scholars of all Christendom. It remains to be seen whether the
stimulating atmosphere and the free and equal competitions of the New
World will not show their invigorating effect in the larger activity of
Catholic scholars, and their liberation from within the narrow lines of
polemic and defensive literature. The republic of Christian letters has
already shown itself prompt to welcome accessions from this quarter. The
signs are favorable. Notwithstanding severe criticisms of their methods
proceeding from the Catholic press, or rather in consequence of such
criticisms, the Catholic institutions of higher learning are rising in
character and in public respect; and the