THE CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume I, Issue 50, 11 April 1874, Page 6

THE CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES.

TB£ following statistics will help oto readers to understand the preference given by the ' Guardian* to Mexico, over the Chited States, as " an apposite illustration of the progress of civil freedom in combination with perfect religious equality." On the 13th November last, a Catholic festival was held in Boston. One of the speakers observed that, in 1825, there was only one priest in the whole State of Massachusetts, one in New Hamphshire, and one in Maine; and even us late as 1844, there were only thirty priests and 60,000 Catholics in all New England. There are now, after an interval of onry twenty-nine years, 100,000 in the single City of Boston; whilst in New England there are 441 priests, 432 churches, and nearly one million Catholics. And, observe, this result is not due entirely, as is some* times supposed, to Cntholic immigration. The general popuisjUon has increased in the United States, during the present century, at the enormous rate of 1,433 percent ; but, still more strange, the Catholic population during the same period has increased 22,000 per cent

In the City of Washington, about 50,000, one half of the entire population, are Catholics ; and this is a place which offers ao home to tbe emigrant. "In five years," says the tSiogrepher of Archbishop Spalding, "he confirmed 2*2,209 jwrsonß' of whom 2,752, or 12 72 per cent., were converts." And he adds that in his former diocese of Louisville, "the proportion of converts" had been nearly identical. Catholics in the United States are one-fourth of the entire population.

At the Boston festival, one of the speakers, the Rev. Kbst Stone, himself a convert from Protestantism, svud who could •tell bis he.irers, " the blood <-f Puritanism is in my veins," said, ** Protestantism bus worked itself out. It has evaporated and has left behimi n mixed .sediment of refined rationalism, sickly spiritualism, and rude indifference. The people of Massachusetts begun with v belief in revelation ; at present almost tLeir only tii-tinct cieed is in comruon schools." And then, he asked, " What is it to replace Protestantism in the bj&arts of the people 1 ? >>y the favur of Almighty God it will be that ancient and divine religion of which. Protestantism ■tffis the. perversion and the caricature."

Another speaker at the same festival, remarked, " Massachusetts has ontsnij'ptfd her rivals in the investigation of creeds. There is nut left a conceivable theory of the supernatural (except our «<wii) which has escaped her critical ei>

quiry . . . don't know on« that she has not condemned, or else dismissed, with costs. Having got through all other cases, she has time to take up ours."