s_

[Sidenote: How to Save Our American Churches]

[Sidenote: Missionary Effort the Solution]

Missionaries have been surprised at the eagerness with which they were
received by the Italians, Bohemians, Poles, Slovaks, and Lithuanians,
and others commonly regarded as most hopeless. The Bohemians have a
large number of freethinkers--over 300 societies of them--who have
sought to draw their people away from Christianity or any form of
religion; but they also have a large number of earnest and devoted
Christian converts, who know the power of the gospel to save, and are
preaching and teaching it. In Pennsylvania, among the Slav peoples,
simple-hearted native workers who have found the way of life are making
that way known to others, and local churches in many places are becoming
revived through their active work for these foreigners. Many churches
now extinct would be alive if they had seen their opportunity. If those
churches that have lost most of their old-time membership could be
filled with missionary zeal, and be sustained as evangelistic centers,
the church life of the mining regions would become a different thing
once more. The only way to save these American churches is for them to
save the immigrants. The same thing is true in all country sections
where the foreigners have become numerous. The need everywhere is for
money to plant and equip thoroughly, and maintain efficiently, these
evangelizing churches in every community. These institutions must be
more than meeting-houses, open a few times a week.

[Sidenote: A Great Mission Enterprise]

The institutional church always open, with something to meet every
legitimate need of old and young, so that the evangelical center shall
be the center of community life, can alone meet the requirement. A great
force of workers must be raised up, and this means training schools. No
more important educational work can be done in our country in the
present emergency. These schools might be interdenominational, with
special classes where required for the specific denominational training,
and thus a united Protestantism could be rallied to their support, and
make them of size sufficient to impress all with the real consequence of
the work.

[Sidenote: Church Federation for Service]

In this work the interdenominational comity and cooeperation represented
in the federation of evangelical churches would secure the best covering
of the whole field, in the true fraternal and