356 RELIGIOUS AGENCIES 



under the influence of powerful feeling may produce great effects, 

 yet when reported and printed verbatim it may hardly please those 

 who were in sympathy at the time, and often when printed in a 

 book will be futile as a means of making religious impressions. 



The ornamenting of tracts and the using of pictures now so 

 common is of doubtful utility except as a kindergarten movement. 

 The tract has lost its dignity; first because of so many being 

 written which are only a paraphrase of the printed sermons of 

 years ago, and because they lack a direct, fresh, vivid style. Tracts 

 and pamphlets on spiritual religion must be written as though the 

 writer's life, liberty, and living depended upon persuading or con- 

 vincing the reader. 



Some denominations show more skill than others in the prepa- 

 ration of works intended to promote religion. The tracts, pam- 

 phlets, and books put forth by the Paulist Fathers, an organization 

 of the Roman Catholic Church, are models from the point of 

 view of the object. The Swedenborgians, the Unitarians, and the 

 Baptists have shown great skill in the use of the tract, the pam- 

 phlet, and the small book. Generally speaking, schismatics and 

 heretics, using these words, not opprobriously, but as indicat- 

 ing the opponents of that which is supposed to be established, 

 have shown greater strength and skill in the onset than the 

 defenders of the faith. Not until danger surround them on every 

 hand do the orthodox awake to the necessity of vigorous defense, 

 and in the history of the Christian church this not unnatural fact 

 has often been reproduced. The heterodox, when they have set 

 up a new religion or a new variety of an old, grow indolent, write 

 without a degree of force comparable with the vigor of their former 

 revolutionary manifestations, and are themselves again in turn 

 counterworked by the fusillades and undermined by the subleties 

 of a new generation begotten of themselves. 



The following conclusions I deem warranted by a careful survey 

 of the subject : 



(1) Where general indifference to religion exists, so that the 

 public assemblies in its interests are neglected, it is difficult to 

 make any progress except through the agency of personal con- 

 versation, supported by published facts and arguments. 



(2) To aid in estimating the force of the press as a religious agency 

 these facts are valuable: The report of the British and Foreign 

 Bible Society is just out. Since its foundation, one hundred years 

 ago, it has issued 186,680,100 copies. The American Bible Society, 

 eighty years old, will say in its report, to be issued next week, 

 that it has issued 74,441,674 Bibles, Testaments, and selected 

 portions. Carefully prepared estimates of all the other publica- 

 tions of Bibles support the probability that at least 450,000,000 



