EVANGELICALISM IN NEW YORK.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 370, 21 May 1880, Page 11

EVANGELICALISM IN NEW YORK.

Thb inferiority of the average minister is accounted for in T?ie Sim toy the fact that young Presbyterians of " culture" prefer to go into professions ; and so the ranks of the ministry are filled by persons who are a great trial to cultured congregations ; and consequently, " in spite of the numerous ministers waiting for calls, the most influential and critical churches are forced to import ministers. Irish Presbyterians have even been brought from their native haunts and set to preach in the " best" churches at large salaries. Is it, strange, then, that the native-born minister is forced into bigamy and other unpleasant things, of which we read in the papers ? He marries with a view to a snug parsonage and a wealthy church — for the Presbyterians are wealthy, if not quite so high-toned as their Episcopalian brethren — and, after all, he is compelled to waste his sweetness. He is not among the few called. He feels that he has been defrauded, and, although he does not care particularly about the Chinese, he resolves that the Irish and Scotch Presbyterians " must go ;" but they are woefully tenacious, and so the average minister at last settles down into obscurity and that crushed state in which he is " ni femme, ni homme, pasteur," as a French writer wittily characterises his Parisian brethren, the French Calvinists. The effect of all the efforts of Protestantism in New York is thus shown by the New York Sun: —

" Infidelity, skepticism, and polite indifference spreading yearly among the rich tnd educated ; a bitter atheism hardly less prevalent among the poor. Populous districts within the sound of the Murray Hill church-hells as utterly sunk in heathenism and godlcssness as Dahomey. On all sides a fierce," greed for the good things of this world — as fierce as in Avenue A, where it is called Communism, as in Wall street, where it is called speculation. Capital and labor everywhere at swords' points. Manufactories of criminals in full blast day and night on almost every street corner and in almost every block, protected or winked at by the sworn guardians of society. Over 65,000 arrests in the city last year, 6,691 of them for crimes of violence ! An inordinate luxury surrounded by an abyss of sordid want, disease, and slow starvation !

"In view of this lamentable showing, is it not high time for preachers and laymen alike to ask themselves whether there is not something radically wrong in the existing, conventional method of religious effort 1 Here is an enormous yearly expenditure of force and money, and this is what there is to show for it after two centuries and a half of preaching and praying in New York city. What is the explanation ?" The explanation is easy. Protestantism has no divine life, and all its pretences end, like all pretence, in nothing. — CatJiolic JReviete.