Ch000, or 100 per cent.
Lus

Fawing lines between the
Chinese are all reckoned

as Buddhists.

Another source of disagreement among statisticians This is judged by is in regard to the total population of China. Wagner (1874) to be nearly 405,000,000; by Richthofen (1882), to be at least 430,000,000. Some authorities consider it to be more than 50,000,000 less. There are those who rate the total number of Buddhists in the world at about 100,000,000.

The New York Independent (May 19. 1887) gives the following table of the leading denominations in the United States. The number of Roman Catholic communicants is only a probable estimate.

1. Methodists.

2. Roman Catholics.

3. Baptists

Ministers. Communicants. 29,493 4,532,658

Churches.

47,302

6.910

7,658 4,000,000

40,854

27.889

3,727,020

4. Presbyterians...

12,868

9.429

1,082,436

7,573

3,990

930,830

6. Congregationalists.
7. Episcopalians

4,277 4,090

436,379

4,524

3,865

430,531

5. Lutherans

Hughes.

From a skeptical position he passed over, in 1844, to the Church of Rome, which he defended for many years in his "Quarterly Review." A noted polemic, as well as efficient person in the administration of the episcopal office, was John Hughes (1798-1864), the first Catholic archbishop of New York. A landmark in the annals of the Roman Catholics in the United States was the assembling of a National Plenary Council at Baltimore, in 1852. There the opposition of the Church to secret societies, and to the system of public schools, was enunciated. The third plenary council assembled at Baltimore on November 9, 1884, and continued in session about one month. The progress of the Church is shown in the fact that there were in attendance, belonging to the United States, fourteen archbishops, sixty bishops, and one prefect apostolic. The president was Archbishop Gibbons. The pastoral letter of the council dwelt on the importance of education for the clergy in the non-theological as well as the technical branches of knowledge; on the need, for the preservation of civil and religious liberty, of a religious training of the people, in connection with a secular schooling; and on family duties, including the benefit of household devotions. It is understood that the council proposed that rectors should be irremovable except for cause, and should elect the bishops; that a catechism should be made for the whole country; and that a Catholic university should be established. Should the first of these proposed changes be carried out, the Roman Catholic Church would no longer stand in the dependent relation of a missionary church.

The Mormons.

A sketch of religious phenomena in the United States can hardly omit a notice of the Mormons. As in the case of Mohammedanism, it may be a question whether Mormonism has in it enough of Christianity to entitle it to the name of a heresy, or whether it is not properly classified with false or heathen religions. The Mormon sect was founded at Manchester, New York, in 1830, by Joseph Smith. He professed to have been guided by an angel to a spot where he found buried the "Book of Mormon," written on thin gold plates. How far a manuscript, written for quite another purpose by one Solomon Spalding, furnished the material for this Mormon Bible, is an unsettled question. In style, it is an imitation of the Authorized Version of the Script

It was alleged to be the production of Mormon, a Hebrew, the survivor of emigrants from Palestine to Chili, who came thither centuries before the Christian era. Smith established the sect of

Mormons, or " Latter Day Saints," as he styled them, on the basis of this imposture. In 1843, he professed to have a revelation sanctioning polygamy. Driven from Illinois in 1848, the Mormons removed to the Territory of Utah, and founded Salt Lake City. Brigham Young had taken the place of Smith as a leader, who had been killed by a mob. Young died in 1877, and was succeeded by John Taylor, an Englishman. He has lately died. The Mormon recruits have been obtained by emissaries sent to Europe, largely from the working-class in Great Britain, in Sweden, and in Norway. A body of anti-polygamist seceders from the Mormon community has been formed, and still another Mormon sect, opposed to polygamy, originated in 1851.

Roman Catholic missions in the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER VII.

CHRISTIAN MISSIONS.

THE Missions which the Catholic Church, with so much zeal and energy, had planted in all parts of the world during the first age of the Reformation, began to languish as the eighteenth century drew to a close. The controversy on the Chinese and Malabar customs, which has already been spoken of, the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773, and the political revolution which convulsed France and Europe, and curtailed for a time the power of the Roman see, were the principal causes of this decline. Hardly had the present century begun, however, when the Church entered upon a new era of missionary conquest. Pius VII. regained the lost prerogatives, restored the Jesuits, and reopened the College of the Propaganda, the foremost of all the Catholic institutions for the education of missionaries. The prosperity of the college continued to increase, and in 1867 there were represented among its students so many nations, that on the first Sunday after Epiphany the blessings of the advent were chanted in twenty-five different languages. The missions of the Catholic Church have been in this century, as before, under the direction of Their organi- the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, at zation. Rome, or the Propaganda, as it is usually called, which was founded in 1622. By its authority a simple mission with chapel, orphanage, and, perhaps, hospital, might be raised to an apostolic prefecture, or a vicariate, or, last of all, to an episcopate

of a higher or lower grade. In this way the hierarchical organization of the Church of Rome has been extended well-nigh over the whole world. The movements of its missionaries have been all the more effective from having been guided by a single committee composed of the cardinals of the Propaganda. Under such a system there could not be that interference with each other which has so often hindered the efforts of Protestant missionary societies. The most notable of the organizations which have contributed to the support of the missions is the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, which was founded at Lyons in 1822.

The missionaries and

their work.

Not only the training colleges but also the religious orders, and especially the Jesuits, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Lazarists, the Picpus Society, the Capuchins, and the Carmelites, have sent forth missionaries to bear the message of the Church to all the nations of the earth. In the Turkish Empire and Persia, as well as in Egypt and Abyssinia, they have continually endeavored, and not without a measure of success, to bring the sects, the Armenians, the Copts, etc., into allegiance to the See of Rome. The work in India, weakened as it was in the last century by the controversy about the Malabar customs and by the suppression of the Jesuits, was still further disturbed, after the year 1834, by a schism at Goa. But such misfortunes did not prevent the steady growth of the Church. In Eastern Asia, in Annam, Cochin China, China, and Japan, the missionaries were persecuted again and again, until religious liberty was proclaimed in these lands through the influence of the European powers. Nor was the climate of Africa less destructive than the swords of the Orientals. But the missionaries, who knew no allegiance but that to Christ and the Holy Mother Church, were not to be turned back by danger. Many of them even coveted the martyr's crown. Across the ocean, in British America and the United States, the Church has steadily grown in numbers and in authority, while in Mexico and in several of the South American republics it has been deprived of much of its wealth and many of its ancient privileges. The Catholic missionaries, though they have labored assiduously in these older countries, have not been forgetful of the South Sea Islanders. Their work among these peoples has centred in the Wallis and Gambier islands, where they have established flourishing missions. But the present century has been signalized not so much by the successes of the Roman Church in the various lands of the world as by the rise of Protestant missions.

The Protestant Churches, as we have already seen, were not at