worldly means, and he is relegated to his place in the social grade of the Church according to his ability to pay for it. Perhaps his means are modest, and the private demands upon them all they will bear. In that case, he is nobody in the society of the Church. He is made to feel that he and his family are measured and estimated according to the scale of worldly treasures, and he becomes discontented and unhappy. He concludes that if the modern Christian Church is the guardian of the gateway to heaven, it is easier for a whole caravan of camels to thread the postern of a needle's eye than for a poor man to make his way through the formidable barrier. He gives up his search in that direction for elevating and encouraging influences in life's trials, and, with the conclusions of science and philosophy, makes a more comfortable, if not a better, sanctuary for himself and his in his own home. Churches, at least in large cities, are for the rich, and serve rather a social than a genuine religious purpose; chapels and mission schools are for the poor, who are thereby made to feel their inferiority; but for the great class of reading, thinking, and active men of the age there is no provision made for spiritual salvation.

A NON-CHURCH-GOER.

REV. DR. WARD.

I MUST confess to a certain embarrassment in attempting to comment on the paper of "A Non-Church-Goer," from a difficulty I find in determining whether it should be treated as a serious communication or as a sort of jest. As a serious attempt to state facts I could read it only with astonishment, for from beginning to end it assumes as well-known fact what is well known to every person of intelligence upon the subject to be the reverse of fact.

The substance of the article in review is the repetition, with variations, of the assertion that "it is a generally admitted fact that in these days only a small portion, even of intelligent and eminently respectable people, are regular attendants upon religious services on Sunday." This is palpably untrue, and yet it is reiterated again and again. "The majority," says the writer, "of intelligent and well-meaning people, whose purposes are good, whose aspirations are high, whose conduct is upright, do not and cannot believe what the churches teach, and they are

weary of its reiteration." After making this assertion, that intelligent and moral people have generally withdrawn from attendance upon our churches, the writer then proceeds to discuss reasons for his false fact.

It would have been the part of an intelligent writer to make at least superficial investigation to discover whether the facts are as imagined. One whose purpose, however, is simply to stir up the lions may not care whether his stick is tipped with fact or fancy. But the fact is easy to obtain. It is patent to the eye, and a few minutes' search in the Census Reports and in the Year Books of our religious bodies would give the desired information to any one who was not desirous to remain in ignorance of it. I suppose it is the United States that is chiefly being considered in this discussion; and it is a fact easily demonstrated that the proportion of members of so-called Evangelical Protestant churches is now considerably larger than at any previous time within the century. There is in the United States a population of fifty millions of people of all ages. Of these, over ten millions, more than one in five, are communicants in Evangelical Protestant churches. Mind, I say communicants. I do not say nominal members, adherents. I do not count in the baptized children. There are actually enrolled as communicants, who are chiefly adults, by trustworthy statistical reports, by count and not by guess-work, over ten million men and women. These represent five million families which are attendants at church, and the children of which, and many of the adults, are attendants but not communicants. We are within bounds if we say that they represent thirty millions of people who recognize themselves as attendants or adherents of the churches. Here we have at once a handsome majority of our people in this Protestant division of the believing Church. But we must add to these, according to the best computations, over six millions of Catholics. "A Non-Church-Goer" may deny that either they, or the thirty million Protestants, are "intelligent and eminently respectable people"; but he cannot claim that they "do not believe what the churches teach." That would be absurd. They do believe.

We have, then, at a moderate calculation, thirty-six of the fifty millions of our population who are recognized as regular attendants on those churches whose faith, we are told, has ceased to attract men of culture and intelligence. Of these ten millions

are active communicants of Protestant churches. And this immense number of communicants represents a rapidly increasing proportion of our population. In 1800, there were, according to the best available statistics, 365,000 Evangelical communicants in the country, being seven per cent. of the population of 5,308,483. In 1850, there were 3,529,988 such communicants, being fifteen per cent. of the population of 21,191,876. In 1870, there were 6,673,396 such communicants, being seventeen per cent. of the population of 38,588,371. In 1880, the communicants had risen to 10,065,963, being a little over twenty per cent. of the population of 50,152,866. The increase in population since 1800 has been ninefold; that in Evangelical communicants has been twenty-sevenfold, three times as great as in the population. So much for the random assertion that "only a small proportion, even of intelligent or eminently respectable people, are regular attendants upon religious services on Sunday," and " the proportion is diminishing year by year." On the contrary, proportion is increasing so rapidly that if "A Non-Church-Goer's" life should be prolonged many decades, the greater likelihood is that he will have to hide himself away or emigrate to escape the danger of being converted.

the

Does our imaginative friend say that he had in mind the "intelligent and eminently respectable," and that the churchmembers and church-goers are of a different class! He dares say it, probably, for he gives no evidence of measuring his words; but it would be palpably untrue. It does not need proof that the classes which are eminently non-intelligent or nonrespectable are, like our friend, almost to a man, non-churchgoers. When a previously vicious man attaches himself to a church, it is a step toward respectability. The Church educates its members in honesty and thrift. Church-members average much more moral, intelligent, and wealthy than non-churchmembers. This is the natural product of their church-training. Go into almost any community and you will find the "eminently respectable" people generally church-goers, if not churchmembers. Every village this side of Tombstone, Arizona, is full of the proof of it. If you find anywhere a community which does not go to church, you find one where life is not safe, and where Judge Lynch does the preaching. It is the saloon and groggery population which supplies the larger part of nonchurch-goers.

VOL. CXXXVII.-NO. 320.

6

But do not intelligent men keep away from the church? Yes, some of them, but not many. The vast majority of really intelligent people are adherents of the church. Some are not, but they are comparatively few. There are men of French or Spanish birth who have learned to despise Romanism, and who, in throwing it off, have thrown off all faith. There are Germans by birth who have succumbed to a local tide of unbelief. There are Jews to whom Judaism seems a decayed religion, and who have accepted no other. There are physicians who have learned that brain activity and mind activity are correlate, and who conIclude it is all brain and no soul. There are students of nature who see majestic, immutable laws, and are satisfied that the law of the vibrant atom and the developing molecule is God enough. There are brave and good men who have thought out, or thought along the accretions of accepted creeds, and suppose they must reject the creeds no less than the accretions. There are thousands of such, and they have their own coteries in our cities where they chiefly abound, and they are numerous in the aggregate; but they are yet a small fraction compared with the great body of our intelligent and moral people who still are attached, and in increasing ratio, to our churches.

I speak of the United States, not to avoid the mention of Darwin and Huxley and Tyndall, but because it is by this country that we must judge the truth of the assertion made. I am not afraid to speak of Germany, with its Emperor William and its Prince Bismarck, stout believers, and its scholars less unbelieving and its churches less recreant to faith than fifty years ago; of France, less atheistic than at the beginning of the century, and with a rapidly growing Protestant strength, with its successive ministries so strongly Protestant; of England, notwithstanding that majestic name of Charles Darwin, and those other honored names I have mentioned, but which can be easily matched in science with three times as many names of scholars of nature and of humane learning who cherish the Church of Christ; the England whose prime minister is "fed on the dry leaves of an antiquated theology in which the sap of life has ceased to flow," but who, somehow, is the robustest man in the British empire; the England whose Darwins and Tyndalls, even, christen their children in the old churches. I might speak of these, but I wish only to deny the strange assertion that the religion of Jesus Christ, and the churches which embody it, have ceased to keep their hold on our intelligent and moral public.

Does "A Non-Church-Goer" wish to tally names? Who stand at the head of our departments and schools of science? Who are they in geology? Go down the list, from Dana and LeConte, and see whether they are church-goers or not. In biology, begin with Gray, the stoutest Darwinian of them all, but a devout member of an orthodox church; in astronomy, with Young and Newcomb; go through all the sciences and count their devotees, and I am not afraid to let the tally tell whether the Christian faith has been rejected. Who are the friends of education? Who scatter their money over our land to sow it with colleges? It is Christian men, almost exclusively Christian men, who do it in the interest of the Christianity which they love. Who have sent teachers to our freedmen and our Indians, and are giving them common schools and universities to pay the debt we owe them and to make them intelligent citizens? Who else is it that loves intelligence and morality enough to do this but Christian believers? When a body of people who have repudiated the Church do the same, we are surprised, and fill the air with plaudits. Mr. Adler's Society for Ethical Culture, with all its strength of wealthy Hebrew and Gentile unbelief, has established a kindengarten or two for the poor in this city, and we praise it loudly. It is well done. But Sarah B. Cooper and her San Francisco Bible-class have established five times as many-and what of it?

The Church exhausted? The sanctuaries empty? Who does not go to church? Take any village and reckon from house to house of the reputable inhabitants, and they nearly all go to church. Watch the front doors of Fifth avenue, and see what one fails to open at half-past ten Sunday morning to send its dwellers to church. The world of society, of culture, of wealth goes to church. "Where do you go to church?" is one of the first questions asked of new acquaintances, because all go to church somewhere. Ours is a church-going people, a church-respecting, a church-honoring people, and never more so than now.

Here I might stop. If the assumption is wrong, the explanations given are not worth considering. The two given are as false as the assumption that our churches have ceased to attract. One is that our intelligent people have ceased to believe the dogmas of the Church. It must be met with a simple denial. The other is as amusing as it is amazing. It is that churches make such enormous pecuniary demands on people that they cannot