Candidates for membership are accepted after a six months’ probation,
popular prayer-meetings are held at any chosen spot, the lay preachers
are permitted to deliver religious talks without giving up their secular
occupations, and no pastor may remain longer than five years over any
congregation. These and other provisions are rather in the nature of
concessions to the religious needs of ordinary people; the special items
of faith differ slightly from those of the mother church, and are of
comparatively little significance. The number of communicants has grown
rapidly, especially among the negroes of the South, owing to the large
camp-meetings, where many persons sing and pray together, and work
themselves up to a more or less hysterical point of excitement under the
open sky. As is usual among less cultivated classes, the tendency to
form sects has been very great; small groups are continually breaking
away, because they cannot believe in this or that feature of the main
church. Seventeen principal groups may be distinguished, and some of
these only by the colour of the communicants. The Methodist
Episcopalians are by far the most numerous, and all the Methodist
churches together must embrace more than sixteen million people.
The twelve or thirteen sects of Baptists are in some cases widely
different in the matter of faith, although the main body of regular
Baptists are Calvinistic, and the church is organized like the
Calvinistic Congregational Church. Each congregation governs itself, and
the one point which all have in common is that they renounce infant
baptism; he only may be baptized who is formally able to acknowledge
Christ, and he must be baptized not by sprinkling, but by immersion.
This cult originated in Switzerland at the time of the Reformation, and
gradually gained adherents all through Europe, but it first became
widely spread in America, where it embraces about twelve million people.
Just as Methodism is a sort of popular form of the Episcopalian Church,
the Baptist faith is a popularization of the Congregational Church. The
main division of the regular Baptists is made between the Northern and
Southern churches, a division which originated in the middle of the
century, owing to the diversity of opinion about slavery; and the third
main group of Baptists is made up of negroes.
The first Lutherans to come to the New World were Dutchmen, who landed
on Manhattan Island in 1623. But the Dutch authorities there suppressed
all churches except the Reformed Church, and it was not until New York
came into the hands of the English that the Lutheran Church got its
freedom. Lutherans from the Palatinate settled in Pennsylvania in 1710,
and in the middle of the eighteenth century began their definite
organization into synods under the influence of their pastor,
Mühlenberg. The church grew in consequence of German, and later of
Scandinavian, immigration. Most of its communicants still speak German,
Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Icelandic, and those who speak English
are mostly of German descent. All together they make a population of
four million persons, of whom one-fifth live in Pennsylvania. The
Lutherans have formed sixteen sects.
There is another small Protestant sect, which likewise originated in
Germany; this is the sect of Mennonites. As is well known, they combine
the Baptist refusal of infant baptism with the principle of
non-resistance. They came from Germany to Pennsylvania at the end of the
seventeenth century in order to escape persecution, and were there known
as the German Friends. Their little band has the honour of having
registered, in 1688, the first protest against American slavery. Their
numbers have since been augmented from Holland, Switzerland, Germany,
and Russia, and to-day the largest part of the Mennonites is said to be
in America—in spite of which they number hardly more than 150,000
persons.
In many respects the Quakers may be compared with the Mennonites. The
Quaker Church was founded in the middle of the seventeenth century by an
Englishman, John Fox, and spread to America as early as 1656, where it
now numbers, perhaps, 400,000 persons, living chiefly in Indiana, Ohio,
and Pennsylvania. The Quakers lay great emphasis on silence, and even in
their meetings they observe long pauses, in which each member communes
with the Holy Spirit. The sins for which a Quaker may be excommunicated
from his church are the denial of the divinity of Christ or of the
divine origin of the Bible, enlistment in the army, encouragement of
war, trading in alcohol, drunkenness, blasphemy, making wagers,
participation in lotteries, giving an oath in court, and requiring an
oath. They dress in black or grey, and are known for their mild, gentle,
and yielding characters.
The Roman Catholic Church in America is little different from the Church
in Europe. It has grown rapidly in the nineteenth century, owing to the
tremendous numbers of Irish, South German, Polish, Hungarian, Italian,
and Spanish immigrants. Catholic missionaries, it is true, were the
first Christian ministers in the New World. They accompanied the Spanish
expeditions, and their first bishop landed in 1528. Maryland was the
chief English colony of Catholics, while most of the other colonies were
very intolerant of the Romish Church. In 1700 New York, which has to-day
a half million Catholics, is said to have had only seven Catholic
families; and even in 1800 the Catholic population of the whole United
States was estimated at less than 150,000. In 1840 they had increased
tenfold, and number to-day probably ten millions, with sixteen
archbishops and a cardinal. The Catholic centres, in the order of the
size of congregations, are, New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, St.
Paul, New Orleans, Baltimore, Cleveland, Buffalo, Newark, Providence,
Pittsburg, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee.
The Jews, who are said to have first come from Brazil in 1654, have
likewise increased rapidly in recent years, owing to the extraordinary
immigration from the East of Europe. They must number to-day about a
million people, and if the latest estimates are correct, nearly one-half
of these have not gone farther than New York City, which would therefore
have a larger Jewish population than any other city in the world. The
larger part of these people are Russian Jews, who live together in great
poverty and are very little Americanized. The division made by the
census into Orthodox and Reformed Jews does not represent two sects, but
merely a manner of grouping, since the congregations present a very
gradual transition from rigid Asiatic orthodoxy to a reform so complete
as to be hardly Jewish at all, and in which the rabbis are merely
lecturers on “ethical culture.”
Many other churches might be mentioned, such as the widely spread sect
of Disciples of Christ, which originated in America, or the Moravians,
Dunkards, and others which have come from Europe. But it will be enough
here to speak of only a few specially typical sects that have been
manufactured in America. The profane expression is in place, since they
are all artificially devised organizations, whose founders have often
been thought dishonest; such are the Adventists, the Mormons, the
Spiritualists, and the Christian Scientists. The Adventists were
gathered in by William Miller, of Massachusetts, who in the year 1831
calculated from figures which he found in the Bible that Christ would
appear again on earth in the year 1843. This prophecy caused a great
many small congregations to spring up, and when the momentous year came
and brought disillusionment, and even after a second similar
disappointment at a later year, these congregations did not break up,
but contented themselves with the less risky prediction that Christ
would make His appearance soon. There are Adventists in all the states,
and especially in Michigan. They have broken up into smaller sects, of
which a few are always making new computations for the coming of Christ.
In all, they amount to about two hundred thousand people.
More famous, or perhaps more notorious, are the Mormons. Their first
prophet, Joseph Smith, began in 1823, when he was eighteen years of age,
to have dreams in which he was intrusted with a religious mission. Four
years later, with the help of certain persons of his dreams, he
“discovered” the Book of Mormon—a set of metal tablets on which the
history of America was written in “reformed Egyptian” characters. The
first American colony had been organized, according to the Book of
Mormon, by a race of people which had helped to build the Tower of
Babel, and which in 600 B.C. had settled in South America. The American
Indians, the book says, descend from this race; and Christ also, it
says, was for a time in America. Finally, an angel came who appointed
Smith and a friend of his as priests, and they then began the regular
formation of a church. Miracles were rumoured; missionaries were sent
out and congregations formed in several states, even before polygamy was
ordained. In 1843 Smith received the inspired message which proclaimed
the new ordinance of “heavenly marriage.” In the following year Smith
was murdered, and his successor, Brigham Young, when hostile
demonstrations became frequent, led the group of believers on a bold
expedition into what was at that time the almost impassable West—to
Utah, on the Great Salt Lake.
The settlement grew, and under its rigorously theocratic government made
remarkable economic progress. A large garden was planted in the
wilderness, and Salt Lake City is to-day a large, modern town on the
railroad line to California, and the Mormons compose only half its
population. But they alone and under terrific difficulties carried
civilization across the prairies, and as a token of their industry the
largest church in America stands there, the Mormon Temple, which they
built by forty years of labour, exactly according to the plans which
Young saw in a vision. While people are readily admitted to the curious
hall of prayer, no strangers are allowed to enter the Temple. Polygamy
was introduced, undoubtedly, from no immoral motives, but from the
religious belief that an unmarried woman will not go to heaven. Economic
motives may have helped the matter along, since the priests permitted
new marriages only when the contracting parties had sufficient means to
support several families, and so used the satisfaction of polygamous
instincts as a reward for unusual economic industry.
The stern morality of the American people has always looked on the
Mormon tribe as a thorn in the flesh, and yet it was difficult for a
long time for the federal government to suppress the abuse. Serious
opposition began in the early eighties with the passing of special laws;
thousands of Mormons were put in prison, and millions of dollars were
paid in fines. The Mormons fought with every legal means, but were
repudiated by the Supreme Court, and finally gave in. In the year 1890
their president, Woodruff, published an ordinance forbidding new
polygamous marriages. This has not prevented the Mormons from holding
polygamy sacred, and they have abandoned it only on compulsion. The
marriages which were solemnized before 1890 are still in force. Such
polygamous families do not impress a stranger unfavourably, since, in
spite of its complexity, their family life appears to be a happy one.
From Utah the sect has spread to Idaho and other Western States, and
embraces now perhaps half a million people.
There have been some other curious religious congregations with unusual
marriage ordinances. For instance, the Oneida Community has had an
apparently most immoral form of cohabitation. It is here a question not
so much of religion as of a communistic and economic experiment. Such
experiments are, for the most part, short-lived and flourish secretly.
Celibacy is practised by fifteen communities of Shakers, who live in a
communistic way. They broke away from the Quakers at the end of the
eighteenth century, and have unique religious ideas. God, and,
therefore, every human soul, is thought to be a double principle, both
male and female. The male principle was revealed in Christ, the female
in an English woman, Anne Lee, a Quakeress whose visions during
imprisonment occasioned the formation of this sect.
The Shakers were so called because they are “shaken” by religious
fervour; and the lower classes of the American populace are uncommonly
predisposed to this ecstatic and hysterical religious excitement.
General revivals, great camp-meetings, and hysterical and tumultuous
meetings of prayer, with theatrical conversions and divine
illuminations, have always played a prominent role in America. Thus at
the end of the fifties, after a time of declining piety, a wave of
religious conversion swept over the country, having all the appearance
of a nervous epidemic. The doings of the rapidly growing Salvation Army
also often have a somewhat neurotic character.
It is difficult to say why this is so. As in every form of hysteria,
suggestion is, of course, an important factor; but the manifestations
are so marked that there must be some special disposition thereto. It
almost seems as if a lack of other stimulants produced a pathological
demand for religious excitement. Certainly in those portions of the
country which are most affected, the life of the great masses, at least
until recently, has been colourless and dull. There has been no
stimulation of the fancy, such as is afforded by the Catholic Church, or
in former days was provided by the romantic events of monarchical
history. People have lacked the stimulation of amusements, festivals,
the theatre and music; daily life has been hard, morality rigorous, and
alcohol was thought sinful. Where religion has been the single
intellectual stimulus, it has become an intoxicant for the pining soul:
and persons drank until they obtained a sort of hysterical relief from
deadly reality.
The seeds of mysticism easily take root on such a soil, and it is no
accident that the chief mystical movements of our times have gone on in
America, the country which so many suppose to be the theatre of purely
material interests. Here we find, first of all, the Spiritualistic
movement which began in 1848, when mysterious knockings were heard by
the Fox family in a village of New York State. The sounds were
interpreted as messages from dead friends, and as soon as these spirits
commenced their material manifestations it was only a short step for
them to appear in person. The leading card of Spiritualism is its
supposed proof of life after death, and all its other features are
secondary.
On the other hand, it is natural for a teaching which depends on such
mysterious phenomena to turn its interest to other supposably
unexplained phenomena, and therewith to become a general rallying-ground
for mysticism. Although the Spiritualistic Church has about fifty
thousand members, these are by no means all of the actual Spiritualists
in America. Indeed, if Spiritualism were to be taken in a broader sense,
including a belief in telepathic influences, mysterious communications,
etc., the number of believers would mount into the millions, with some
adherents in the most highly educated circles. Even in enlightened
Boston a Spiritualistic church stands in the best section of the town.
Its services have been grievously exposed from time to time, but the
deceptions have been quickly forgotten, and this successful “religious”
enterprise is once more given credence. A short time ago, in
Philadelphia, the spirit of Darwin was constrained to write a pious
final contribution to his works for the benefit of a well-paying
audience, on a typewriter which stood in the middle of the room, and
which, of course, could be easily operated electrically from some other
room.
To be sure, it would be unfair to say that all spiritualism is based on
deception, although the lively wish to see dead relatives, or receive
communications from them, puts a high premium on the pious fraud.
Indeed, it would be over-hasty to say that all the spiritualistic
conceptions go against the laws of nature; for, since the philosophy of
Spiritualism has conceived of an ether organism which pervades the
molecular body and survives death, it has fairly cleverly met the
demands of casual explanation. And it may well be thought probable that
in the world of mental influences there is much remaining to be found
out, just as a hundred years ago there were hypnotism and Röntgen rays;
so that the zeal of very many people to assist in the solving of these
mysteries is, perhaps, easily understood.
But just where these most serious motives prevail and all idea of
conscious deception is excluded, one sees the profound affiliation of
intellectual interests with the mystical tendency. Even the Society for
Psychical Research, which aims to investigate mysterious phenomena in a
thoroughly scientific way, has, after all, mostly held the interest of
men who are more inclined to mysticism than to science. Mrs. Piper, of
Arlington, may be called the most important spiritualistic medium, and
Hodgson her most interesting prophet. The whole movement is, after all,
religious. Spiritualism has a near neighbour in Theosophy, which is
specially strong in California. The great literary charm of Hindu
philosophy makes this form of mysticism more attractive to minds that
are repelled by its vulgar forms. Hindu mysticism has, undoubtedly, a
future in America.
There is a still larger circle of people who believe in Christian
Science, the discovery of Mary Baker G. Eddy. When Mrs. Eddy suffered a
severe illness at Lynn in 1867, she was seized by the idea that all
illness might be only an illusion or hallucination of the soul, since
God alone is real, and in Him there can be naught but good. It was
therefore necessary only to realize this deceptive unreality, in order
to relieve the soul of its error and so to regain health. She herself
became well and proceeded to read her principle of mental healing into
the Bible, and so to develop a metaphysical system. She commenced her
work of healing without medicine, and in 1875 published her book,
“Science and Health, With a Key to the Holy Scriptures.” The book is a
medium-sized work, has a system not unskilfully constructed, although
unskilfully expressed, and one who is familiar with the history of
philosophy will find in it not one original thought. In spite of this,
the book must be called one of the most successful of modern times. It
is a rather expensive book, but has been bought by the hundreds of
thousands. Congregations have formed all over the country, and built
some magnificent churches; and, finally, the infectious bacillus of this
social malady has been wafted across the ocean. The great feature of
this new sect is its practice of healing; there are to-day some thirty
institutions giving instruction in the art of metaphysical healing, and
the public supports thousands of spiritual healers.
The movement is benefited by the general mistrust of academic medicine
which pervades the lower classes of America, as may be seen from the
ridiculous popularity of patent medicines. The cult is also undoubtedly
helped by actual and often surprising cures. The healing power of faith
is no new discovery; the effects of auto-suggestion are always important
in nervous disorders, and there are indeed few pathological conditions
in which nervous disorders do not play a part. Mrs. Eddy’s disciples, in
their consultation offices, do with the help of the inner consistency of
their metaphysical system, which the logic of the average patient cannot
break down, what Catholicism does at Lourdes by stimulating the
imagination. The main support of Christian Science is, after all, the
general mystical and religious disposition. Where religion plays such a
mighty rôle in the popular mind, religious vagaries and perversions must
be the order of the day; but even the perversions show how thoroughly
the whole American people is pervaded by the religious spirit.
Not only would it be unfair to estimate the religion of America by its
perversions, but even if the religious life of the country were amply
described in the many forms of its conservative congregations and
confessions, the most important thing would be still unmentioned: the
spirit of moral self-perfection common to all the religions of the
country. To be sure, it is not to be supposed that all the morality in
this nation is of religious origin. One sees clearly that this is not
the case if one looks at American social ethics, which are independent
of religious ethics, and if one notices how often motives from the two
spheres unite in bringing about certain actions. The Americans would
have developed a marked morality if they had not been brought up in
church; but the church has co-operated, specially when the nation was
young and when far-reaching impulses were being developed. And while the
forms of faith have changed, the moral ideas have remained much the
same.
Benjamin Wadsworth was president of Harvard College in the beginning of
the eighteenth century, and no greater religious contrast could be found
than that between him and his present successor in office; between the
orthodox Calvinist who said that it is by God’s unmerited grace that we
are not all burning in the flames of hell, as our sins so richly
deserve, and the liberal Unitarian of to-day. And yet President Eliot
could rightly say that, even after these two hundred years, he gladly
subscribes to all the moral tenets of his early predecessor. Wadsworth
exhorted parents to teach their sons to live soberly, virtuously, and in
the fear of God; to keep them from idleness, pride, envy, and malice; to
teach them simple, kindly, and courteous behaviour; to see that they
learn to be useful in the world, and so marry and carry on their daily
business as to avoid temptation and to grow in grace and in the fear of
God.
Benjamin Franklin’s catalogue of virtues which he desired to realize in
himself, was: temperance, silence, order, simplicity, industry, honesty,
justice, self-restraint, purity, peacefulness, continence, and modesty.
In this he was not thinking of the church, but his worldly morals came
to much the same thing as the Puritan’s ethics. The goal is everywhere
moral self-perfection—to learn, first of all, to govern one’s natural
desires, not for the sake of the effect on others, but for the effect on
one’s self. To put it extremely, the religious admonition might have
read: Give, not that your neighbour may have more, but that you may have
less; not in order to give your neighbour pleasure, but to discipline
yourself in overcoming greed. The social morality developed the opposite
motives; and even to-day the joining of both tendencies may be followed
everywhere, and especially in many philanthropic deeds. The two extremes
go together: social enthusiasm for being helpful, and the fundamentally
religious instinct to give alms.
Within the circle of ecclesiastical influences, moral concern for the
self is everywhere in great evidence—the desire to be sober, temperate,
industrious, modest, and God-fearing. It has been said that these
centuries of self-mastery are the cause of America’s final triumph. Too
many other factors are there left out of account, but undoubtedly the
theocratic discipline which held back all immoderation and indulgence,
and often intolerantly extinguished the lower instincts, has profoundly
influenced national life. And to this all churches have contributed
alike. It seems as if the Calvinistic God of severity had been
complemented by a God of love; but practically all churches have worked
as if it was necessary, first of all, to improve radically evil men, to
convert evildoers, and to uproot natural instincts. The American church
is to-day what it has always been, whether in or outside of Calvinism, a
church militant, strong in its battle against unrighteous desires. To be
churchly means to be in the battle-camp of a party; in the camp itself
they make merry, but every one is armed against the enemy.