Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Church History

The Transoceanic West in Its Religious and Moral Aspect

Professor Alexander Lopukhin

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The modern English translation and the cover design are © 2026 Royal Archives. All rights reserved.

The underlying source text is in the public domain.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Translated by Royal Archives

Source: Заокеанский Запад в религиозно-нравственном отношении

Cover: Green River Cliffs, Wyoming (1881) by Thomas Moran (American, 1837–1926), National Gallery of Art (CC0), which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:transoceanic_west:en:1

Introduction

The Author

Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin was born on the tenth of October 1852 in the village of Mityakino, in the Saratov province, the son of a parish priest. He was schooled first at the Saratov theological seminary and then, from 1874, at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1878. Even as a student he had drawn near to the world of learned journals, doing correctional and literary work in their editorial offices and publishing, while still at the Academy, a substantial study of the Old Testament prophets. Languages came easily to him, and by the time he left the Academy he had already marked himself out as a gifted and disciplined young biblicist with an unusual command of English. That command shaped the course of his life.

In July of 1879 he was appointed psalmist—a reader and chanter—at the Russian embassy church in New York, and there he served for the next several years, into the early 1880s. It is on this American sojourn that the present volume rests. A man of learning set down in a young and restless country, Lopukhin watched its religious life with the double attention of a churchman and a scholar, and what he saw impressed him so deeply that it colored the whole of his later work. He came home neither a partisan of America nor its detractor, but its first serious Russian interpreter, convinced that a nation so unlike his own had a great deal to teach and a great deal to warn against.

On his return he made America the subject of his early scholarship. In 1881 he defended and published his master’s dissertation, Roman Catholicism in America, and over the decade that followed he issued a series of studies, sketches, and lectures on the religious and social life of the United States. Meanwhile his academic career advanced steadily: he was named professor of comparative theology at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1883, and from 1885 held the chair of ancient civil history until his death. As an editor he became one of the most industrious figures in Russian church publishing, guiding the journal Strannik (The Wanderer) and launching, as a free supplement to it, the great enterprise for which he is best remembered—the Explanatory Bible (Tolkovaya Bibliya), a running commentary on every book of Scripture. He lived to complete only its first volume, his own commentary on the Pentateuch; he died on the twenty-second of August 1904, at the height of his powers, and the work was carried to completion by others across a dozen volumes between 1904 and 1913. He was buried at the Nikolskoye cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. The five American writings gathered here belong to the earliest and freshest season of that career—the reports of an observant young reader before he became the editor of the Russian Orthodox Bible.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

The five pieces in this volume were written across roughly a decade and a half, but they form a single sustained inquiry: what does the religious life of the United States actually look like, and what can an Orthodox Russia learn from it? Lopukhin approached America at a moment when almost no serious Russian account of the country existed. “We often call Americans our friends,” he wrote in one of these prefaces, “but only rarely do we admit that we scarcely know them at all.” His purpose, first and last, was to close that gap—to replace rumor and caricature with patient, first-hand observation.

Religion in America (composed at the turn of the 1880s) is his broad survey of the American religious landscape: the extraordinary energy of a people who, cut off from the old centers of belief by an ocean, had not lost their religious instinct but intensified it, together with the ceaseless “ferment” of denominations that instinct produced.

Roman Catholicism in America, subtitled A Study of the Present Condition and the Causes of the Rapid Growth of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States of North America, was his master’s dissertation of 1881. It sets itself a precise historical question—how a body that began in “insignificance” had risen within a single century toward the first rank among American churches, and that in the very country that had first written the separation of church and state into its law.

Life Across the Ocean, subtitled Sketches of the Religious, Social-Economic, and Domestic Life in North America, is the largest and most personal of the five—a book-length travelogue that carries the reader from St. Petersburg through Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Paris, and London, across ten days of ocean, and into the streets, churches, holidays, and households of New York. Its later chapters turn homeward to the small Russian community and its embassy church in the American city.

The Transoceanic West in Its Religious and Moral Aspect began as a set of public lectures delivered in St. Petersburg during Great Lent, later gathered into a book. Here the occasion is explicitly Russian: Lopukhin frames America as a case study offered to an educated Russian society that he saw drifting toward “religious individualization”—the ordering of belief by private reason rather than by the Church.

The Centenary of the Orthodox Mission in North America (1894) marks the hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first Russian monastic missionaries at Kodiak Island in 1794. It is the most narrowly historical of the five, recounting the mission’s origins in the fur-trading voyages of the North Pacific and the labors of its first monks.

Taken together, the occasion of these works is one man’s determination to render America intelligible to his countrymen—its Protestant multiplicity, its Roman Catholic ascendancy, its constitutional experiment in religious liberty, and, closest to his heart, the young Orthodox mission planted on the same continent.

Argument & Structure

For all their variety of form, the five writings can be read as movements of a single argument, and it helps to see how each is built.

Religion in America opens from a single observation: the American people are intensely, restlessly religious, and their many confessions are less settled institutions than currents in a continuous search for religious truth. From this Lopukhin traces what he calls the process of “ferment”—the collision and reconciliation of diverse religious elements—through the Episcopal Church’s turn toward “catholicity” and its overtures to the Orthodox East, and on to the specifically American problems of religious liberty of conscience and religion in the public school. Its structure moves from a general diagnosis of the national temperament to particular test cases in law and education.

Roman Catholicism in America is the most rigorously organized of the five, built in three large parts: the first steps of Roman Catholicism on the continent (including the early Jesuit missions among the native peoples); its struggle for the freedom to exist amid Puritan and colonial hostility; and its external and internal growth into a major American body. Lopukhin’s governing question is causal—why growth so rapid, in soil so seemingly unfavorable—and he answers it historically, tracing the interplay of immigration, organization, and the discipline of a centralized church against the fragmentation around it.

Life Across the Ocean is structured as a journey and then a residence. Its first movement, “On the Way to America,” is pure travel writing—the European capitals, the Atlantic crossing. The second, “Beyond the Ocean,” settles into American life through its holidays and habits: Christmas and carnival, Easter in America, the Bible in America, the “kingdom of the dollar,” revival meetings, and the fraternal lodges he calls “the knights of mystery.” A third movement, “Native Echoes,” turns to the Russians abroad—their festivals and sorrows, the Russian church in New York, and the Americans who found their way into it—before closing with social and economic notes on emigration and the promise of the new land. The reader who wants Lopukhin the man, rather than Lopukhin the analyst, will find him here.

The Transoceanic West follows the shape of the lectures that produced it. A first reading argues for the importance of studying American religious-moral life at all, and surveys the American public conscience—its Sunday schools, temperance and civic societies, and the moral seriousness Lopukhin admired in American democracy. A second reading turns to what he saw as the doctrinal and practical difficulties of a purely Protestant order—the multiplication of sects and the “unlimited arbitrary will” of independent preachers—and then to the countervailing American striving toward church unity, the revivals, and the Episcopal reach toward firmer catholic ground. The movement is from what America does well to the deeper question its divisions raise, and back to the yearning for unity those divisions provoke.

The Centenary of the Orthodox Mission proceeds chronologically from the North Pacific voyages of Russian traders and the expeditions that fixed the relation of the Asian and American coasts, through the merchant Shelikhov’s decision to consolidate the scattered “sowing of Christian seeds” into a properly organized mission, to the arrival and first labors of the monks at Kodiak. It is narrative history, told with evident reverence for the “simple monks” who, expecting no such destiny, carried the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

What gives these American reports their lasting interest is that Lopukhin never wrote as a mere correspondent. He read American religion theologically, and he read it as a mirror held up to his own society.

His deepest concern was the relation between religious truth and religious form. America struck him as living proof that “religious need lies in the very nature of the human spirit and is as eternal as the human spirit itself”—a standing rebuke to the “cold and soulless skepticism” he saw corroding an older Europe. He admired without reserve the vitality of American faith: a people among whom science and religion lived, as he put it, “in harmonious unity,” where educated men occupied themselves with religious questions and the skeptical literature of the old world “found almost no sale.” Against the materialism that had swept mid-century Europe, America seemed to him evidence that the human spirit turns back, inevitably, toward the mysterious and the holy.

Yet he saw the American situation as unfinished, even unstable—a vast “ferment” in search of a truth it could not quite reach. The multiplication of confessions and the authority he saw vested in the individual preacher and the individual conscience seemed to him to answer the hunger for religious truth with endless motion rather than rest. He was struck, accordingly, by every American movement toward unity and toward firmer, more ancient ground: the Episcopal turn to “catholicity,” the overtures toward the Orthodox East, the recurring protest of religious feeling against fragmentation. In these he read a genuine and hopeful longing.

His account of the rapid growth of Roman Catholicism belongs to the same analysis. He treated it not as a threat to be denounced but as a historical phenomenon to be explained—the success of a disciplined, centralized, and organized body in a landscape of division—and precisely as evidence of the same American hunger for authoritative, catholic form. His observations on Protestant and Roman Catholic America alike are reported as a historian reports, describing what each communion held and how each fared, without setting one against another as the arbiter of the whole.

For his Russian readers the moral was pointed but irenic. In The Transoceanic West he addressed an educated society he feared was drifting toward “religious individualization”—belief arranged by private reason—and he offered America as the classic instance of what follows when that tendency runs its course without settled ecclesial anchoring. America was, for him, at once an inspiration and a warning: inspiration in its undimmed religious energy and its civic moral seriousness, warning in the restlessness of a faith seeking form.

Running beneath all of this is a conviction that binds the five works into one: that the health of a people’s religious life depends not only on the sincerity of its belief but on the soundness of the form that carries it. Lopukhin credited America with an abundance of the first and worried about the second, and he was too honest an observer to pretend the two always went together. That tension—fervent faith seeking a stable and catholic shape—is the theological thread he followed across constitution, school, revival tent, and mission field alike.

The Centenary strikes a different and warmer note. There the significance is missionary and devotional: the wonder that the light of the Gospel reached Kodiak in the same years that the coasts of America were still being charted, carried not by a trained propaganda but by “simple monks” ready to endure every hardship for the truth. It is Lopukhin’s tribute to the zeal of the young Orthodox mission on American soil—the mission whose religious environment his other four studies had labored to describe.

Reception & Influence

These writings made Lopukhin, in effect, Russia’s first informed guide to American religious life, filling a gap he himself had named. Their afterlife is twofold. In their own moment they gave an educated Russian public a rare and detailed window onto a country it knew mostly by rumor, and Roman Catholicism in America, as an academic dissertation, earned him his master’s degree and the professorial career that followed. More broadly, they belong to the formation of the scholar who would go on to edit the Explanatory Bible and the Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia — great works of accessible, popularizing scholarship whose animating conviction, that serious religious learning should be put within reach of ordinary readers, is already fully present in these early American reports. For the modern reader they carry a further, unlooked-for value: they are a thoughtful outside observer’s snapshot of Gilded-Age American religion—its revivals and lodges, its schools and Sunday schools, its constitutional settlement of church and state—seen through Orthodox eyes at the very moment the Orthodox mission on the continent was taking root.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents a fresh modern English translation of five of Lopukhin’s Russian works on American religious life, prepared from the public-domain Russian texts as preserved in the digital library of azbyka.ru. The originals — Религия в Америке, Римский католицизм в Америке, Жизнь за океаном, Заокеанский Запад в религиозно-нравственном отношении, and Столетие православной миссии в Северной Америке — were written in the 1880s and 1890s; several first appeared as periodical essays or public lectures before being gathered into books. They are rendered here into clear, contemporary English while preserving the author’s inline emphasis, his paragraph structure, his own notes, and his scriptural references. Chapter and section numbers and scripture citations follow the house convention of Arabic numerals and a modern reference style. The translation aims throughout at faithful, readable prose that keeps the register of Lopukhin’s own nineteenth-century essayistic Russian without archaizing it.

A word on names and attribution. The author is given here as Alexander Lopukhin, a lay scholar and theologian; where his contemporaries styled him “Professor,” that title reflects his chairs at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. He is best known to posterity as the editor of the Explanatory Bible, and it is worth remembering, as one reads these youthful American studies, that they are the work of the same mind that would later undertake to comment on the whole of Scripture for a general Russian readership.

Because these are the observations of a nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox visitor, the reader will meet frank judgments about the Protestant and Roman Catholic America of the 1880s—its divisions, its enthusiasms, its rapid growth. They are presented here as historical testimony, in the author’s own voice, and are best read as one perceptive contemporary’s account rather than as a settled verdict on any communion. Where his information reflects the state of knowledge of his day, that too is part of the document’s interest.

Suggestions for Reading

A reader new to Lopukhin need not take the five works in order. Life Across the Ocean is the natural doorway: its travel narrative and its scenes of American holidays, streets, and worship introduce both the country and the observer, and its later chapters on the Russian church in New York place the author himself before us. From there, Religion in America and The Transoceanic West supply the analytic frame—the diagnosis of American religious “ferment” and the questions it raised for Russia—while Roman Catholicism in America rewards those who want Lopukhin at his most rigorous and historical. The Centenary of the Orthodox Mission is best kept for last, or read on its own as a self-contained history: it turns from the wide American panorama to the single thread that mattered most to the author—the Orthodox mission carried across the Pacific by a handful of monks, whose hundred-year story gives these studies of a distant land their quiet center of gravity.

Preface

Contents First Reading I. The importance and interest of studying the religious-moral life in America in view of the church-religious condition being experienced by our society II. Public sensitivity to the interests of religious-moral life Second Reading III. The confessional nature of Protestantism and its church-practical inadequacy. The kingdom of sects and division IV. The striving of the American people toward church-religious union and the significance of this fact. Conclusion

Public lectures, delivered during the Great Lent of 1888 in the “Society for the Propagation of Religious-Moral Enlightenment in the Spirit of the Orthodox Church” for the benefit of needy students of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and pupils of the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary.

First Reading

1. The importance and interest of studying the religious-moral life in America in view of the church-religious condition being experienced by our society

The Church and the State in America. The Church and the School. The Church and Society.

The Church and the Press. The Public Significance of Preaching

In the past year, before a public interested in religious questions, we had the honor to set forth several reflections regarding the religious-moral condition of the heterodox West at the present time, and there we attempted, among other things, to present a principled characterization of the confessional foundations of Orthodoxy in distinction from the systems of Western Christianity[1]. This question has not lost its lively interest now and, perhaps, has even grown to the degree that one generally observes a growing interest in our society for the elevated problems of religious-moral life. We live in a most significant time. That wave of unbelief and materialism which in the middle of our century swept through the spiritual life of Europe is visibly weakening. Crude materialism, which, finding a temporary ally in the natural sciences, laid its merciless hand upon all that is ideal and holy and wished to sweep out, so to speak, all religious ideas from the realm of human spirit, is noticeably losing its fascination for all more or less thinking people. This worldview, which proudly came forward with the promise to give enlightened humanity in place of the old “God of religions” a new “god of science,” suffered, as was to be expected, a complete fiasco. It could not satisfy the deepest needs of the human spirit, and the spirit turns away from it. Materialism wished to explain all the mysteries of being through scientific, palpable principles; but these principles are too simple to embrace all the mysteries that occupy the human mind. After the most careful and thorough explanation of spiritual phenomena, the human spirit somehow instinctively feels their incompleteness and inadequacy, and these very explanations serve merely as one step toward that unattainable temple where the mystery of being lives in all its mysterious inaccessibility. And so we see that the mind of contemporary humanity, no longer satisfied with materialism, is manifestly inclined toward the opposite worldview, which gives greater satisfaction to the growing thirst for the mysterious. After the recent wholesale denial of all that is mysterious and supernatural, it becomes almost incredible to what degree a thirst for the mysterious and supernatural is now observed everywhere. The contemporary cultured person with a kind of sickly sensitivity listens to strange voices in the gloomy séances of spiritualism, hears with reverence the mysterious knockings and movements of a soulless table, is drawn to the enigmatic trick of guessing others’ thoughts, and even people of positive science are not averse to believing in the possibility of an unknown fourth dimension. It is clear that with such a disposition religious worldview again obtains significance and interest, which in the end gives the best satisfaction and peace to a weary and aimlessly wandering mind. And indeed, we see unmistakable signs of the revival of religious interest not only among the people but in educated society as well. This fact should cause only joy; but unfortunately in this very turning there is an element which hinders its full fruitfulness for religious-moral life. Here we see, so to speak, the return of a lost reason to religion; but the preceding wandering through the thickets of rationalism and complete unbelief has so harmfully affected the spiritual life of the contemporary cultured person that he now, even in returning to religion, does not have sufficient moral self-control to humbly submit to the teaching of the Church, but brings into the realm of religious worldview that corrupting rationalism with which his spiritual life is infected. This is undoubtedly the reason for that sad phenomenon, that our famous writer, who considers his return from spiritual and practical nihilism to a religious-moral worldview to be the greatest happiness of his life, in his religious-theological works essentially remains enslaved to his reason corrupted by former skepticism. But the same is observed generally in our educated society. After a shameless enthusiasm for negative doctrines, returning now to a religious worldview, it does not wish to humbly bend before the teaching of the Orthodox Church but seeks satisfaction of its religious thirst where religion is taught in the form of piquant and sensational speculations. It is no secret that in two locations of our capital there has been regular preaching of the most extreme sectarian ideas, and this preaching attracts not a few persons from that society which, feeling a religious thirst, does not wish to quench it from the common spring of the Orthodox Church. And indeed, generally in the disposition of our educated society one observes a fermentation which has not yet sufficiently defined itself, but in which one cannot fail to discern a tendency in the direction of what may be called religious individualization—that is, the arrangement of religious life according to personal considerations of reason. This is evidently a sectarian tendency, and to oppose it is the sacred duty of each person to whom the interests of the Church and a healthy spiritual-moral life are dear. By these reflections, among others, we were guided when we chose as the subject of our Great Lenten readings the question of the religious-moral condition of the overseas West. America is the classical land of sectarianism, and the study of its religious-moral life can therefore be of the highest importance and profound interest, precisely in the sense of clarifying what results may follow from the dominion of personal reason in the spiritual-religious life, in the absence of firm ecclesiastical principles. With the religious-moral life of the North American Republic we had the opportunity to become acquainted through direct observation, the results of which we have already shared with the reading public in print both in our correspondences and in separate publications. But this field is so broad that even after all this there is the possibility to communicate some such data which by their novelty are not lacking in some interest for clarifying this most interesting and instructive life, all the more so that in the very recent time phenomena have occurred on American soil which during our sojourn there could serve only as the subject of uncertain conjecture.

To give a clearer and more definite understanding of the religious-moral life in North America, we shall broaden our subject and examine it from two sides, both of which have special interest—namely, from the side of the general religious-moral condition of the American people, and from the side of those particular phenomena which constitute the fruit of the principles lying at its foundation. With such a portrayal both the bright and dark sides of this life will emerge, and at the same time its instructive side for us will become clearer and more tangible.

First of all, it must be said that in the religious respect the American people of the United States differs very sharply from the peoples of the old world. This is a completely young people, which is seething with the fullness of their youthful spiritual life. They do not yet have that discord between the different forces of the spirit which the decrepit Europe suffers from—no contradiction between reason and faith. After the soulless skepticism of the old world, on the soil of the new world one feels the breath of new, fresh, and healthy life. The American people develop uniformly in all their powers and faculties. Their cultural-social development proceeds parallel with the religious, and therefore in their essence they lack that moral flabbiness which is a striking characteristic of the cultured classes of European peoples. America does not know such an intelligentsia as that which would undermine its moral existence through the denial of the religious principle; in it there is no society separated from church communion, and there is no literature ignoring religion as one of the important agents of cultural and social development. One can hardly find anywhere so many educated secular persons occupied with religious questions as are encountered in the United States of America. And this is all the more remarkable because America by its cultural character is a country of positive knowledge. In spite of this, science there lives in a harmonious unity with religious faith and the skeptical works of the old world there find almost no sale. It will therefore not be surprising that the whole life of the American people is pervaded with a religious spirit, and upon all manifestations of state and social life lies a strong imprint of religious influence.

The first proposition may seem incredible and inappropriate to those who know that in America the principle of the complete separation of Church and State prevails. In this regard, as is known, America serves, so to speak, as a commonplace to which all European culture-bearers constantly refer, considering the union of Church and State a hoary anachronism for our enlightened age. But it must be said that in this regard there exists great obscurity among us, arising from insufficient acquaintance with the general character and form of life in America. Church and State are indeed separated there, but this juridical fact does not yet determine the actual state of things. The closest examination of the relationship in which Church and State stand in America can only lead to the conclusion that in reality Church and State are inseparable, as soul and body are indivisible in a living organism. We have already been attacked once by our culture-bearers for this statement, those who only dream of benefiting our fatherland by transferring to its soil the principles and arrangements of the beloved West, under the name of clerical. But nevertheless we again repeat this assertion, because it is based not on theory but on the study of reality. The separation of Church and State in America means only that the State there, having encountered a diversity of confessional forms, did not identify itself with any one of them in particular, which would have violated the natural sense of justice and equality in relation to all others, but by this means did not separate itself from religion as the general religious-moral principle. This fact of American life again proves that the principle of separation of Church and State is not a denial of religion on the part of the State, but only one form of their mutual relationship. A denial of religion on the part of the State represents as impossible a fact as the denial of a fact that indisputably exists. The State cannot deny religion by the very nature of its purpose. It has as its aim not to destroy the essential elements of social life but to support them, to give them better conditions for development than singular and scattered life can provide. If religion constitutes an essential element of social life (which the most extreme representatives of atheism and unbelief did not dare deny, who, for all their hostility to existing forms of religion, were still forced to devise their own religions, such as the religion of reason, of humanity, etc.), then certainly the State cannot deny this element without contradicting its own aim and purpose. And history has not yet presented an example of a non-religious state. Religion has always been and is the natural spring which constantly pours forth streams of the highest and ideal principles, which condition the healthy moral development of social and state life. To deny religion for a State or society would mean to choke up this spring of living water with the garbage of ordinary sensual needs, and the result of this would be the inevitable death of higher moral life with all the consequences of dissolution. What importance religion has for the State is historically attested by the fact that the State has always sought a union in religion or the Church. Therefore, the principle of the juridical separation of Church and State is merely a new form of their internal union and mutual relationship, as we see in the United States of America. This internal union manifestly makes itself known both in positive and negative ways, but since this question was investigated by us earlier in sufficient detail[2], we shall here limit ourselves to only noting such facts as have direct bearing on the current reality of American life. On the negative side, what attracts attention in this regard is the remarkable fact that the American State is not at all indifferent to the confessional forms of the religious life of the people and consequently far from permits that unlimited freedom of religious conscience which is usually understood by the principle of separation of Church and State. Strictly speaking, the State allows only such confessional forms which in their content do not contradict the general religious-moral principle lying at the foundation of the American State and constituting, so to speak, its state religion or church. Since this principle is undoubtedly a Christian principle, any deviation from it is directly punished by the State. On this basis the American State, for example, cannot at all permit the existence on its territory of such religious sects as would consider it a duty of their conscience to offer human sacrifices or to perform rites contrary to Christian morality. From precisely this principle there logically flows that long-standing and stubborn struggle which the government of the United States of North America wages against Mormonism, which practices, as is known, polygamy contrary to Christian morality. This struggle at present, thanks to the energetic efforts of the current President Cleveland, has taken a severe turn, and the government does not stop even at depriving Mormons of certain important civil rights—election to government offices, for example—and has even subjected many to imprisonment, and this solely because Mormons believe in such a divine revelation, in their understanding, which contradicts the religious-moral code accepted by the State or its state religion[3].

But the connection of the American State with religion is also proven by a series of facts showing positive interaction between them. For instance, the government in America concerns itself with maintaining religiosity among the people. It is a well-known remarkable fact that in 1777 the American Congress entrusted a special commission to purchase in Europe twenty thousand copies of the Bible for distribution among the people in view of the fact that due to turbulent political circumstances one could not obtain paper and type for printing the Bible in America. In 1780 the same Congress appointed a special commission to oversee the printing of a domestic edition of the Bible in Philadelphia, and motivated this appointment by the fact that it highly values this pious and praiseworthy enterprise as contributing to the interests of religion, and recommended this Bible edition to the entire people of the United States. The very Constitution of the United States states: “Religion, morality, and science are necessary for good government and the happiness of mankind.” The famous Declaration of American Independence of July 4, 1776 was preceded by a solemn religious service. Subsequently all general public and state institutions bear upon them a clear imprint of Christian religion. Attached to Congress and legislative assemblies are special chaplains or clergymen, by whose prayers the sessions are ordinarily opened. Chaplains also serve with the army, navy, and prisons. The inviolability of worship is protected by strict laws. For trading in spirits in the proximity of a church the offender is subject to a fine, and a Black person to corporal punishment. Violation of worship through improper conduct, coarse conversation inside or even outside a temple or prayer meeting is punished with a heavy fine (from 25 to 500 dollars) or imprisonment.

[1] See “Christian Reading,” the last two issues of 1886: “The Contemporary West in Religious and Moral Respects.”

[2] Roman Catholicism in America, chs. VII–X, pp. 116–196; “The Wanderer,” March 1882; Religion in America, ch. “Freedom of Religious Conscience in America.”

[3] This argumentation became, so to speak, a commonplace in judicial practice in America in cases of this kind, and just recently we encountered it in almost verbatim form in the prosecution speech of an American prosecutor directed against the Mormons (Churchman, March 27, 1886, p. 340). Meanwhile, for this very argumentation, which plainly demonstrates the inner union of religion and state in America, the “Vestnik Evropy” proclaimed us “clerical” (May 1881 in the bibliography of an article about our book “Religion in America”). However, we cannot help noting with satisfaction that the view we set forth has at last penetrated the pages of secular journals. In the January issue of “The Observer” for the present year there appeared an article by L. Kotlyarovskii: “Freedom of Conscience in America,” and in it the author fully repeats our view, using chiefly acts and documents collected in our works on America to confirm it.

The Church and the Press. The Public Significance of Preaching. (Cont.)

The Bible is read obligatorily in public schools. The invocation of God is considered obligatory in every oath in court and even upon taking one or another administrative office, and the very holding of office is conditioned by a known religious test. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Constitution requires that a candidate for public office sign a confession that he believes in God and in retribution in the future life. The Constitution of the state of Maryland grants rights of religious conscience only to those who believe in God. In many states there are laws which prosecute all blasphemy. In the majority of states civil laws protect the sanctity of Sunday. In 1880 a court rejected the recognition of the obligation to pay a debt which had been made on a Sunday, and a certain traveler, wounded on a railroad, was denied monetary compensation for his injury on the grounds that he should not have traveled on the Lord’s Day. Finally, not to enumerate further, the State exempts from all taxes any real property serving religious purposes, as well as all professions having a religious character. As a result, when the government of the state of Illinois recently imposed a patent of three hundred dollars on each spiritualist medium (of which there have become far too many), the spiritualists raised an outcry about the restriction of religious conscience, arguing that the mediums in their assemblies perform the same functions as pastors in Christian assemblies.

Such facts could be increased to infinity if there were a need for that; but the facts presented are entirely sufficient to confirm the thought we are proving—that the separation of Church and State in America is only a special form of their internal interaction. We have examined this side of the matter in detail because it is least known to us, and consequently in society and in the periodical press one can hear the most perverted and tendentious views. Thus, only recently we had occasion to meet with an opinion which is evidently based on an unclear understanding of the general relationship between Church and State in America—namely, the opinion that the American school is completely secularized and religion has no place in it. This opinion is evidently based on an unclear understanding of the condition of the American school and stems solely from an abstract understanding of the term “secularization.” It is quite true that the school in America is secularized, that is, there is no formal teaching of the Law of God in it as in our educational institutions. But this secularization must be understood in exactly the same sense as the principle of separation of Church and State. Religious teaching is excluded from schools solely on the same ground as the Church is separated from the State—that is, due to the practical impossibility of satisfying children of different faiths, representatives of all possible kinds and shades of confessional distinction. But with the exception of formal instruction in religious subjects, the American school nevertheless retains the religious element to a significant degree, which strongly pervades the entire school atmosphere. Thus in schools a chapter from the Bible is read daily before the opening of classes, Christian hymns not having a confessional character are sung; at school celebrations speeches are made, for which in the majority of cases representatives of the clergy and local preachers are invited, naturally giving these speeches a religious-moral character, and so forth. Finally, religious education has a whole supplementary system in the excellently organized Sunday school, which not only fills the gap of the public school but through its close relationship with the Church and the family decidedly obtains dominant influence on the general spiritual disposition of children. In personal observation we have often been simply amazed at the extent of the religious knowledge of American children, especially in the area of familiarity with biblical history and the very text of the Bible itself. And as regards the depth of religious education, this is evidenced by the prevailing disposition even in adult young people. It may seem to us almost incredible, for example, such a fact as that several young people who set out on a hunt or gathered to spend a pleasant summer time somewhere on the shore of a poetic lake or picturesque Hudson, in the evenings fill the surroundings with choral singing—do not think of it as dashing or even erotic songs, no—of sacred hymns, deeply imprinted in their memory since their school days. And these religious hymns, which are studied in great number in school, are already sung by heart by five- and six-year-old children, and some of them enjoy such broad distribution and popularity that one can positively hear them at every turn. In view of this, to speak of the absence of religious education in the American school means to deny tangible facts. The opinion about the lack of religiosity in the American school was formed under the influence of Roman Catholic press, which is dissatisfied with this school and does not hesitate to call it even godless; but this dissatisfaction is entirely explained by the fact that the religious-moral element in the public school has a Protestant character, which for Roman Catholicism is hardly worse than unbelief itself, and therefore in Roman Catholic journalism there is a constant struggle, for example, against the reading of Protestant translations of the Bible in schools, with the direct assertion that it is better not to read the Bible in schools at all than to read it in the editions of the Bible Society.

Even more strongly does the religious element in America stand out in secondary and higher education, in the so-called colleges and universities. With regard to public education, the American State holds a completely different system than, for example, in our country or in the states of Western Europe. It considers itself responsible only for general public education, ensuring the conscious use of civil rights in the country. With this aim it maintains an excellent system of public schools, the course of which approximately equals our gymnasia. On this school it spends enormous sums of money and concerns itself so that all the population—both male and female—passes through it. But with this its concern for education ends. The American State knows no higher school funded by the state. All existing colleges and universities in America are entirely public institutions; the State has nothing to do with them; they are founded by private individuals, supported by donations from individual devotees of higher education, and therefore manage themselves independently of the government. But in view of the fact that these institutions have a completely public character, the religious-moral spirit which distinguishes American society could more vividly express itself in them. And indeed, American colleges and universities do have a stronger religious imprint than State institutions. By their very origin they in the majority grew out of simple church schools founded by various religious societies at a time when confessional disagreement was not smoothed over by the state principle of religious toleration. Consequently, they even now in the majority bear this confessional imprint and each of the principal universities of the country is in the exclusive direction of one or another religious community. For example, Cambridge University near Boston is under the supervision of the Unitarian community, Columbia College in New York belongs to the Episcopal Church, Yale University is in the hands of the Presbyterian community, and so forth. It is understood that their organization has a corresponding character, and at their head ordinarily stand rectors from members of the clergy of one or another community, naturally strictly watching over the interests not only of religion generally but of their confessions in particular. Upon becoming acquainted with this system of American higher education, we have more than once been struck by the involuntary thought of what horror would seize the culture-bearers if they were told that into our higher schools one needed to introduce even part of those dreadful “clerical” arrangements under which the highest science in the country of the most free-thinking people in the world contentedly lives!.. And how powerful this so-called “clericalism” is in American universities can be shown by a self-evident fact that once in a Presbyterian college there arose a whole storm of indignation against one professor because he placed the works of Spencer and Bain at the foundation of his teaching of philosophical sciences—those very thinkers whose ideas were taught among us almost in theological seminaries! And it goes without saying to what a degree absurd and false were all those references to America which were intended artificially to sustain in us a known movement toward the emancipation of women and the introduction of higher women’s education. The very character of the system of higher education we have described excludes the possibility of such emancipatory ideas, and America in this regard stands far behind us: it knows neither women’s universities nor close-cropped young ladies, and to what degree the very idea of the necessity of university education for women is little developed there can be seen from the fact that the so-called Annex, that is, the supplementary class especially for women, opened at the medical faculty of Harvard University, was almost subjected to closure solely because male medical students firmly refused to work together with them in the anatomical museum—simply from a sense of moral delicacy inherent in them. As for the religious-moral condition of the higher schools properly speaking, one can judge this from the fact that in these very schools Revivals, or specifically American movements of religious feeling, most often begin. The younger generation, as the most sensitive and responsive to spiritual needs, is the first to be seized by a wave of religious enthusiasm, and from there it spreads to the surrounding areas.

In view of such a relationship of the centers of higher education to the Church, it is not surprising that the entire intellectual and literary life of American society is pervaded with a strong religious element. In this regard, America presents a most instructive example. By its intellectual character, it is preeminently a country of positive knowledge. Physics and technological sciences occupy the foremost position, and it is in these very spheres of knowledge that American scholars chiefly acquire worldwide renown. And yet, in spite of this, knowledge there coexists in remarkable harmony with faith, science with religion. Not only that, owing to the dominion of the religious element in the general worldview, scientific theories themselves acquire a religious character. This has even happened to Darwin’s very theory, or the so-called “theory of evolution” as developed by Spencer. It must be said that by its technical structure it pleased the technical American mind and enjoys considerable popularity. But a remarkable thing is that to the American mind it is far from identified with crude materialism, as happened, for example, in our country, where the press pointed out its mechanical aspects with special malice, as if excluding the possibility of everything spiritual and moral, and preached almost with relish the “axiom” of man’s descent from the ape. On the contrary, in America the “theory of evolution” merely gave occasion for the highest religious-moral speculations; in it they found the key to better understand the orderly world-order prevailing in the universe, a new step toward grasping that, in Spencer’s expression, unknown force which leads the world toward higher perfection through wonderfully purposeful laws. Under the influence of this theory, there even formed a special “religion of evolution” which sees in this theory the solution of the greatest philosophical problems about the relation between freedom and necessity, the reconciliation of the principle of love with the dominion of law in the governance of the universe. This of course does not mean that in the theological respect such speculations find correct application. On the contrary, owing to the dominant sectarian principle of religious life in America, they often lead to hazy, sectarian-tinged sophistry. But we speak of the power of religious influence in the intellectual life of the American people, and this is entirely confirmed by the fact presented.

The same influence stands out sharply in American literature generally and periodical literature in particular. In this regard, first of all it must be said that the classical book which exerts the greatest influence on American literature is the Bible. In studying the religious-moral life of the American people, nothing struck us so much as the degree to which the holy book has become incarnate in the entire structure of intellectual and social life. It is not merely a reference book—in our sense—but is constantly in the hands, thoughts, and heart of the people. Not to mention that you will find it before any other book not only in every house but in every hotel and restaurant, you will note that texts from it are written on visiting cards, on doors, you will find them even in newspaper advertisements. The younger generation, having passed through the American secularized school, amazes one with tremendous knowledge of biblical texts by heart. Biblical texts alongside typical phrases from classical poets and writers of the English race are constantly used in literature and even in newspaper editorials. In view of this, any event related to the Bible acquires the significance of a major public event. We shall never forget the public excitement which occurred upon the occasion of the appearance in 1881 of a new translation of the Bible into English. Already two weeks before its publication, in both newspapers and in society, there was talk only of this translation. And these were not empty rumors. On the very first day of its sale in New York, 300,000 copies were sold, on the next day 200,000, and so on. One newspaper in Chicago, situated two thousand versts from New York, in order more quickly to acquaint its numerous readers with this translation, printed the entire Gospel of Matthew by telegraph as a correspondent’s report, and in the next Sunday issue printed the entire New Testament in half a million copies, which were sold in the course of one day at five cents per copy. The newspaper press spent two weeks analyzing this translation, and some particular lovers of precision even recalculated the number of words and letters in the new translation, in order to derive various conclusions from the comparison of the numbers obtained with such data from the old translation. At that very time we could not help but be struck by the sad contrast between this all-consuming interest and the indifference with which the Russian translation of the Bible was received among us.

The Church and the Press. The Public Significance of Preaching. (Cont.) (2)

In view of such significance of the Bible, it will become clear why American literature bears such a strong imprint of the biblical and generally religious element. But as for the periodical press in particular, this element is even more noticeable on it by virtue of its, so to speak, origin and conditions of existence. The majority of monthly journals in America owe their origin to colleges. Every college that feels scientific and literary strength in its corporation equips itself with a journal, in which professors share their scientific and literary labors with the public. So matters stand in the majority even to the present time, and with the exception of the journal The North American Review, and a few simple and illustrated journals published by major publishing firms, American journalism is in the hands of professorial corporations. And thus, owing to this, American periodical monthly press fully reflects the serious spirit of American colleges—namely, a strong religious-moral imprint. On the pages of these journals constantly appear articles on various higher theological, philosophical, and religious-moral questions, which in our country can be found only on the pages of little-known ecclesiastical journals. And generally one must say that American educated society relates with a much livelier interest to higher religious-philosophical problems than our society does. This need is naturally met by the periodical press, and it is remarkable that this interest is constantly growing. “Our weekly journals,” says one American writer, “investigate with growing attention and interest the great current religious questions. Our Reviews (that is, our thick journals) devote themselves chiefly to the discussion of religious problems. Now, more than at any other period of our history, our writers make religion the main subject of literature. Even novelists introduce religious questions into the substance of their tales.”[1] Alongside purely religious questions come philosophical ones, and speculative thought enjoys remarkable success on the classical ground of positive or applied knowledge. We have formed a conception of Americans as soulless technicians and practical materialists. And yet for this people so many journals of speculative philosophy are published as can hardly be published in any European country. And these journals all stand out by their character of elevated idealism. Such are, for example, the journals The Platonist in Missouri, Journal of Speculative Philosophy in the famous philosophical town of Concord near Boston, those Athens of American enlightenment; the “Religious-Philosophical Journal” in Chicago, and so forth. And that these journals are not simply products of incorrigible lovers of speculation, do not represent a voice in the wilderness, can be judged by the eloquent fact that, for example, the religious-philosophical journal in Chicago is distributed in 9,000 copies. As for the spread of properly religious journals, it is sufficient in this regard to point to the fact that one weekly newspaper Christian Advocate is distributed in 50,000 copies weekly, and some illustrated religious newspapers are distributed positively in hundreds of thousands of copies. But the influence of the religious element in America on public consciousness does not end even here. Besides literature, preaching in the church has an even more powerful and direct influence, which owing to special circumstances has received high development in America and has become an important public force. The best preachers, such as Beecher, the brother of the famous writer Beecher Stowe, author of the world-famous tale Uncle Tom’s Cabin, are positively the most popular person in the entire country. His sermons are transmitted by telegraph to all the newspapers of the country (and even in England), and the major New York newspapers publish them in large excerpts. Such attention, however, is not limited to Beecher alone; it extends to other preachers as well, and as a result a fine custom has developed according to which Monday editions of newspapers are filled with excerpts from the sermons pronounced on the preceding day. Thanks to this custom, not only is the Gospel of God’s word more widely distributed, but each person can avail himself of the whole sum of religious-moral lessons taught on a given Sunday. Through these accounts one can always follow the state of preaching and religious-theological thought in the country, and these same accounts in turn serve as an important incentive for preachers constantly to maintain the height of their calling. When we first became acquainted with this fine custom, we more than once thought why our newspapers should not follow the example of our transatlantic friends in this regard and place in their Monday and post-holiday issues accounts of sermons pronounced on the preceding day, all the more so since for lack of material they are ordinarily filled with all sorts of old and useless rubbish.

And thus this entire sum of diverse religious influences has as its result that public consciousness and public activity in America bear a strong religious-moral imprint, giving the entire life of the American people a distinctive character of spiritual originality and energetic self-activity. We now turn to characterizing this side, insofar as it manifests itself in the area we are considering.

[1] Index, February 23, 1883.

2. Public sensitivity to the interests of religious-moral life

Care for the Religious-moral Education of Children. Sunday Schools and Bible Classes. The Christian Association of Young People. The Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Temperance Society. The Civic Virtue of the American People. The Essence of American Democracy and its Instructive Aspect

Public self-activity naturally presupposes a known degree of vitality and responsiveness in regard to certain principles of social life. When this vitality and responsiveness are absent, society is certainly indifferent to even the most glaring violations of the most precious principles and traditions for it; but such a condition presupposes either extreme underdevelopment of public self-consciousness or the decrepitude of spiritual life generally. Something quite different is observed in America. There the young people still live to a considerable degree with the enthusiasm of youth, which is not dulled even by the stern practicality of life, and they are extraordinarily sensitive to the interests of the higher principles of their social life. And since their social life, as we have seen, is deeply pervaded with the religious-moral element, nowhere does this sensitivity manifest itself with greater energy than in the area of religious-moral life. At every deviation from the generally accepted religious-moral principle public opinion declares itself with remarkable force against the violation. In proof of this one could cite numerous examples, but we shall limit ourselves to two or three. It is known with what strictness Sunday is observed in America. On this day not only all commercial, industrial, drinking, and entertainment establishments are closed, but even public libraries—with the aim of providing rest for those who work in them. And to what degree public opinion is strict in this regard can be judged by the fact that when in 1848 the inauguration of the new president, which ordinarily takes place on March 4, coincided with Sunday, public opinion did not permit the violation of its sanctity even by this great national celebration, and contrary to custom the “inauguration” was postponed to the following day. In 1876 public opinion declared itself with equal force against the opening on Sundays of the world exposition in Philadelphia, notwithstanding the fact that here public opinion had to contend with a strong foreign element in the form of diverse-speaking and diverse-believing exhibitors and visitors. In one of the large cities an impresario of one of the city theaters decided to depart from the general custom and began to give performances on Sundays as well, counting on significant income. But he was mistaken. Public opinion energetically declared itself against such an innovation by opening a subscription among the better local society with an oath never to visit such a theater if it would open its doors on Sundays. And this subscription took on such extensive proportions that the bold innovator faced complete ruin, if he had not publicly apologized to society and renounced his intention. Still greater sensitivity to the interests of religious-moral life was once shown by public opinion in New York, a city which, it should be noted, owing to the constant inflow of an enormous wave of European immigration, has considerably lost in its purely American typicality. The well-known theater impresario Abbey, having noticed in society a considerable interest in the religious drama performed at ten-year intervals in Oberammergau, decided to stage this medieval drama from the life of Jesus Christ on an American stage. With this aim considerable expenditures were made by him, specifically spent up to 20,000 dollars (40,000 rubles), and yet in the end he was forced to abandon this enterprise because not only did an open subscription yield no results, but public opinion declared itself so strongly against such profanation of sacred history—both in the press, in preaching, and in public assemblies—that the impresario did not dare to act against it, which he announced in print in his notice of the cancellation of the plan.

With such sensitivity of public opinion to the interests of religious conscience, it is understandable that American society cannot be indifferent to the religious-moral needs of the people, and it indeed exerts enormous efforts to satisfy them, and above all in the younger generation, upon whom rest the hopes of the state. This concern is especially noticeably expressed in the organization of a system of religious education. With every church there necessarily exists its own Sunday school, under the supervision and direction of the pastor, upon whom rests all responsibility for it. It is held either in the church itself or in specially arranged vestibules and buildings on Sundays. The conduct of the Sunday school is facilitated by the fact that children are not deprived of their holiday through it, since there are no lessons in public schools on Saturday, and children come to Sunday school with fresh and vigorous powers, and moreover the very conduct of the school strikes one with its practical simplicity and public sense. The whole school, ordinarily consisting of several hundred and even thousands of children, is divided into many small groups—from five to ten children—and each group or so-called “class” is superintended by a special teacher or instructress. It is understood that such a system requires a tremendous teaching staff, but it is willingly, one might say lovingly, supplied by the parishioners themselves, and chiefly by young people of both sexes. And thus the whole parish in its numerous representatives conducts the great work of religious instruction of children, and this teaching is all the more effective because the teachers and instructresses are often parents and older brothers and sisters of the children. But even apart from this, the teaching acquires a heartfelt, family character in view of the fact that teachers become attached to their groups, which they supervise for several years in succession, and extend their observation beyond the time of the Sunday school meeting to the family, where they are ordinarily received as the closest members. The very work in school is rather a verification of the knowledge acquired at home during the week. In school each student is given a special sheet[1] on which the entire lesson is printed, which he is to learn by the next time. The lesson ordinarily consists of several verses from the Bible, the most important of which must necessarily be memorized (from 10 to 15 verses), and several explanatory questions and answers to the passage being studied. There also, in special type, is printed the so-called “golden text,” that is, the text expressing the essence of the moral teaching contained in the passage of Scripture being memorized. Then follows a series of practical remarks, very useful both for students and for teachers. And in general on this sheet is grouped such a mass of useful knowledge that after studying it the entire passage of Holy Scripture becomes entirely clear to each child. The school is opened and closed with a general prayer, and since the work is interspersed with singing of sacred hymns, which are also studied by children, it acquires a special attractiveness for children, who go to Sunday school with irresistible eagerness as to a holiday. To support the system of Sunday schools there exists a broad society, the so-called “American Sunday School Union,”[2] which possesses a considerable fund from which, among other things, money is spent on the purchase of books and other aids for poor schools. This society also supplies all schools with the described lesson sheets, which are published periodically with the designation of the lesson for each Sunday. At the end of each year the society prints a detailed report, by which one can judge the state of instruction in Sunday schools. We have a report for 1882, from which among other things can be seen that in the reported year Sunday schools were attended by seven and a half million children. With the report is appended even a map, showing with special red markers the distribution of schools throughout the country. In a word, this is a kind of public ministry of religious-moral education and instruction of children. In Sunday schools, as we have said, chiefly young people of both sexes are engaged, but among the teachers are also found respectable elders, who have devoted their whole lives to this good work. And among the latter it is not rare to meet persons of high public standing—bankers, famous lawyers, city mayors, judges, governors of individual states with their wives, and even members of Congress and legislative assemblies. For example, in the city of New Jersey, neighboring New York, the teacher in Sunday school was the rector or so-called president of the local college, and he did not abandon this teaching even when he became a senator of Congress. The Supreme Judge Marshall (in Vermont) remained a teacher in Sunday school until his death. In the city of Cincinnati among the teachers of one of the Sunday schools is the head of a large banking house. President Harrison spent the last Sunday of his private life in the Sunday school before his departure to Washington in the famous White House, where he had previously been a teacher. In a word, the Sunday school in America is the best expression of the religious-moral sense of American society, and in its organization is a highly effective instrument for maintaining religion and morality among the people. In conclusion of the sketch of the Sunday school system, one can further mention that alongside Sunday school goes the so-called “Bible classes.” This is also a kind of school for religious instruction, but a school for all adult parishioners. The Bible classes assemble on known days of the week, and there the pastor explains a known biblical reading before hundreds of listeners, many of whom possess high education. These classes can be compared to our non-liturgical conversations, but the essential difference lies in the fact that here the pastor not only explains the known “lesson” but also proposes questions to his listeners, with the aim of ascertaining how well they have assimilated the subject of the conversation—that is, the matter proceeds in a purely catechetical manner. Thus, thanks to the system described, the people in America learn religion throughout their lives—from earliest childhood to deep old age, and since all this teaching has Scripture as its subject, it is no wonder to meet in America many persons—not only deeply knowing Holy Scripture but knowing it all by heart. And yet some say that religion is excluded from schools in America, and on this basis they construct even entire more or less “liberal” theories.

Sunday school through its system of education ordinarily imbues children so thoroughly with the spirit of religiosity and attachment to the Church that even after completing their course they unwillingly part with it and seek a replacement for its religious-moral education in the institution of special associations in parish churches. These are the so-called “parish associations of young people.” Such associations exist at every parish church and have as their aim the maintenance of a moral bond between young people of one parish at that critical moment of life when young people begin to disperse from the common nursery along the paths of various professions and worldly occupations. These associations ordinarily assemble on known days in the vestibule of the parish church; here papers are read, religious hymns are sung, and in general time is spent in pleasant mutual communion. It is not rare that such associations invite known scholars to deliver lectures, which then acquire a public character, and especially frequently are famous foreigners traveling through America invited for this purpose. But these private parish associations form only a pale reflection of one large association which constitutes the true ark of salvation for thousands of young people of both sexes. This is precisely the well-known “Christian association of young people,” the organization of which is so interesting that we consider it not unnecessary to make acquaintance with it.

[1] Scholar’s Lesson Paper, a monthly publication containing four Sunday lessons in each issue.

[2] The American Sunday-School Union.

Care for the Religious-moral Education of Children. Sunday Schools and Bible Classes. The Christian Association of Young People. The Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Temperance Society. The Civic Virtue of the American People. The Essence of American Democracy and its Instructive Aspect. (Cont.)

“The Christian Association of Young Men”[1] has existed in America since 1852, and although its concept was borrowed from England, in its practical application it fully reflects that profound religious-moral and also practical-life wisdom that characterizes the American people. Its idea is very simple and could easily have arisen in the mind of anyone more or less inspired by love for humanity, someone who had occasion to observe the lives of young people in such large centers of public life as Paris, London, and New York. Into these, so to speak, basins of public life, thousands and tens of thousands of young people flow each year who, stepping out onto life’s stage for the first time, seek their first paths here, leading to the alluring career for youthful minds. By its very nature this is clearly a critical moment in a person’s life, and upon it depends whether one will manage to come through one’s life path whole and unharmed, or whether one’s strength will weaken in the struggle with the flood of new impressions and the abyss of life will draw him in and carry him toward ruin. The tragedy of the situation is increased further by the fact that the young man, far from his homeland and the beneficial influence of his native hearth, finds himself completely alone here amid a sea of strangers who care nothing for his struggle and suffering. And it is unsurprising that while many strong in spirit and patience make their way forward, many others despair and fall, unable to endure the heavy struggle of life and the pernicious temptations—they perish amid indifference, and sometimes perhaps even amid the malice of those around them. It was precisely this observation and the compassion for young people flowing from it that led to the founding of the “Christian Association of Young Men.” According to the charter of the New York chapter of this society, it “aims at the improvement of the spiritual, mental, and social condition of young men in the city of New York through the organization of lectures, discussions, libraries, reading rooms, public meetings, and all other means and aids that can contribute to achieving this goal.” But the most remarkable aspect of this society is that it, in accordance with the prevailing sentiment in American society, immediately assumed a deeply religious character, and by its fundamental idea this society aims “to unite, as stated in one circular, those young men who, recognizing Jesus Christ as their God and Savior, according to Holy Scripture, desire to be His disciples in their faith and in their life, and to combine their efforts in spreading the kingdom of Christ among young men”[2]. As something called forth by a deep and pressing need, the society found sympathetic response everywhere and in just a few years succeeded in spreading to all the more or less significant cities of America. And now, in its current organization, it produces incalculable benefits for the young generation of the country. This society represents a kind of religious-moral brotherhood. Any young man contributing annually two dollars to the treasury can become a member, and for a trifling sum he gains the opportunity to use all the extensive rights afforded by the society. In New York the society owns a huge building housing a large library, a magnificent reading room, and gymnasium facilities. Lectures on all manner of subjects calculated to meet the needs of young people are held weekly; there is prayer meeting every day, at which sacred hymns are sung; from time to time famous scholars and theologians are invited to deliver public lectures on the most pressing questions; and finally, at certain intervals there are even entertainment gatherings where young people have the opportunity to spend time pleasantly in innocent recreation. And all this members of the society enjoy free of charge. But the best aspect of this society lies in the fact that within it every young man feels himself as if in his native environment: all members invariably call one another brothers, and in the society’s representatives every young man can find familial sympathy for any misfortune or disaster that befalls him. Finding himself in a completely unfamiliar city without a place, he can boldly turn to the society in full confidence that he will not only receive sympathy but also be helped to find suitable work, will receive temporary aid, will be visited in illness, and during hours of evening boredom and despondency he can count on finding encouraging and uplifting diversion in that very “Christian Association of Young Men.” And how many young forces are thus preserved for public life, forces that would otherwise have not withstood the struggle for existence or the struggle with pernicious temptations of noisy city life! This highly useful society has branches in almost all American colleges and universities; chapters of it exist in almost all more or less significant cities, and we ourselves have more than once experienced its moral and religious influence. As a foreigner cast into the midst of a world entirely alien, I sometimes experienced attacks of that oppressive feeling called homesickness. The melancholy heaviness weighed on my heart, work fell from my hands, and in such heavy moments more than once I sought encouragement and diversion precisely in the “Christian Association of Young Men,” in its reading room and in its public meetings. And more than once in such circumstances did I find my thoughts turning to our northern capital. How many young people gather there each year from all corners of Russia, arriving with the brightest hopes and youthful enthusiasm, with a hunger for higher education; and how many disappointments, crushing despair, oppressive loneliness do these enthusiasts have to endure solely because they nowhere encounter strong moral support, which is what young nature most needs. And in view of this there is nothing surprising in the fact that our student youth presents such easy prey for all manner of dark agitators. Having no morally healthy recreations, they seek low and crude diversions; encountering no morally ennobling solidarity, they are drawn to the solidarity of criminal associations and perish by the dozens—for the Church, society, science, and the state. The Americans in this respect are more practical and more philanthropic than we are. According to the latest report we have (for 1882), the “Christian Association of Young Men” has up to one hundred thousand members, and this hundred-thousand-strong army of deeply religious and highly moral young people constitutes a reliable bulwark of the moral well-being of the country not only in the present but, most importantly, in the future.

But besides such societies that aim at the positive promotion and strengthening of religious-moral spirit in the people, there are also in America societies that wage direct struggle against negative phenomena of moral life, and among this latter kind of societies perhaps the most remarkable and at the same time least known among us is the so-called “New York Society for the Suppression of Vice”[3]. It is perhaps most remarkable because it demonstrates how strong is the feeling of moral self-protection in young American society and how much sounder judgment the inhabitants of the democratic republic display in this regard than representatives of our liberal journalism. I recall how this journalism with fury and the cynical coarseness characteristic of it fell upon our great, now lamented patriot Ivan Sergeyevich Aksakov, when in the darkest and most shameful epoch of our society—the nihilist bloody debauchery—he proposed a plan for forming in society itself, apart from the police, so to speak public organs for uncovering dens of sedition. Inquisition, espionage, Middle Ages—all this, along with many other terrible things, was brought up there, solely to throw mud at the thought of the great patriot. And yet precisely such a society as Ivan Sergeyevich envisioned exists and flourishes on the soil of the freest country in the world—precisely in the democratic republic of North America. And I now must ask forgiveness before the great shade of the passionate patriot, that despite his written request to me, I did not succeed in timely acquainting the Russian public with this aspect of American life in print, and I fulfill the promise I gave only now. “The Society for the Suppression of Vice” is precisely an expression of public self-initiative in the struggle against moral-social evil. The direct responsibility for the pursuit and suppression of vice and crime naturally rests upon the official organs of the police and administration. But not only among us but also in America do the official organs not always display sufficient energy in carrying out their direct duties, and not being morally interested in them, they usually confine themselves to merely formal compliance. If to this we add the possibility of bribery and other temptations offered by agents of dark deeds to the official guardians of order, it is unsurprising that many measures directed at suppressing vice and protecting public morality remain without strict enforcement. And so, to better protect public morality in this very respect, the “Society for the Suppression of Vice” was formed in New York. It is composed of enthusiasts of public virtue, numbers many respected persons from society and the clergy, and is chaired by the former rector of New York University, the distinguished Comstock. And this very society—horribile dictu!—has secret agents who watch all those spreading and making vice, catch them even where the official eye of police officials does not penetrate or does not wish to penetrate, and deliver them into the hands of justice; they themselves appear in court as prosecutors, provide witnesses to prove the truth of the accusation, and rest content only when vice and crime receive their deserved punishment before the law. But the chief and special aim of this society is the persecution of immoral and corrupting literature in all its forms, and its activity in this regard is tireless. They are the strictest censors of immoral elements in literature, especially popular and children’s literature, and one can confidently say that they would subject to merciless burning and destruction no small portion of that children’s and popular literature which is published each year in our country with permission of the official censorship. We say—destruction and burning—in the literal sense. Agents of the society sometimes seize and confiscate entire editions of immoral books and, turning the publishers over to the court, literally burn the editions in flames, as is shown in the vignette adorning the front page of the society’s reports. Thus we see here a remarkable example of public censorship in a country that enjoys the fullest freedom of the press. Thanks to the efforts of this very society, important laws have been enacted in the New York state to limit the spread of immorality through literature and the press, and members of the society are relentless guardians of these laws. The society’s influence extends to all colleges and universities, and it especially concerns itself with protecting student youth from the harmful influence of immoral literature, and to this end directly appeals to the leadership of educational institutions for cooperation. The zeal of this society in pursuing its goals can be judged by the fact that each year it destroys entire thousands of pounds of immoral literature and subjects publishers to fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars before the law. Last year the society fined such publishers three hundred thousand rubles in our currency. Finally, this same society extends its influence to all public and private libraries, compiles catalogs of books it considers harmful, and these books cease to be distributed in the library to any more or less youthful, spiritually not yet established readers. Therefore, in the celebrated country of free press, works of, for example, Zola are less accessible to young men and women than what we call “forbidden” works are to gymnasium students and schoolgirls—even those in the first grades.

[1] Young Men’s Christian Association.

[2] Hist. Sketch of the Young Men’s Christian Associations, N. Y. 1860, p. 5.

[3] The N. Y. Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Care for the Religious-moral Education of Children. Sunday Schools and Bible Classes. The Christian Association of Young People. The Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Temperance Society. The Civic Virtue of the American People. The Essence of American Democracy and its Instructive Aspect. (Cont.) (2)

That same sound judgment characterizes the widely distributed network of so-called “temperance societies” in America[1]. It must be said that the people of America, despite the entire sea of diverse immigrants continuously pouring in from various parts of the world and of course bringing with them their established habits and customs, displays remarkable sobriety, especially the rural population. In large cities, especially where the incoming German and Irish element is strong, the vice of intemperance of course finds rich soil for its spread, but even here it is confined to the lowest, unsettled, ignorant classes, and visibly weakens as people rise in mental and social station. In the middle-educated classes, which include teachers of city schools, minor officials, clerks, college students, and such people, American propriety requires almost strict temperance. Once invited to an entertainment evening where hundreds of young people of both sexes from exactly these classes had gathered for public amusement, I was struck by the unusual-for-us-in-Russia fact that such an evening was completely a “temperance evening”—that is, the strongest drink served was merely lemonade (and it, I must confess, involuntarily and immediately transferred my thoughts to that “lemonade” with which certain evenings of our student youth are enlivened). When public opinion, so to speak, so regards the vice of intemperance, the law and courts have every opportunity to boldly and openly take the side of the virtue of temperance. And indeed, the law and courts in America, to a degree remarkable for a republic, even sternly punish the vice of drunkenness. On Sundays drinking establishments are obligatorily closed, drunkards on the streets are subject to arrest and fine, the law and courts in every case side with sobriety, for example by fining the proprietors of drinking establishments where workers are allowed to get drunk and squander their earnings. Every mother of a family has the right to bring suit for recovery from the proprietor of a drinking establishment where her husband squanders his hard-earned money, in full confidence that the court will side with her. But even all this does not satisfy public conscience, and it strives for even greater suppression of vice—through the medium of “temperance societies.” Their chief aim of course consists in spreading the idea of sobriety among the people through sermons, the press, meetings, and so forth, but at the same time agents of the society step forward, so to speak, as public keepers of existing laws against intemperance. These laws, through negligence or deliberate leniency by police officials, may sometimes not be observed, as indeed they are not observed in some cities. But in such case the unrelenting punishers of law-breakers are the agents of “temperance societies.” It has often happened that agents of these societies, penetrating on Sundays into drinking establishments through hidden entrances under the guise of patrons, at the same time caught the law-breaker red-handed. These same agents serve in court as voluntary and unrelenting prosecutors where intemperance must be punished, and as selfless defenders where they need to support the side of the virtue of temperance, as for example in cases of suits against proprietors of drinking establishments. Temperance societies are spread throughout the country and it is remarkable that all are organized according to the system of religious societies. They are usually headed by preachers and pastors, members upon joining sign a special “confession,” call each other brothers and sisters, at meetings sing exclusively religious hymns, and so forth. In a word, these societies too fully reflect that profound religious spirit with which the entire life of the American people is stamped. And the meetings of these societies, as we ourselves have had occasion to observe, produce on those present such an engaging impression as the meetings of religious communities. In some states temperance societies have gained such significance that they came to head the government, and the natural result of this everywhere is the complete closure of all drinking establishments, with the right to sell alcoholic beverages confined only to pharmacies, and that only upon a doctor’s prescription. An example of the force of persistence in advancing the society’s ideas by its individual members can be found in the well-known case of the former President of the United States, Hayes. He and his wife belonged to one of the temperance societies, and upon moving into the White House to the high presidential office, they resolved to remain true to the society’s oath, and to this end undertook a gigantic struggle with the highest Washington society, which, like any capital society, is not averse of course to the consumption of wine, a favorite accompaniment to grand public and state dinners. First of all, they banished this custom from the White House, then with truly heroic self-denial applied the ideas of the temperance society also to grand public and state dinners, and finally, after stubborn struggle with the established custom of capital society, a struggle that cost great moral suffering and self-denial and was borne chiefly on the shoulders of the heroic Mrs. Hayes, the idea of temperance triumphed. Washington society resigned itself to the necessity, and dinners without wine even acquired a particularly fashionable character. And so thanks to the persistence of the president’s family, the capital of the North American republic was, at least during the four years of Hayes’s presidency, the most sober capital in the world, and Mrs. Hayes with her distinguished husband were honored with the most enthusiastic addresses of thanks and praise from all the temperance societies in the country. It is remarkable that the ideas of temperance societies find favorable soil in American colleges and universities, and we ourselves have had occasion to meet educated young men who, having signed the “confession” of temperance societies, positively avoided even touching the insidious drink with what seemed like superstitious fear. It is unsurprising that there are found fanatics of temperance who carry their preaching about it to absurdity. In a Baptist community there once arose, on the initiative of extreme temperance advocates, even a question of whether wine could be used in the Eucharist. And it is remarkable, this question at one time became an all-consuming interest of the day: entire series of scholarly and publicistic articles appeared about it, daily newspaper press zealously occupied itself with it, reporters scoured the city gathering and printing opinions of all more or less competent people, and finally this question was resolved by the answer that yes, it could be, but only unfermented wine, on which supposedly the Last Supper was celebrated. As is evident from individual articles appearing in American journals, this question has not lost its living interest down to the present time, and this entire curious movement presents a not uninteresting feature of public life of our trans-Atlantic friends.

Besides these societies one could point to a whole series of others in which again the power of the religious-moral self-awareness of the American people manifests itself, but the examples already given are sufficient to show how deeply the religious element penetrates the public life of this people, how it imparts special vitality and moral seriousness to their life and activity. But to complete the characterization, I will point to one more feature that, flowing from the power of the religious-moral and indeed spiritual self-awareness of the people, excellently characterizes the general moral aspect of this young and highly promising people. This feature is an extraordinarily strong sense of civic virtue. The American—merchant, railroad magnate, scholar, professor—never confines himself within the narrow shell of selfish indifference to public interests, and hence the remarkable responsiveness to public needs and demands. One need only clarify some public need, and funds flow abundantly from everywhere. It only needed for the Roman Catholic cathedral held in Baltimore in 1884 to express the need for establishing a special Roman Catholic university in America, and money—literally hundreds of thousands and millions—poured in from all sides, and the university was opened one year after the idea was proposed. That same civic virtue showed itself in the fact that American society raised and maintains its entire system of higher education exclusively through public efforts, without any government assistance: all universities and colleges are founded and maintained from private means, professors are also maintained through private stipends, libraries associated with them are formed from private donations. Public libraries, museums, the Academy of Arts in New York were founded through private means of individual philanthropist-capitalists and are named after their founders (e.g., Astor Library, Lenox Library, etc.). Finally, every American considers it his sacred duty, by will, to set aside a portion of his capital for public needs—for churches, colleges, public schools, or generally for educational and charitable purposes. In newspapers one constantly reads of large donations by individuals, and a typical example can be found in the donation by California millionaire Stanford of twenty million dollars (i.e., approximately forty million rubles in our currency) for founding a university in California. Scholars and writers also for the most part bequeath their savings to the cause of science and education, and in most recent times one can point for example to the well-known historian Parkman, who bequeathed around one hundred thousand dollars to Harvard University. All these facts (many more of which could be cited) undoubtedly point to a high development of the sense of civic virtue, so to speak the consciousness of moral connection with the social-state organism, and again here the moving motive is undoubtedly that profound religious-moral spirit that lies at the foundation of all the life of the American people and which alone can lead the individual out of the pernicious mire of narrow selfish interest into the expanse of true Christian fraternity—which in everyday language is civic virtue. In observing such facts we often found ourselves involuntarily transported in thought to our distant homeland, and in such comparison the indifference stood out in an even sadder light, an indifference which complaint about serves as a constant refrain of journalism and all friends of public undertakings and enterprises. While for example we hear crying everywhere about the lack of means for public education, especially for maintaining the newly opened system of parish schools, in America according to official reports ten million dollars per year are contributed voluntarily in money and other donations for public education—that is, approximately twenty million rubles. But never did this unfavorable contrast for us stand out so starkly as in 1883, when our great writer passed away, one who had glorified our literature in the Western world (I.S. Turgenev. — Editor’s note). He, by his own declaration, ardently loved his homeland, was such a great patriot that from love for his fatherland he spent almost his entire life abroad (!). He possessed a huge fortune, which gave him an annual income of up to thirty thousand rubles, lived and died a bachelor. In such circumstances an American would certainly have founded an entire college in his name or forever secured the maintenance of public schools for an entire district, and thereby immortalized his name in a grateful country; but our great writer, who painted so artistically and eloquently in his works the spiritual poverty of the Russian people, that cry about the lack of means for education that resounds from end to end—it must be that out of love for this people and his homeland he left all his acquired and even inherited fortune to—his French friends… Of course, de mortuis aut bene, aut nihil; but when the time comes for criticism, it will undoubtedly evaluate this sad stain on the moral person of the talented writer at its true worth, and scarcely will all the brilliance of his literary genius be able to redeem this glaring lack of civic virtue and patriotic good sense…[2]

But we must conclude. From the observation and study of the life of the North American people, the conclusion naturally follows that the life of this people is pervaded by a strong religious-moral element, and that this element, as the most general and all-encompassing, imparts special vitality, so to speak an engaging enthusiasm and passion to every public activity and every public enterprise. The famous author of “The Life of Jesus Christ” F. Farrar characterized this peculiarity of the American national spirit strongly and expressively when, during his recent trip to America, characterizing the teeming industriousness of the people, said in one of his speeches delivered to students of Harvard University that the moving motive of this extraordinary activity is nothing other than faith, that faith which moves mountains. And in this respect lies an instructive aspect of American life for us. The sluggishness and lack of cohesion that characterize our public life, alas, goes hand in hand with religious indifferentism, which like winter frost slows all the wheels of our public life, enlivened only sometimes by the eccentric outbursts of sensational preachers alien to the national spirit of rationalist pietism. But if there is something instructive for us in the positive aspect of American life, then even more instructive is its negative aspect, which will form the subject of our next reading.

St. Petersburg.

March 30, 1886

[1] The Temperance Societies.

[2] When this lecture had already been read, we came across in the “Rural Bulletin” a fact which presents such a striking example of the contrast displayed in this regard by a simple Russian peasant that we find it appropriate to bring it forth here as proof of how much healthy patriotic sense can be found in the simple soul of a peasant than in the soul of a highly educated “intellectual.” Here is this fact: “In the village of Khabne, Radomysle district, Kiev province, during the first week of Great Lent, the local priest Fr. John was invited to give final rites to a peasant named Semyon Kovalev, who was dying of consumption and had no children. Kovalev was known for his exemplary management and thrift. After receiving the rites, the dying man expressed his wish that all his property, consisting of a house with its estate and three and a half desyatinas of arable and hay-cutting land, after his death pass into perpetual ownership of the local village school, toward the construction of which he donates 300 rubles, and another 300 rubles he donates to be deposited in the State Bank in perpetuity, so that the interest would go to aid homeless children. If for any reason the authorities did not permit him to establish a school on the property he had donated, then in that case he donates separately 1,100 rubles, with the stipulation that the money be placed in the State Bank and the interest be used to assist poor children attending the village school. The dying man wished that in the presence of the priest and several peasants invited for this purpose a will be drawn up and confirmed by the village administrator, which was done on February 24. Then the dying man expressed the wish that while he was still alive, building materials be brought to his estate for the school’s construction, so that he could see this with his own eyes from his bed. The peasants, fulfilling the will of the donor, began to bring wood for the future school and stacked it in the estate of the dying Kovalev.” Soc. Bulletin no. 14–15, p. 162.

Second Reading

3. The Doctrinal Essence of Protestantism and Its Ecclesiastical-Practical Failure. The Kingdom of Sects and Divisions

Protestantism in its Full Development. The Wandering of Religious Thought. Rationalism – The Unlimited Arbitrary Will of Preachers and the Degeneration of Preaching. – The Sectarian Insularity of Parish Churches and Their Inaccessibility to the Common People. – Helpless Victims of Religious Demagogues. – Dark Sectarianism With an Admixture of Charlatanism – “Independent Catholic” and “Physiological” Churches. – The Salvation Army

Any force, no matter how beneficial in itself, can bring benefit only when it acts under certain limiting and guiding conditions. Outside such conditions, even the most beneficial force either loses its good quality or assumes a destructive character. Fire is the most beneficial and most necessary element for human life and culture, and yet this very same fire at any moment, in the absence of restraining conditions, can grow into an all-consuming flame and turn entire cities to ashes. The same is true in the realm of religion. Strong faith and living religious feeling can move mountains, but they, in the absence of established regulating conditions, can give birth to phenomena that lie as a heavy burden on the conscience of a people. Such a phenomenon is observed in the religious-moral state of the American people of the United States. This people, as we have seen, is distinguished by strong energy of religious feeling and therefore is extraordinarily sensitive to the interests of religious truth; and yet the principal doctrinal system in which Christianity expresses itself in North America does not provide sufficient assurance to the religious conscience, not only of preserving truth, but against outright deviation from it. This is Protestantism, which appears as the predominant doctrinal beginning in North America and to which the country itself owes its settlement, for it, fleeing oppression in the Old World, sought freedom of development in the New. There, enjoying full freedom, it was able, without obstruction, to express its doctrinal essence in all its fullness, and therefore for evaluating the essence of Protestantism the study of the ecclesiastical-religious state of America provides the best data.

Protestantism as a doctrinal system is founded upon two main principles, from which all its content logically develops. As a negation of the Roman Catholic system, which carried external church organization to the point of suppressing all personal initiative, it began to teach that the church is only a spiritual, invisible society and members can be united in it only in the most general principle, namely only in faith; so that every believer, believing that he is redeemed by Christ, thereby becomes a member of the church, whatever his views may be in all other respects. Then, in contrast to the Roman Catholic system, which denied the individual his own participation in determining true doctrine, it rejected the authority of the church and tradition and determined that every person, with the help of his own reason, on the basis solely of Scripture, can and must determine what his religious doctrine should be, “what his faith” and moral code should be. Underlying this doctrine is evidently the thought that the realm of spirit is a realm of freedom, and therefore if there is anywhere man can be completely free, it is precisely in spiritual life, and especially in its highest sphere—religion. Hence the rejection in Protestantism of all authority and the provision to each individual person of complete freedom of thought. But in this a small thing was overlooked which deprives even truth itself of unconditionality, namely, that complete freedom presupposes the purest spirit; but since man is not a pure spirit but represents a combination of spirit and body, this very combination in itself already limits the spirit and places it in dependence on numerous completely extraneous conditions. As a consequence, limitation is necessarily introduced, whose limits may narrow as man rises on the steps of the ladder of education, or expand to the furthest degree—as he descends into the realm of ignorance and darkness. But there is no degree of education and enlightenment where the spirit completely throws off the chains of limitation and where it could contemplate truth not as in a mirror darkly but face to face, and therefore it always needs a certain authority that could serve as a criterion for its logical work. This truth found its fullest expression in our Orthodox Church, where within certain limits freedom of religious thought is allowed (and these limits are so broad that in them there is room for the greatest genius of speculative thought to unfold), and at the same time a firm, immovable, unchanging, supporting point is constantly provided for theologizing thought in the universal mind of the church, in tradition, constituting the result of centuries of thought and experience of all Christian society. Thanks to this, in the Orthodox Church every person, according to his intellectual makeup, can either experience with his mind the deepest truths of theology, or hold with simple faith to those established rules that serve as the external expression of these great truths, in full confidence that here he has immutable truth in its simplest, tangible for the simplest mind form, and this confidence is guaranteed by the high and immutable authority of the church. The believing Protestant finds himself in quite a different position. If he possesses the faculty of thought, then of course his enlightened mind can embrace and understand the highest truths of theology, and in history can even find some support for verifying his thought, but in view of the fact that for the Protestant mind there is no unchanging, binding authority in the form of the church, he can easily be carried away by the results of logical thought, attach to them greater significance than they actually have, and thus go beyond the bounds of true Christianity and fall into heretical error. He drifts like a ship on a boundless sea, having lost his compass. In the distant blue he seems to see a luxurious shore with a cozy harbor, he sets course there at full sail; but the mirage vanishes and the ship breaks into pieces on a submerged reef. But the position of the simple uneducated mass, which in even the most enlightened countries constitutes an immeasurable majority of the population, is even more helpless. Unable to independently construct a religious worldview and at the same time lacking the immutable authority of the church, which could substitute for insufficient personal reason, this mass under Protestantism must necessarily cling slavishly to the letter of the Bible, rely on the arbitrary interpretation of the pastor in understanding it, and in church life live by that very tradition which is denied theoretically, or become prey to all sorts of charlatans who come forward in the role of self-appointed reformers. All this we have had occasion to see in reality in studying the ecclesiastical-religious life of North America.

As to the speculative side of theology in America, the indicated extremes of Protestant theology were able to occur on American soil all the more easily because the American mind is extraordinarily inclined toward speculative thought. Here we have an entire speculative-theological school at the head of which stand such strong minds as Parker and Emerson. This school of American transcendentalism was formed on the soil of Puritan New England, where it now in the state of Massachusetts has as its representative a well-known school of speculative philosophy in the small town of Concord. It must be noted first of all that this speculative school, with all its deviations from the authority of the universal church and sound theology, is distinguished by profound religious spirit. Religion and philosophy in it are inseparable, and the school itself has as its ultimate goal the establishment of harmony between religion and science, for “science, in Parker’s literal expression, is the natural ally of religion, and to separate them means to separate what God has joined together.” Nevertheless, because here reason does not recognize the authority of the church, rationalism still gains complete dominance, and it leads finally theological thought to monstrous conclusions that destroy true Christianity. This was even observed by representatives of the Unitarian community in Boston.

When Emerson in 1838 in his introductory lecture at Harvard University expressed his confession of faith and directly rejected miracle on the ground that God’s intervention is conceivable only in the normal operation of the laws of nature, that church history had distorted by various exaggerations the personality of Jesus—“this sole spirit in history who fully appreciated human worth,” this lecture produced terrible alarm in the community, and in the well-known “Association of Preachers of Boston” the question was directly posed: does Emerson with his party belong to Christianity, or to a special “religion of Boston?” Parker answered this question with his sermon “on the transient and permanent elements in Christianity,” and there fully articulated what Emerson left unarticulated, namely, that their school sees in Jesus only a perfect type of religious man, who drew great religious and moral truths from his own conscience, animating them with his love for humanity; that among the transient elements in Christianity belongs the belief that the Bible contains a supernatural revelation and that in Christ there was a supernatural essence, and not merely that spiritual-moral perfection which He had in common with other great founders of religious systems. Clearly, this is pure rationalism, as we see it in the theories of Strauss and Renan. But nevertheless it did not lead to that complete denial of the supernatural and complete atheism which, as is known, Strauss ended in, but on the contrary, by the bent of the American mind, it led to the formation of a special church, the so-called “Free Religious Community,” at the head of which stood pastor Hinkley (F. Hinkley). And it is remarkable that this new “church” immediately declared those same legal rights that belong to other churches; namely, the right to solemnize marriages, to have real and tax-exempt church property, and so forth. But it must be said that a commission appointed by the legislative assembly to investigate whether the new community actually represented religion in the full sense of the word had doubts about this and therefore did not immediately grant it the required rights, which are granted only to truly religious communities clearly expressing faith in God. Regarding this matter, an interesting conversation took place between the chairman of the commission and Hinkley, throwing curious light on the murky vagueness of the symbol of faith of the new community. Since in the program of the community submitted for consideration it was stated that it had as its exclusive aim “the practice of virtue, the study of truth, and the cultivation of the feeling of brotherhood among people,” the president of the commission remarked to Hinkley that he did not see from the program to whom exactly they addressed their prayers in their worship. To this Hinkley answered:

“As individuals we represent all shades of free inquiry, but as a community we have a certain element of definite worship. All sound-minded people recognize a certain Power outside us and above us. We think that we recognize the great principle of things when we recognize this Power, although we do not recognize it as other churches do.”

“What then do you worship?” asks the president, bewildered by this impenetrable speculative fog.

“I am fully disposed to explain to you,” answered Hinkley, “but I do not think it is the duty of the government to define what people should or can worship.”

“I have heard,” the president continued, “you say earlier that you recognize neither God, nor Christ, nor the Bible.”

“All that I said,” answered the preacher of nebulous religion, “is that we cannot recognize them as other churches do. We generally recognize only a certain Power influencing people.”

“But is what you call Power precisely what others call God?”

“Yes, you are beginning to grasp it. From this point you will encounter irreconcilable disagreements, both within churches and outside them.”

Despite this nebulous church being granted legal rights as a religious community, one can be certain that the president of the government commission never did clarify to himself what exactly would be worshipped in this strange church, whose name would be invoked in oaths and who would be called as witness to marriages solemnized by the ministers of this church.

But it is clear that such nebulous thought is accessible only to a small circle of philosophically educated people, from whom the new church was constituted. Nevertheless there is no absurdity that would not find special popularizers with the aim of carrying a certain nebulous idea into simple popular consciousness. On the general principle of free religion, a new community was formed in New York under the name “Society for Moral Culture.” The Boston community had already reduced almost all its thought to the practical aims of moral improvement, but still recognized over all an unexplained and unclear for the founders of the new church Power. In the New York community a further step was taken along the path of eliminating metaphysics from theology, and the exclusive goal of this community was directly set as moral improvement without any reference to a supreme Power. Moreover, the moral element was so emphasized that it completely subordinated the religious, and, according to the explanation of the founder of the “Society for Moral Culture,” Felix Adler, religion itself is merely an auxiliary phantom, needed only for the external unification of moral doctrines. He preaches every Sunday in New York about the height and holiness of moral perfection; but constantly makes known to his listeners that he recognizes neither God nor the immortality of the soul. “I do not accept theism,” he said in one of his sermons. “But the foundations can outlast the building and serve for some new building. And with all my strength I hold to the foundations of theism: it provides the possibility first for denying chance, that is for the conviction that order reigns in the world, and then also for the conviction that this order is good, that is, that there is progress in the world.” It must be noted that Adler is of Jewish origin, and his community at first consisted almost exclusively of representatives of that reformed Judaism which on the free soil of America strives to cast off the yoke of Talmudic law. But subsequently gentiles too, that is, members of other faiths, joined, and from these diverse elements the community in question was constituted, and in it began to seek a hereditary refuge all those restless minds who ultimately felt under them the disappearance of all solid ground. That this is truly a desperate situation is proven by the remarkable fact that into this and similar new communities entered people, many of whom had passed through almost all communities and sects, vainly seeking satisfaction of the living religious need of their spirit. A typical example can be served by the well-known American thinker and writer Orestes Brownson. Born in a Presbyterian community, from early childhood he began to seek the true church, experienced all religious communities and sects up to the extreme sect of Unitarians, finally entered a rationalist community and became a zealous propagandist of Boston transcendentalism as preached by Parker and Emerson, and nevertheless in the end passed into Roman Catholicism, where he died in 1876. This restless wandering through the thickets of sectarianism and this desperate leap from nebulous transcendentalism into the arms of the medieval system—what is this but the despair of a strong religious mind at finding rest in the system of Protestantism? And such examples are not isolated. On the contrary they are vivid types of the wavering and wandering of theological thought which appears as necessary and inevitable in this system, which deprives the person of reliable support in the teaching authority of the church.

Protestantism in its Full Development. The Wandering of Religious Thought. Rationalism – The Unlimited Arbitrary Will of Preachers and the Degeneration of Preaching. – The Sectarian Insularity of Parish Churches and Their Inaccessibility to the Common People. – Helpless Victims of Religious Demagogues. – Dark Sectarianism With an Admixture of Charlatanism – “Independent Catholic” and “Physiological” Churches. – The Salvation Army. (Cont.)

But this wavering and wandering of thought is not confined to individual persons. It characterizes the very communities or churches into which the Protestant population of America is divided. This is most clearly evident in the fact that within the communities themselves discord usually occurs, which at first leads to the division of the community into parties disagreeing in their understanding of essential points of doctrine, and as this discord intensifies further, it leads to complete rupture, sometimes resulting in the formation of new communities and sects. Such a phenomenon is observable even in such established communities as the Episcopal Church, where a party was found discontented with the growth of sound Catholic principles in this church, as a result of which it separated into a new community under the name “Reformed Episcopal Church.” The same is observable in Methodism, Presbyterianism, and other communities where the leaven of Protestantism still works. Among their members there are always such reasoners and enthusiasts who wish to make full use of the right of personal freedom of religious thought, reject the conventional forms in which the doctrinal principle happens to take shape, and at their own risk form new and newer communities and sects up to nebulous theosophy and Mormonism. But most remarkable here is not this fragmentation but the fact that in Protestantism, even in the most established communities, there is no firm assurance in one’s own doctrine. A person belongs to a known church, zealously attends and carefully listens to sermons; but at the same time the worm of doubt constantly gnaws at the religious conscience: does this church truly express the truth of Christianity? Does the preacher correctly expound it? Is not that preacher in the neighboring church, who expounds the same subjects in a completely different spirit, more correct? And this is a painful feeling. It is like the feeling of a ship’s passenger who is unsure of the ship’s soundness and the captain’s competence, and therefore is constantly troubled by the thought, will not the ship now strike a submerged rock, on which it will break and founder? Or again it resembles the state of a man unsure of the architecture of his house, and therefore constantly worries whether he has laid the supporting beams firmly enough and whether the ceiling will not collapse at the slightest tremor? If there were a higher authority in the church, then of course one could turn to it for resolution of doubts and troubling uncertainties. But in Protestantism there is no such authority. It, having entrusted the conscience of each to build its own salvation, rejected even the authority of the bishop and gave the flock the simple preacher as a guide. But the preacher himself presents no guarantees of the correctness of his teaching; he alone can be guided by his personal reason, and consequently personal arbitrariness completely reigns in his teaching. This truly constantly happens. Different pastors and preachers of the same community often explain known Christian truths completely differently, and arbitrariness reaches such a degree that pastor conferences often have to resort to repressive measures to humble or bring to stricter doctrinal accuracy their brothers who have deviated too far from the known doctrinal symbol. But these measures for the most part do not achieve their goal, because the conferences themselves, as private institutions, do not have sufficient authority. And meanwhile this arbitrary will of the preacher lies with all its weight on the conscience of defenseless and helpless parishioners, for whom in case of decidedly impossible views of the preacher the only means of restraining him remains to reduce the salary paid him by the parish. And so it often comes to pass that a known parish decidedly does not know what views their preacher actually holds, for he often, so as not to disturb the conscience of his parishioners, masks his views in murky generalities. This happened even with the famous Brooklyn preacher Beecher. Once he produced extreme sensation in his community by openly expressing his sympathy for the Roman Catholic Church, which Protestants were accustomed to seeing only as the so-called “synagogue of Satan,” under the presidency of the Antichrist—the Pope, and then on another occasion even more astounded his followers by stating that he considered the doctrine of the fall and original sin as an outworn medieval anachronism. Such astounding shifts decidedly threw all his numerous admirers into indescribable confusion, and long was it debated what exactly their famous preacher believed in and what his brilliant moral teachings were founded upon? If such cases are possible even with such lofty, enlightened, and honest preachers, then it is unsurprising that in others lower in all respects this theological arbitrariness reaches incredible proportions and serves as a source of numerous misunderstandings, not only sowing confusion in church life but also harmfully affecting the religious conscience of the people. This arbitrariness, apart from dogmatic worldview, is expressed also in the choice of subjects for sermons. Since preaching in America represents a special profession for which the best orators are selected, receiving enormous sums of money (Beecher for example receives twenty-five thousand dollars, that is, up to fifty thousand rubles), it is natural that rivalry arises among preachers, and those less gifted are not averse to resorting, to maintain their fame, to such means as have little relation to the true aims of preaching. Noticing for example their inability to captivate their listeners with exposition of higher religious and moral subjects, American preachers begin to resort to artificial measures, abandon purely religious and moral subjects, intrude into public and political life, exploit all manner of sensational rumors, turn to advantage striking and piquant court cases, and not rarely play on the strings of public passions, especially when they are inflamed to the extreme—as for example during presidential campaigns, that is, the electoral struggle for choosing the President of the United States. Hence the very subjects, advertised in advance in the newspapers, strike one with their eccentricity and sensational character, evidently calculated to attract listeners. As an example one can point to such subjects: “on heavenly police,” on “white horses in heaven,” on “dead lions and living dogs,” “on the best choice of bridegrooms and brides,” on how “the Lord thrashes us” or “how Satan sows us,” and so forth in the same vein. Of course, such subjects are capable of attracting even such listeners as would not have gone to church if the subject of the sermon were for example some serious religious and moral question; but on the other hand such preaching clearly loses its true character and often leads, especially when touching on personal interests, not to the establishment of peace on earth and goodwill among men, but to the opposite results. In 1881 near New York there occurred a terrible disaster: a light two-story pleasure steamboat, crowded with hundreds of passengers, many of whom drowned, collided with an ocean ship. Preachers did not fail to make this catastrophe the subject of their sermons, and one of the young beginning preachers gave his subject the most offensive character toward the captain of the ill-fated steamer, based on an effective juxtaposition of “the Captain of Salvation” (Captain of Salvation), that is, Jesus Christ, with “the captain of destruction.” And so when he was at the height of his oratorical depiction of the incompetence of the captain who through his mismanagement had allowed such a disaster, suddenly a loud and angry voice rang out across the entire church: “You are a liar!” Terrible confusion ensued, everyone rushed at the disturber of church order, who turned out to be the captain of the ill-fated steamer himself, and the sermon ended with a police report. Such cases are not uncommon and they constitute a factual denunciation of the false direction of American preaching, as a result of which it loses a considerable portion of its moral teaching value.

Beyond doctrinal and homiletic arbitrariness, the extreme Protestant principle manifests itself in the extraordinary separatism of churches. Despite the fact that in America the population theoretically divides into several large communities, in reality each parish church considers itself entirely autonomous, acknowledging no higher jurisdiction over itself. Among preachers, it is true, various conferences and assemblies exist where the affairs of the whole community are discussed; but these conferences possess no canonical character, and the pastor submits to their verdicts and decrees only as long as he finds them beneficial and advantageous, and he can always reject their authority regarding the ordering of affairs in his own parish. For him, the highest authority and jurisdiction reside in the parish itself, represented by its trustees, who pay him his salary and upon whom depends his very right to occupy his position. And such separatism not only fosters again the fragmentation of doctrinal opinion, but at the same time leads to a remarkable phenomenon that greatly narrows the beneficent influence of the church. The matter is that the church, as a separate unit, becomes the full property of the parish; and by parish is understood only those who bear the expenses of its upkeep; consequently, the first condition for belonging to the church becomes the sum paid for the church’s maintenance and the preacher’s support—whether in the form of direct subscriptions or in the form of payment for a seat in the church, which is organized in this case entirely by the system and plan of public clubs. As a result of this, the church inevitably loses the character of universal accessibility; those of greatest means obtain predominant significance, people making the largest contributions, purchasing the most expensive seats. Competition and rivalry, especially in churches where popular preachers serve, extraordinarily raise the prices for places, commonly sold by auction (as for example in Beecher’s church where the price for seats sometimes reaches a thousand dollars); subscription to these seats becomes a matter of a kind of fashion and respectability, and thus the church closes itself within a narrow circle of more or less wealthy classes and becomes completely inaccessible to the poor classes of the population. And thus in America the church decidedly loses the character of that truly Christian principle, according to which it ought to represent a complete brotherhood of all believers in Christ and according to which in it there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, and consequently neither rich nor poor, but all are one in Christ. By such an organization, establishing the dominion of plutocracy, the American church pitilessly excludes from its doors precisely those who hunger and thirst, those who labor and are heavy laden, to whom the preaching and gospel were addressed principally by Christ Himself.

And so the common people, and especially the poor classes in great cities, are deprived of this greatest blessing that can fall to a human being on earth—namely the blessing of satisfying the essential needs of their religious-moral nature. This deprivation of the right to brotherly communion in the church is felt all the more strongly and heavily because by the principle of the country’s civic and state life all citizens are equal in their rights and duties, all equal members of one democratic republic. And this theoretical equality is flagrantly violated precisely in the domain of the most sacred rights to Christ’s gospel! But having been left, so to speak, beyond the church’s pale, the poor and common people do not lose through this their striving to satisfy their religious-moral thirst; on the contrary, because of this deprivation the thirst grows stronger still, and the people are compelled to seek this satisfaction outside the church, from whatever source presents itself. And here, in our view, opens the darkest side of the church-religious life of America. Here the simple and most spiritually helpless people, those most in need of the church’s guidance, are utterly delivered into the power of wolves, often appearing in sheep’s clothing. Into the arena step various ‘benefactors’ of the common people, those uninvited or unrecognized preachers who, lacking the means to establish themselves in church circles, begin seeking popularity among the forsaken masses of the population, preaching them a poorly understood Gospel and, to act more powerfully on the masses, produce the crudest confusion of the spiritual with the material, of Christ’s Gospel with the preaching of socialism, stirring up not only the spirit but alongside it the most dangerous passions. And the poor people, abandoned by the church, go in masses to these sermons, gradually imbibing the most pernicious ideas and being drawn into lawless sentiments. But these uninvited preachers do not confine themselves to this. Having felt their influence, they inevitably become inflamed with the passion of ambition and therefore strive to come forward as special religious reformers, having a mission to renew church-religious life. With truly demagogic impudence they begin to hint at their higher calling, and then directly proclaim that they have received a supernatural revelation commanding them to found a new church—like the ‘church of the saints of the latter days’ or the ‘church of the second coming’ and so forth. And here precisely is where sectarian ferment is born and takes root, and the madness by which we ordinarily form our view of church-religious life in America generally. We are far from thinking that the church in its best representatives completely abandons the people. No, we know that among the best preachers there are many self-sacrificing persons who, understanding all the abnormality of this state of affairs, after preaching before the brilliant assembly of their congregants descend into the darkest slums of poverty and desolation to speak a word of comfort to their wretched inhabitants, accompanied often by material charity (for which there is a special collection box for the poor at each church); but we speak generally of the church’s relation to the poor classes of the people, and in this relation the church in America sins against the fundamental principle of Christ’s Gospel. Alongside wandering preachers, attempting in some way to satisfy the religious needs of the people, outright charlatans and speculators often come forward, who make from the people’s ignorance and religion a source of profit or an object of political ambition. In 1880 a new community was formed in New York under the pretentious name of the ‘independent Catholic church.’ Its preachers, under the grand title of ‘bishops’ and ‘presbyters’ of the Roman Catholic Church, by means of preaching and pamphlets began to declare that the time had come to throw off the tyranny of the papacy, and that to this end they themselves, despite the height and security of their position, left that church and shook the dust from their feet, to seek true happiness in Christ alone, to whom they called especially the Irish, who are very numerous in America and zealous Catholics. This preaching found considerable success among the lowest classes and interested even me personally, as at that time I was occupied with my composition on ‘Roman Catholicism in America’ and was carefully following all movements in that church. But what was my astonishment when a few months later I read in the N. Y. Herald that all these so-called ‘bishops’ and ‘presbyters’ had been brought to trial for a whole series of frauds and fraudulent extortions of money from various pious persons for matters having no connection whatsoever to religious mission! It turned out that this entire ‘independent Catholic church’ was a speculative scheme of a few charlatans who conceived of exploiting the religious feelings of a credulous popular mass. To the same category belongs the so-called ‘physiological church,’ founded in New York by one doctor around the same time. Intrigued by an announcement in the newspapers about the peculiar worship in this monstrous church, accompanied by sermons of its founder himself—Doctor Linner—I once went to this church and was struck by the filthy, shameless impudence of this founder of the ‘physiological church.’ The whole thing is built on crude deception and unscrupulous exploitation of credulous people. At the entrance a fee is charged for seats. The doctor himself sings, to the accompaniment of a small harmonium, some sort of decadent hymns in honor of nature; then delivers a sermon about the mysterious forces of nature, and in conclusion offers—or rather forces upon—his victims at an exorbitant price his pamphlets, mostly of dirty medical content, and the whole ‘worship’ ends with the distribution of the doctor-preacher’s business cards, on which his medical practice is advertised as capable of conquering even the most chronic and medically incurable forms of disease.

Protestantism in its Full Development. The Wandering of Religious Thought. Rationalism – The Unlimited Arbitrary Will of Preachers and the Degeneration of Preaching. – The Sectarian Insularity of Parish Churches and Their Inaccessibility to the Common People. – Helpless Victims of Religious Demagogues. – Dark Sectarianism With an Admixture of Charlatanism – “Independent Catholic” and “Physiological” Churches. – The Salvation Army. (Cont.) (2)

In such a state of things it becomes quite understandable that any more energetic religious movement is able to spread rapidly among the dark masses and draw them into the crudest forms of sectarianism, provided only that it gives some satisfaction to religious feeling. The most striking exposer of the abnormality of such a state of the popular masses in church-religious respects is the very significant success of the notorious sect known by the name of the ‘Salvation Army.’ It originated in England, but by its character found a living correspondence in the conditions of the church-religious state of the poor classes in America, so that it can serve as a characteristic of purely American life. The secret of this monstrous, militarily caricatured community’s success lies in the fact that it set itself the task of addressing religious gospel precisely to those classes of population that are forsaken and neglected by existing churches. And the wretched people are seized with their whole soul even by such a monstrous movement, being content that here Christ and Christ’s love are preached to them, however crude and repellent the forms. I shall never forget the piercing, heavy feeling that I experienced when I first encountered the ‘Salvation Army.’ Setting out one Sunday to Brooklyn, a wealthy suburb of New York, to listen to a sermon by one popular preacher, I suddenly heard some choir loudly singing some songs to the measured beats of a drum. Learning that this was the ‘Salvation Army,’ I immediately abandoned my previous intention, turned toward where the songs were heard, and there presented itself to me an almost incredible spectacle: along the broad sidewalk stretched a long procession of men and women in distinctive military uniforms with epaulettes, chevrons and various military insignia, and in measured cadence, marching in pairs, led by a ‘captain’ and drummer. The whole party sang a sacred hymn with a constant refrain: ‘O, I love Christ,’ and the captain, turning from time to time to the procession, interspersed his singing with loud commands—one-two, one-two—‘O, I love Christ!’ The procession headed into a building serving as the sect’s usual meeting place, and there began such a wild, frenzied scene, more horrible and abominable than anything I could have imagined. The whole party fell to their knees and began making frenzied swayings with frenzied howling, and finally achieved what they call the ‘outpouring of the Holy Spirit.’ This outpouring was granted to some fat, elderly man, who positively stretched out on the floor and under the maddening refrain of the ‘army’ and the captain’s exclamations raised an unbearable, hoarse, shattered howl, literally a howl, terrible and abominable. An old woman rushed at him with all her might, and her feeble, aged, whining, shrill voice even more intensified the horrifying ugliness of the scene. Meanwhile the captain, with a wildly grinning face, kept leaning toward them, saying: ‘O bliss, O sweetness!..’ In conclusion everyone rose and those present were offered pamphlets about the great regenerative significance of the ‘Salvation Army,’ as well as separate issues of the newspaper it publishes: ‘The War Cry,’ one copy of which I have preserved out of curiosity to this day. Such then is the notorious ‘Salvation Army,’ and it makes considerable conquests among those dregs and refuse of our civilization, with which all great cities both in America and in Europe are overflowing.

Thus from the foregoing it is evident to what abnormal, one might say sickly phenomena Protestantism leads when its fundamental principle is applied without restriction—the denial of the church’s authority and the provision to each individual person to build his own salvation by his own reason and according to the conclusions of that reason to arrange his own life. Thanks to this principle, people with highly developed speculative ability drown in a sea of nebulous transcendentalism; middle-class and materially secure classes shut themselves within narrow church circles, inaccessible to the common people, and the simple, dark people become helpless victims of religious charlatanism or frenzied sectarianism. Such a state of affairs could be ruinous for the religious-moral life of any other people who possessed a less strong religious spirit. But the American people, as we demonstrated in the previous reading, is a very religious people, and its healthy nature not only does not perish under the corrupting influence of extreme Protestantism, but on the contrary boldly and forcefully struggles against this influence and even manages to a significant extent to overcome this phenomenon or to deprive it of much of its corrupting power. To a characterization of this struggle we now turn.

4. The American People’s Striving for Church-Religious Unification and the Significance of This Fact. Conclusion

The Protest of Religious Feeling Against Church Fragmentation (Revivals). – Consciousness of the Insufficiency of Protestant Principles and the Search for Firmer Foundations of Church-Religious Life. – The Striving for Church Unification and the Renewal of This Movement at the Present Time. – The Maturation of the Catholic Element in the Theology and Practice of the Episcopal Church. – The ‘Congress of Churches’ and Its Significance. – Conclusion

Protestantism, as a confessional principle introducing the personal determining element into religious-moral life, naturally must promote the quickening of religious-moral self-consciousness more than any other confessional system. Taking from the individual every support point in the church’s authority and leaving him solely to answer for himself the question: ‘what is my faith?’ and to compose his own personal creed, it obviously constantly maintains the reason and conscience of each individual in a state of excitation, which is all the stronger since it concerns the greatest questions that can occupy human thought. As a result we must acknowledge as certain the fact that in Protestant countries religious-moral self-consciousness always necessarily stands higher than in countries with strong church authority. But this advantage is not unconditional. It would be a greatest blessing if Protestantism, introducing this stimulating element of personal self-determination into religious-moral life, had not lost sight of the other side of the matter—namely that man, as an individual, is a limited being, that completely depriving him of a support point in the church’s authority means casting him onto a frail boat without oars, rudder, and sail onto a boundless sea and forcing him to exhaust himself working with his own hands to reach some peaceful harbor. It is clear that this position, for all its compulsive force to work, cannot be considered favorable or saving. Man on a frail boat may, through happy chance circumstances, reach harbor, but that will be mere chance, nothing more. In most cases he will exhaust himself from exhaustion and despair at the sight of the impossibility of reaching the desired shore, powerlessly drop his hands and become the victim of the first squall, which will either swamp his frail vessel or cast it upon the rocks and smash it to pieces. In precisely such a position stands each individual in Protestantism. Outwardly we see here strong animation, we marvel at the energy of religious feeling and the thirst for religious truth, but we do not see how much oppressive despair and helplessness lie at the foundation of this outward animation. We do not see how these separate individuals, entirely left to themselves, powerlessly struggle with the doubts oppressing them and with what desperation they look about them, vainly seeking an authority that could inspire them with some confidence and allow them to breathe calmly in the bliss of immutable faith. It is not surprising that under such a terrible condition, constant excitation of theological thought and religious feeling often leads to complete exhaustion. And therefore in Protestant countries we often see alongside extraordinary excitation of religious-moral self-consciousness extreme decline and darkening of it. Religion here can be compared to a sea which now rages and storms, now seems to die in motionless calm. The same can be observed in America. Despite all the force and height of religious-moral self-consciousness, the religious feeling of the American people is visibly tired from fruitless ferment, and religious life takes forms in which external ceremonial often obtains more legal obligation than in countries with strong church authority, because in periods of exhaustion of religious feeling for the Protestant Christian nothing remains but to hold soullessly to the dead letter of the Bible and that wretched ceremonialism which obtains some recognition from what one might call customary law. At the same time naturally the religious-moral self-consciousness of the people itself becomes diminished, and this diminishment is undoubtedly manifested in that caste-like or cliquish division in which church-religious life in America is expressed. But this condition is obviously not natural. It stands in direct contradiction with the fundamental idea of Christianity, constantly recalling the indivisible brotherhood of men, redeemed by the one and same Savior and God. And so despite all the artificial barriers dividing people into various confessional and church classes, in the American people from time to time there manifest themselves strong impulses in which irresistible religious feeling strives to destroy all these artificial partitions and at least for a time unite all in a single brotherhood under the headship of one Savior of all. Such impulses are known in America by the name of ‘revivals of religion’ (Revivals of Religion) and constitute a most remarkable and distinctive phenomenon in the religious life of this country. They express the highest degree of religious excitation and at the same time an evident protest against the church-fragmenting principle operative in Protestantism.

A ‘revival’ ordinarily comes when religious life reaches the highest degree of exhaustion and weakening, when everywhere extreme deadness reigns and dead forms suppress the spirit. At this time in religious-moral and generally spiritual life everywhere a kind of oppressive heaviness is felt, like extreme weariness in a hot noon, and everyone seems to thirst for a refreshing breath of breeze. And it is during these heavy moments that a ‘revival’ begins. In its external form, it is properly speaking nothing else than a series of religious meetings calculated to excite those present to the degree of fullest religious exaltation. Having designated some locality requiring, in the opinion of religious leaders, a lifting of religious spirit in it, Methodist, Presbyterian, or other Protestant church representatives direct their preachers to that locality, who there gather all they can for their prayer meetings in a church, where the singing of hymns exciting spiritual zeal takes place and the pastor delivers sermons with vivid depiction of the torments of hell awaiting hardened sinners and the bliss prepared for the righteous. Following such a sermon, which profoundly shakes the nerves of the most sensitive among those present, the pastor invites all to engage in mental confession and quiet prayer: all bow their heads, cover their faces with their hands and spend some time in prayer during which the deep silence of the church is broken only by the slow tolling of a solitary church bell. But as the general self-reflection of each into his conscience continues, the nerves become increasingly tense, and here and there begin to sound deep sighs, suppressed sobs, groans; then from among the praying some one rises and, under the influence of irresistible religious enthusiasm, begins to confess aloud his sins, beating his breast, tearing his hair and begging his fellow citizens to pray to the Almighty for his deliverance from the torments of hell. The example is contagious, especially for nervous people. Not three or four days pass of this religious ‘revival,’ accompanied by abstinence from food, attendance at temples several times a day or equally frequent presence at religious meetings under the open sky, before the nervous excitation of the sinners being turned to the path of truth begins to take the form of an epidemic. Self-accusations of sin even pass into hysterical fits in some, while in others the striving to atone for transgressions takes practical form in the conversion of property to charitable works. Not infrequently such religious excitation reaches the point where entire villages begin to sell their property and liquidate their affairs in firm conviction of the imminent coming of the end of the world. The past winter in one rural locality of New England as a result of such a ‘revival’ a whole party of villagers formed, expecting the end of the world from hour to hour; they sold all their possessions, ceased sowing their fields, made themselves white linen garments in which they dressed, spending the nights in vigil and prayer, waiting for that hour when they would be taken alive to heaven in this raiment[1]. But this distinctive religious enthusiasm is not limited to rural people, and often manifests itself in even more amazing forms in such great cities as New York. One such ‘revival’ occurred in New York in 1857, when the religious enthusiasm of New Yorkers was excited to such a degree that merchants, bankers with their clerks and other businessmen locked their offices and shops in the middle of the day, flocking in crowds to prayer in churches; when local theaters were extemporaneously converted into halls for religious assemblies, where preachers addressed their sermons to the public, which packed the buildings. That period’s religious movement in the states was so intensive and universal that it attracted the attention of the entire civilized world. But the most remarkable side for us of these ‘revivals’ consists in the fact that with any more or less strong movement they go beyond the bounds of confessional forms and assume a universal, indifferently Christian character. A strong religious wave, so to speak, overflows those artificial and petty barriers which Protestantism sets up in the form of small, mutually hostile communities and sects, sweeps them away as the irresistible surge of tidal swell sweeps away the sand castles built by children on the shore, and members of all communities and sects indifferently gather at the same religious meetings, sing the same sacred hymns and all merge into one religious brotherhood, animated by the same feelings, by the same thoughts. Together with confessional divisions, all other intellectual, social, and economic divisions are smoothed away. Access to the religious meetings of ‘revivals’ is free for all, and here, one might say, is the only occasion when it is presented to the poor folk, without any admission fee, to participate in a public worship service together with all other classes endowed with higher intellectual and material blessings, which in ordinary times divide people in this democratic country even more firmly than in any other countries.

It is understandable that these revivals have only a temporary character. After a certain period of tension the excitement and enthusiasm weaken, and in church-religious life the former fragmentation is restored, enclosing people in separate, divided church circles and religious communities. But the inner meaning of these movements retains its full significance. This is in our view a spontaneous protest against that soulless petty sectarianism which corrodes the religious-moral life of the people, and at the same time it is a protest against Protestantism itself. Indeed, here in strong excitation religious feeling seeks satisfaction in practices denied by Protestantism. Granting each individual the freedom to build his own salvation by his own forces, Protestantism nevertheless deprives man of such powerful aids to religious-moral life as, for example, fasting and confession. But the soul obviously cannot do without these aids, and therefore during religious ‘revivals’ people surrender to terrible self-flagellation, exhausting fasting and abstinence, and all-public frenzied confession of their sins. Here evidently those saving institutions which in the Orthodox Church are recognized as beneficial aids in the work of faith and morality and are carried out in calm and confident consciousness of their saving character, people in Protestantism are compelled to win by force, which in turn leads to the extremes of frenzy.

Thus ‘religious revivals’ in their essence are nothing other than a spontaneous protest of religious, one might say instinctive feeling against the abnormalities of Protestantism and serve as a vivid expression of the consciousness of its insufficiency as a confessional system or church. But this instinctive feeling naturally becomes clear consciousness where living religious feeling is joined with clear and strong theological thought. And in America there are not a few theologically educated persons who from careful study of the church-religious life of the American people come to the sad conclusion that Protestantism cannot satisfy all the demands of religious-moral life. This consciousness was expressed especially sharply soon after the fratricial war that began in the ‘60s. That very war was a consequence of the extreme spiritual division of individual states, and when this sad crisis occurred, all the best minds deeply pondered the fateful question: where to seek firm guarantee against the repetition of such a terrible catastrophe? And then the national consciousness answered this question with remarkable unanimity in the sense that guarantee could serve only religious unification. At that very time the idea of a single church arose, which ought to unite under its banner all the American people. An idea undoubtedly great, worthy of a great people, animated by strong and living religious-moral self-consciousness. But how to realize it? Religion had fragmented into a multitude of separate confessional forms, each of which recognizes itself as the sole truth, and therefore when the idea of church unification arose, each of the communities came forward with a claim that it was the one that should become that single, all-embracing church which the American people yearned for. But this naturally could only lead to new irritation and rivalry between communities, and thus could only contribute to that division from which the people yearns to be free. Then from the midst of theologically-minded people there emerged a man who was able to rise above all confessional prejudices and look into the very essence of that church-religious principle which lies at the foundation of the spiritual life of the American people, and came to the firm conviction that the cause of the disorders in religious-moral life lay in the very essence of Protestantism itself, that it cannot satisfy the highest demands of church life and cannot serve as the principle on which a single, strong church of the unified spiritual American people could be formed. This was the well-known American preacher of the Protestant Episcopal Church Dr. Whittingham, who died in 1882. He publicly expressed his thoughts in 1868 from the church pulpit in his famous sermons on the ‘insufficiency of Protestantism,’ which at the time made a tremendous impression on public opinion in America, as they were stenographically recorded and printed in all the best newspapers. In them, among other things, he expressed bitter reproaches against Protestantism which, in his opinion, having rejected firm church principles, stepped onto the slippery path of rationalism, as a result of which a general and terrible crisis was being prepared for all religious-Christian consciousness. Unbelief grows and develops in it, practical life frees itself from the influence of religious-Christian principles and the ‘communion of saints’ is destroyed. It is too one-sided in its narrow individualism and too cold for religious enthusiasm, so that in it there is no outlet for those naturally enthusiastic persons who could find their happiness only in complete renunciation of gray practical life to devote themselves to serving a higher divine ideal (monasticism). As a result of the one-sided abstractness of its principles, it proved inaccessible to the popular masses and therefore degenerated into aristocratism with brilliant preaching and high fees for church seats. But even among the most intelligent classes its wandering instability develops indifference, as a result of which many, tired of the changeability of forms, reject all forms of church life and live by ‘general’ Christianity alone, losing themselves in its nebulous indefiniteness. Thus Protestantism, in the opinion of Whittingham, by itself shows its wretched insufficiency to satisfy the religious demands of humanity. It constitutes a wholly unsuccessful and harmful movement and prepares a terrible crisis. Salvation must be sought from it. But where should it be sought? – And then with his healthy sense this famous preacher came to the theory that lay at the foundation of all subsequent church-religious development in America, especially in the Episcopal Church; this is namely the theory of the ‘Catholic’ church, which alone can satisfy the highest demands of church-religious life. According to this theory the existing ‘confessions’ in the church are only branches of one and the same Catholic or universal church, and these branches are the Orthodox-Eastern, Roman, and Anglican, while Protestantism with its sects is already a severed branch from the living trunk of the church. Therefore salvation must be sought precisely in this ‘Catholic’ church. Here obviously the preacher-theologian’s thought reached a high degree of church-religious contemplation; but perhaps thanks to this very height he did not complete his analysis, did not indicate more concrete embodiments of the Catholic church and limited himself to only its general abstract definition. But what the preacher’s thought did not fully express was soon supplied by the demands of the times and life, namely by the common consciousness of that Episcopal Church from whose midst this courageous voice had sounded.

[1] See “Russian Bulletin” no. 327, 1885, and Letter from America by V. N. Mac-Gahan.

The Protest of Religious Feeling Against Church Fragmentation (Revivals). – Consciousness of the Insufficiency of Protestant Principles and the Search for Firmer Foundations of Church-Religious Life. – The Striving for Church Unification and the Renewal of This Movement at the Present Time. – The Maturation of the Catholic Element in the Theology and Practice of the Episcopal Church. – The ‘Congress of Churches’ and Its Significance. – Conclusion (Cont.)

The Protestant Episcopal Church of America is the natural daughter of the Anglican Church, and therefore in it there is preserved more Catholic self-consciousness and sound church nature than in all other Protestant communities of the country. Consequently it is naturally more responsive to the deep religious-church movements of the country and in it precisely, more than in any other, the great idea of church unification can find living resonance. And indeed, when this idea arose, this very church with special zeal undertook its realization, and it more boldly than others came forward as that very church which is destined to unify all the American people under itself. The task is obviously colossal and requires of the church that would undertake its realization fully firm, historically established principles capable of bearing all the weight of the task. And it is understandable that at the first attempt to undertake this great work, the Episcopal Church had to acknowledge its complete incapacity for its accomplishment. In its confessional essence this church represents an unsuccessful compromise between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, so unsuccessful that these opposing elements could never achieve harmonious combination in it, and therefore with any more or less strong movement in it a pernicious and fatal division makes itself felt. Such division was not slow to manifest itself now, and therefore the first General Convention, which was charged with considering and deciding this extraordinarily important question, came to the sad realization that the Protestant Episcopal Church, left to its own forces, was unable to take upon itself the great task of church-religious unification of the American people. A sad realization, but it necessarily had to compel the best thinkers of this church to seek a way out of this sad condition. If the Episcopal Church cannot take upon itself the great mission with its present principles, it undoubtedly must seek support in firmer church principles, namely in the principles of the Catholic church. A theologian-thinker like Whittingham[1] saw salvation precisely in the Catholic church, but his Catholic church was too abstract to have significance for the pressing, vital needs of the time. And then the Episcopal Church took a new step in the search for truly Catholic principles, came to the great thought that the best embodiment of Catholic principles must be sought in the Orthodox East, in those very churches in which to this day lives universal Orthodoxy in its unchanged, classical purity. And it was precisely this process of thought that led to that notable movement of the American Episcopal Church toward rapprochement with the Orthodox East, which actively continued throughout the ‘60s and the beginning of the ‘70s. A special committee was formed, whose duty it was to study the Orthodox East and correspond with its chief representatives through written and personal relations. Many members of the Episcopal Church personally traveled in Russia and the East, entered into personal relations with patriarchs, synods and metropolitans, among whom our famous Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow held the most prominent place; and some members, for example (now deceased) Bishop of Florida Freeman Young and Dean Hale decided even to study the Russian language in order to gain direct acquaintance with Russian theological and liturgical literature, and the determination was so unswerving that the latter finally overcame what seemed for an American almost insurmountable difficulties of our language and now reads Russian books with sufficient facility. This movement had as its aim the establishment, so to speak, of such a union between churches as would enable the Episcopal Church to strengthen itself in its foundations and thus obtain the possibility of proceeding to the great task of church unification of the American people, and it is in all its details comprehensively described in our books, as well as in journal articles, to which we refer those interested in this movement. It, as is known, did not lead to its direct goal, and the whole matter was limited to a simple exchange of friendly sympathy between churches. But even this was a great result. Thanks to this movement, the Episcopal Church became convinced that it could always count on full sympathy of the Orthodox East in all its good undertakings, and the Orthodox East had the opportunity to convince itself that in the West, even on such a distant West as America, there still lives the consciousness of its church truth, which compels one to turn to it precisely in cases of great demands of church-religious life, and at the same time for both sides the movement was beneficial in that it gave the opportunity to become better acquainted with each other, and thus smooth the path for further relations.

After a certain period of tension, this movement weakened and seemed even to stop altogether. But it stopped only outwardly, while the inner work of religious-theological thought continued with undiminished force. And in this process a most remarkable phenomenon was revealed. The rapprochement with the Orthodox East and acquaintance with its confessional principle and church-liturgical practice produced an irresistible impression on the representatives of the religious-theological thought of the Episcopal Church. From this contact with the source of age-old church truth the consciousness of Catholicity was more vividly awakened in the conceptions of the Episcopal Church, and from that time we see how this Catholic principle strengthens constantly and grows in this American church. To be convinced of this, it suffices to follow carefully the spiritual periodical press and theological literature of this church. The best and chief exponent of its theological thought is the journal entitled ‘Review of American Church’[2], and this journal in recent years has given very rich material to judge from the actual state and direction of theological thought in the Episcopal Church. Here we see a whole series of articles which deeply engage the confessional essence of the church, subject it to careful critical examination, evaluate it from the point of view of the highest principles, and in doing so are constantly expressing opinions aimed at the transformation of essential points of doctrine in order to bring it into greater agreement with the doctrine of the ancient undivided or Catholic church. Thus it is known that Protestantism, rising up against the crudely sensual Roman Catholic teaching on purgatory, which as is known gave occasion for numerous abuses, rejected together with it even the ancient church teaching on prayers for the dead. Now in the Episcopal Church voices are raised for the restoration of this teaching, and its truth is proved on the basis of historical and dogmatic data in a very thorough article[3] on this subject in the named journal. Voices are also raised for the restoration of the ancient custom of fasting before communion, and several articles are devoted to this subject, and this is all the more remarkable because the named custom is based more on universal tradition and, as is known, rejected by Protestantism, than on the letter of Holy Scripture.[4] At the same time voices are even raised in favor of recognizing fasting in general as an important aid in religious-moral life, and though the argumentation in this regard visibly loses itself and does not have proper support in consciousness, yet the very fact of raising this question is not without important significance[5]. Finally theological thought does not limit itself to these separate points of doctrine. It subjects the very confessional symbol of the Episcopal Church to critical examination, from which logically flow all particulars of doctrine. This fundamental symbol for the Episcopal Church is the so-called ‘Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion,’ which have the significance of the fundamental symbolic book of Anglicanism and Episcopalism. And credit must be given to the high self-denial of American theologians when, finding some contradiction of this symbol with the reviving idea of Catholicity, they do not resort to dialectical contortions of thought in order to reconcile the irreconcilable, but courageously pose the frank question: is it not time to subject this symbolic document to revision?[6] This question, as is natural, provoked objections and led to theological polemic, but the fateful word has been spoken, and it constitutes an important sign of the times, in the sense precisely in which we are considering it.

But this transformative movement in the direction of the restoration of the Catholic principle in the Episcopal Church is not limited only to the realm of theoretical theological thought. No, alongside this work of thought, life itself and the general consciousness of the church move in the same direction, insofar as it is expressed in the highest representatives of it – bishops and the periodic assemblies called ‘General Conventions.’ In the year before last in the depths of this church was accomplished a fact which constitutes an important step toward the restoration of the customs of the ancient church rejected by Protestantism. Doctor Whittingham[7] already pointed out that Protestantism sins against those elevated natures which burn with love for solitude far from the vain world – alone with God, namely in that it denies monasticism. This idea has now found practical realization. A young man from the Episcopal clergy a couple of years ago decided to overcome by his own experience this Protestant barrier on the path to monasticism and took monastic vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience. And remarkable thing – this anti-Protestant step met complete sympathy from the highly respected Bishop of New York Potter, who personally with proper solemnity performed the tonsure ceremony and with dignity answered all objections to this innovation. To objections from those who saw in this act the hateful tendency of Roman Catholicism, he answered by pointing out that monasticism is not an institution of the Roman Catholic Church, but is a universal institution and flows from the deep needs of the human spirit. But incomparably still more profound significance in this regard has the chief question which now occupies the American Episcopal Church, namely the question of the transformation of its liturgy. This question now occupies all the best minds of the church and is devoted to numerous articles and compositions. It must be noted that the liturgy represents the factual testimony of church doctrine, in it the inner meaning of the confessional system is displayed more clearly and fully than anywhere else. This is proved with striking clarity by the fate of the Anglican liturgy, wholly transferred to America. Borrowed from the Roman Church, the Anglican liturgy since the Reformation underwent a gradual process of modification; with the penetration into the Anglican church of extreme Protestant principles, it became increasingly Protestantized and finally reached its present form, which both in England and especially in America represents some wretched fragments of the ancient liturgy, deprived of the vital nerve of liturgical worship. And now with the revival of Catholic self-consciousness, in America a strong movement has begun toward the transformation of the liturgy with a view to restoring it to its ancient original form. At the head of this movement stood Bishop of Florida Young, known for his famous conversation with Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow on the question of church union, and he as chairman of the committee formed for this purpose placed in the named journal above two
extensive articles in which he expressed very many remarkable thoughts striking in depth and strength of Catholic self-consciousness.[8] In his demonstration of the necessity of transforming the Episcopal liturgy on broader Catholic principles, the reverend bishop proceeds from the profound thought that religion and church must stand in close correspondence with the inner spirit of the people. Pointing out that the Anglican liturgy bears the mark of the Anglo-Saxon spirit, he says in America new conditions are appearing, requiring special adaptations. ‘As Americans,’ he says, ‘we must take into account a considerable modification of our Anglican civilization, which has already begun and will continue further as a result of the tremendous and ever-increasing influx of settlers to our shores from almost all nationalities of the world. When these foreign elements are incorporated into the general political organism and become so assimilated with our national life as to constitute with us a homogeneous people, the result will be a full, many-sided nationality not resembling its predecessor, and will require for both its civil and religious life much that is entirely different from what could satisfy the pure English type of civilization’[9]. From this point of view the bishop examines in detail the chief liturgical book of the Anglican Church, the well-known Book of Common Prayer, points out its defects, compares the Anglican liturgy with the great liturgies of the ancient church, and above all with the liturgies of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and comes to the conviction that the Anglican liturgy must be transformed precisely in the spirit of the great liturgical examples of antiquity.

Such an authoritative voice naturally could not pass without effect. And indeed the question of the transformation of the liturgy became a vital question of the times, and when it was proposed for consideration to the General Convention of 1883, many of the bishop’s thoughts found general recognition. The Prayer Book underwent careful revision, precisely in the spirit of the principles indicated by Bishop Young, and a very broad plan of transformation was drawn up, which should undergo final consideration at subsequent General Conventions. The question is obviously of extraordinary importance, and in view of this one cannot sincerely not grieve that the very leader of this notable movement was not destined to live to see the final resolution of the matter: he died suddenly at the end of 1885. But he died with the conviction that his thoughts had found living resonance in all the best representatives of the Episcopal Church and in general in the General Convention, which in the same spirit of restoring Catholicity in the church restored among other things the ‘Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord,’ and decreed to celebrate it precisely on August 6, following the example of the ancient universal church. Finally, and outwardly as well the ripening spirit of Catholic self-consciousness of the Episcopal Church found eloquent expression in the fact that at the same convention the question was raised whether it was not time to change the very name ‘Protestant Episcopal Church,’ and namely whether it was not time to strike out the word ‘Protestant,’ as it no longer corresponds to the inner spirit of the American church. This question also has not yet received its final resolution, but all signs show that the time of its positive resolution is not far off.

[1] See “Christian Reading” for 1881 and 1882, our articles under the title: “Relations of the American Episcopal Church with the Orthodox East on the Question of Church Union.”

[2] The American Church Review.

[3] See the May issue of 1883, article “Prayers for the Departed.”

[4] Articles under the title “Fasting Communion” in the January, March, and October 1884 issues.

[5] March 1883, article “The Physical Effects of Religious Fasting upon Health.”

[6] August 1863, article: “Has the Time Come to Revise the Thirty-Nine Articles?”

[7] Several articles appeared in defense of monasticism, among which we can point to a detailed article in the April issue of the named journal for 1885, pp. 498–514. See also July of the same year.

[8] Two articles in Amer. Ch. Rev. under the general title: “Liturgical Enrichment,” October 1882 and February 1883.

[9] Cited article in separate publication 1883, p. 2. We cannot conceal our natural satisfaction that here an authoritative theologian expresses the very same thoughts which were stated by you with almost literal exactness a year and a half earlier in our work on “Roman Catholicism in America.” There we said the following: “In the consciousness of the American people there dimly moves the idea of religious unity, and it seeks such a church which, free from one-sidedness, could by its catholic comprehensiveness satisfy its many-sided needs. The American people is many-sided by its very composition. It has been formed and continues to be formed from the multitude of all possible nationalities which yearly flow into its organism through the stream of immigration. Into it enter not only all possible peoples of the European continent, but also native, primitive American tribes, African Negroes, and Asian Mongolians. All this varied mass is gradually transformed into one people, forming one body and one spirit. From the fusion of such diverse elements in the American character, clearly there cannot be one-sidedness. Such a nature can only be many-sided, with a balance of forces both in the physical and in the spiritual nature. Hence in religious respects there can satisfy it only such a church which is as many-sided in its catholicity as the people itself is many-sided.”—Since this very thought lies at the foundation of our view on the ecclesiastical-religious life of the American people, the repetition of it by such a connoisseur of this life as the late Bishop Freeman Young serves for us as an honorable warrant of the correctness of our view on the subject. See “Roman Catholicism in America,” pp. 17 and 18; also “Religion in America,” p. 19.

The Protest of Religious Feeling Against Church Fragmentation (Revivals). – Consciousness of the Insufficiency of Protestant Principles and the Search for Firmer Foundations of Church-Religious Life. – The Striving for Church Unification and the Renewal of This Movement at the Present Time. – The Maturation of the Catholic Element in the Theology and Practice of the Episcopal Church. – The ‘Congress of Churches’ and Its Significance. – Conclusion (Cont.) (2)

We have concentrated principally on examining the process of maturation of Catholic self-consciousness in the Episcopal Church, as representing more striking facts in this regard. But individual features of this same movement can be observed in other communities, and it manifested itself principally in the fact that in these communities the search for firmer church principles was renewed with new strength, and the eyes of many turned to the Episcopal Church as standing at the head of this notable movement. As one can judge from the latest reports, in the American religious world the movement toward church unification is rising with new force, a movement which in all its details recalls that great movement which marked the ‘60s and which had as its subsequent result the Episcopal Church’s relations with the Orthodox East. External sign of this movement is the fact that with each year the number of converts from various communities and sects to the Episcopal Church is increasing, where they seek final peace – obviously the same phenomenon that was observed during the previous movement. But having the same character as the previous movement, the present movement acquires even greater intensity because of certain new conditions brought into the religious-moral life of the American people. The previous movement flowed from the inner desire for church unity for more friendly and successful labor in the vineyard of God; now there is added the feeling of self-defense against two increasingly threatening hostile forces. The matter is that in recent decades on the one hand Roman Catholicism has extraordinarily grown and strengthened, coming forward with open intention to take possession of the entire American continent, and on the other hand the continuous and with each year increasing emigration from the Old World has brought into America such a mass of skeptical, irreligious and directly anti-religious elements that unbelief is rapidly beginning to develop in certain layers of the population and threatens to infect with its corrupting breath the spiritual life of the American people. And so fear of these enemies and the desire to unite in common efforts for successful struggle against them and have served as the strongest incentive for the renewal of the movement toward church unification. Since now the conditions are much more developed through the previous work, this movement was not slow to express itself in a remarkable, unprecedented phenomenon, namely the ‘Congress of Churches.’

This remarkable phenomenon passed in our press completely unnoticed, and yet it made a tremendous impression in America and served as an important expression of the religious self-consciousness to which the American people had attained. The ‘Congress of Churches’ took place in the spring of the year before last (1884). It was convened at the initiative of the Episcopal Church and had as its aim the joint clarification of the vital needs of the religious-moral life of the country. And remarkably, the thought of convening such a congress was answered by representatives of all communities and sects, even those which had until then not recognized the possibility of any solidarity with others. To this congress there gathered indeed representatives from all communities and with remarkable unanimity expressed the desire that animated all – to finally take measures to eliminate the evil of sectarian fragmentation in America. At the congress many speeches were delivered, many reports were read by persons of all possible church-religious opinions and confessional shades, and thanks to such a brotherly-Christian exchange of thoughts, so unlike the petty-hostile polemic which had hitherto characterized the relations between the various confessional communities, in the best representatives of religious-theological thought the idea of church unity received new encouragement and new support in its further development. ‘The success of the Congress of Churches,’ said one organ of the Episcopal Church,[1] ‘was unexpected and almost unprecedented. Until now it was impossible to say how strongly the desire for Christian unity was spread among various confessions. The Congress exceeded the boldest expectations and revealed in the minds and hearts of people a deeper feeling of desire to be freed from the evils of our divided Christianity in America than could have been supposed.’ And thus we see here a new phase into which the church-religious self-consciousness of the American people has entered. This phenomenon is still so new that it is impossible to draw any more or less definite conclusions, but certain is the fact that this phenomenon is an eloquent protest against the evils of Christian fragmentation from the standpoint of religious ferment and sectarian Protestantism, and here in all its brilliance there emerges the ripening triumph of the Catholic self-consciousness of the American people. This fact becomes even more remarkable in view of the impression this ‘Congress of Churches’ made on society. It was among other things the subject of lively discussion in society and the press, and under its evident influence opinions began to be expressed which could have the greatest significance in case of their application to life. Thus one professor of a Presbyterian college, discussing the questions agitated at the ‘Congress of Churches’ and seeking the common ground on which all American communities could merge into one integral church body, expressed at this an unthinkable in former times opinion that such ground could be served by the transformed liturgy of the Episcopal Church. And this opinion was expressed in the pages of the most widely distributed journal in America ‘Century,’ having hundreds of thousands of readers and consequently possessing tremendous influence on society.[2] And since the Episcopal Church’s liturgy is now precisely being transformed, and is being transformed with a view to bringing it into agreement with the great examples of liturgical worship of the ancient church, and consequently in the spirit of universal Orthodoxy, this fact can eloquently speak for itself, and casts in the highest degree significant light on the future fate of church-religious life in the great trans-Atlantic republic.

Thus we see how in a country where Protestantism had the full opportunity and freedom to develop and display in all its brilliance its religious essence, and where religious individualism, so to speak, claimed the throne—how in this very country the people who had fled the Old World to the unknown wilds of the New World chiefly for the free development of their Protestant beliefs eventually came to the sorrowful conviction that Protestantism, as a religious system, cannot satisfy the deepest longings of the human spirit, cannot provide full satisfaction for the needs of religious and moral life. In the face of these great longings, its internal insufficiency becomes completely evident, for by its very fundamental principle it can only destroy and fragment, but not create and unite. Only a church that possesses a creative and constructive spirit and strong ecclesiastical authority can satisfy these longings, but clearly such a church must be sought outside Protestantism. And so in light of this momentous historical experience, which has visibly demonstrated the decisive insufficiency of Protestantism, how pitiful are the appearance of our fashionable preachers and philosophizing writers who strive to introduce into the healthy ecclesiastical-religious consciousness of our people the corroding poison of religious individualism, who wish to deprive it of the greatest blessing it possesses in the high authority of the church, and to give each person the difficult and dangerous privilege of striving, by their own strength, under the burdensome weight of distressing doubt and despair, to achieve an answer to the terrifying question: ‘What is my faith?’… For such philosophers-theologians, clearly the lessons of history do not exist: they are deaf to its most dire warnings. But in return they are preparing for themselves in the future a terrible and inexorable judgment from this history which they do not acknowledge.

* * *

[1] The Churchman, May 23, 1885, p. 563.

[2] The Century, November 1885, article by Prof. Schild. This article produced an enormous impression and provoked numerous discussions and responses from theologians of various churches and denominations. Several of these appeared on the pages of the same journal in the form of “open letters.” Such were the responses in the February issue of the journal for 1886 from Episcopal theologians, in the March issue from Presbyterian, and in the July issue from Congregationalist. In all these statements one dominant feeling is expressed—the desire to be rid of the corroding sectarian fragmentation that undermines the religious and moral life in America and to achieve unity, although naturally there are expressed different and widely divergent views both on the means of achieving this unity and on its very character.

Colophon

The Transoceanic West in Its Religious and Moral Aspect
by Professor Alexander Lopukhin.

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
Green River Cliffs, Wyoming (1881)
by Thomas Moran (American, 1837–1926), National Gallery of Art (CC0), which is in the public domain.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 16, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction
- Preface

- Public lectures, delivered during the Great Lent of 1888 in the "Society for the Propagation of Religious-Moral Enlightenment in the Spirit of the Orthodox Church" for the benefit of needy students of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and pupils of the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary.

- First Reading

- 1. The importance and interest of studying the religious-moral life in America in view of the church-religious condition being experienced by our society

- The Church and the State in America. The Church and the School. The Church and Society.

- The Church and the Press. The Public Significance of Preaching

- The Church and the Press. The Public Significance of Preaching. (Cont.)

- The Church and the Press. The Public Significance of Preaching. (Cont.) (2)

- 2. Public sensitivity to the interests of religious-moral life

- Care for the Religious-moral Education of Children. Sunday Schools and Bible Classes. The Christian Association of Young People. The Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Temperance Society. The Civic Virtue of the American People. The Essence of American Democracy and its Instructive Aspect

- Care for the Religious-moral Education of Children. Sunday Schools and Bible Classes. The Christian Association of Young People. The Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Temperance Society. The Civic Virtue of the American People. The Essence of American Democracy and its Instructive Aspect. (Cont.)

- Care for the Religious-moral Education of Children. Sunday Schools and Bible Classes. The Christian Association of Young People. The Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Temperance Society. The Civic Virtue of the American People. The Essence of American Democracy and its Instructive Aspect. (Cont.) (2)

- Second Reading

- 3. The Doctrinal Essence of Protestantism and Its Ecclesiastical-Practical Failure. The Kingdom of Sects and Divisions

- Protestantism in its Full Development. The Wandering of Religious Thought. Rationalism – The Unlimited Arbitrary Will of Preachers and the Degeneration of Preaching. – The Sectarian Insularity of Parish Churches and Their Inaccessibility to the Common People. – Helpless Victims of Religious Demagogues. – Dark Sectarianism With an Admixture of Charlatanism – "Independent Catholic" and "Physiological" Churches. – The Salvation Army

- Protestantism in its Full Development. The Wandering of Religious Thought. Rationalism – The Unlimited Arbitrary Will of Preachers and the Degeneration of Preaching. – The Sectarian Insularity of Parish Churches and Their Inaccessibility to the Common People. – Helpless Victims of Religious Demagogues. – Dark Sectarianism With an Admixture of Charlatanism – "Independent Catholic" and "Physiological" Churches. – The Salvation Army. (Cont.)

- Protestantism in its Full Development. The Wandering of Religious Thought. Rationalism – The Unlimited Arbitrary Will of Preachers and the Degeneration of Preaching. – The Sectarian Insularity of Parish Churches and Their Inaccessibility to the Common People. – Helpless Victims of Religious Demagogues. – Dark Sectarianism With an Admixture of Charlatanism – "Independent Catholic" and "Physiological" Churches. – The Salvation Army. (Cont.) (2)

- 4. The American People's Striving for Church-Religious Unification and the Significance of This Fact. Conclusion

- The Protest of Religious Feeling Against Church Fragmentation (Revivals). – Consciousness of the Insufficiency of Protestant Principles and the Search for Firmer Foundations of Church-Religious Life. – The Striving for Church Unification and the Renewal of This Movement at the Present Time. – The Maturation of the Catholic Element in the Theology and Practice of the Episcopal Church. – The 'Congress of Churches' and Its Significance. – Conclusion

- The Protest of Religious Feeling Against Church Fragmentation (Revivals). – Consciousness of the Insufficiency of Protestant Principles and the Search for Firmer Foundations of Church-Religious Life. – The Striving for Church Unification and the Renewal of This Movement at the Present Time. – The Maturation of the Catholic Element in the Theology and Practice of the Episcopal Church. – The 'Congress of Churches' and Its Significance. – Conclusion (Cont.)

- The Protest of Religious Feeling Against Church Fragmentation (Revivals). – Consciousness of the Insufficiency of Protestant Principles and the Search for Firmer Foundations of Church-Religious Life. – The Striving for Church Unification and the Renewal of This Movement at the Present Time. – The Maturation of the Catholic Element in the Theology and Practice of the Episcopal Church. – The 'Congress of Churches' and Its Significance. – Conclusion (Cont.) (2)

- Colophon