Roman Catholics, and only 67.1 per cent. of German families have a church home. That is to say, the nationalities that have the highest Romanist membership have the highest church relationship.
To put it differently, but equally truthfully, Protestantism is not holding the people as compared with Roman Catholicism. Three Roman Catholic churches claim the attendance of 2,553 out of 2,575 Roman Catholic families; 106 Protestant churches are attended by 867 families with church members, and 572 families without members, but there are 786 Protestant families that have neither members nor church homes.
Religious affiliations in individual houses show results similar to the ensemble of the district. In one house containing fifteen families three pastors have parishioners in nine families, leaving six families without pastors or church homes. An adjacent dwelling contains thirteen families, and four pastors visit seven families, but there are six other families, of three other denominations, in that house, who do not go to any church. Scores of houses among the 398 dwellings in which the 4,800 families live show similar conditions.
The conclusion is inevitable that Protestantism’s families are not in Protestantism’s churches because Protestantism’s church representatives, attending to the people on their communion and pew rolls, scattered all over the 13,000 acres of Manhattan island, have not time or plan to discover and recover the families found on no communion or pew roll.
It should be a humiliation to Protestantism in New York that three Roman Catholic churches get at more families in the district than do ninety-five Protestant churches, among which are three resident churches. It is idle to ascribe the difference of efficiency in the district to denominational tendency, or national characteristics. It is rather due to the difference between regimentation and somnambulism. “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain,” says Protestantism; and she goes on underestimating human wide-awakeness and gumption through her admirable reverence for divine grace. She
