Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/649

Rh there were less than 1,950 with a population of 3,500,000, showing a church for every 1,700 souls. There are now more than 72,000, which, with a population of 38,000,000, would show a church for every 529. "In other words, while the population has multiplied eleven-fold, the churches have multiplied nearly thirty-seven-fold." The most signal religious fact which the past century presents is stated to be the growth of Methodism. When their first conference met at Baltimore they collected but sixty preachers, and it was reckoned that in the whole country they could muster but twenty more, "By the census of 1870 they were credited with more than 25,000 parish organizations, and a church property of $70,000,000." Notice is taken of the tendency to appreciate a more educated clergy, and of a growing ambition in the matter of church architecture. The general movement, it is said, has led not so much toward the multiplication of sects as toward the formation of compact and powerful religious organizations. But there has been little reciprocal influence among ecclesiastical bodies, and no tendency to theological unity. The general conclusion of the writer is that "a review of our past history should incline US to place a modest estimate on our success;" and "at the close of a century we seem to have made no advance whatever in harmonizing the relations of religious sects among themselves, or in defining their common relation to the civil power. . . . The function of American Christianity has been discharged in a moral and practical, rather than in a scientific, and theological development."

Prof. Sumner's sketch of American politics for a hundred years is highly instructive and readable, but on the whole any thing but flattering to the national vanity. The "Ring" and the "Boss" seem to be its latest outcome, and of the latter character it is said, "he is the last and perfect flower of the long development at which hundreds of skillful and crafty men have labored, and into which the American people have put by far the greatest part of their political energy." Whether in politics the course of the nation has been on the whole upward or downward, the writer considers an open question, but comforts us with his individual opinion that we are not degenerating.

Prof. Newcomb, in reviewing the abstract science of the century, discusses with much ability the conditions on which the cultivation of pure science depends, and finds that they are greatly wanting in this country. There is a lack of intimate intercourse among scientific men; of government appreciation of the aid they require in devoting themselves to original research. There is, besides, a kind of national one-sidedness—not merely an absorption in material interests—a kind of faith in practical sagacity and the sufficiency of plain common-sense for all emergencies, which excludes the need of more exact methods of thought, and is inappreciative of the value of refined and remote inquiries that yield no palpable or directly useful results. It is therefore natural "that the development of the higher branches of science in our country should be marked by the same backwardness which characterizes the higher forms of thought in other directions." Prof. Newcomb. brings out, in an admirable passage, the complete antagonism between the ideas "which animate the so-called 'practical man' of our country and those which animate the investigator in any field which deserves the name of science or philosophy;" from which it appears that the most potent hindrance to science with us is that adverse state of the general mind which prevents our people from taking interest in it, and of encouraging those who devote themselves to it. he says: "It is strikingly illustrative of the absence of every thing like an effective national pride in science that two generations should have passed without America having