The Waco Evening News

PROTESTANTISM IN FRANCE
A distinguished American, Mr. Theodore Stanton, writes from France to the April number of the Chicago Monist:
"Protestantism here in France is a sickly growth when compared, for instance, with its rich and sturdy brother in the United States. It has, at most, only a small band of followers, nearly lost to view in the vast army of Catholicism and Freethought. If native French Protestantism exerts so little influence on the nation, it is easy to imagine the excessive futility of the work of foreign missions. There is a great deal said in American and religious circles about the labors in France of the Salvation Army, the McAll mission, the Young Men's Christian association, etc. I have received more than one letter from would-be subscribers in the United States asking me if there and other social organizations were really accomplishing all that they pretend. My reply is that, if you regard their labors as charity work, some good is being done, but if money is asked for because of the religious results which have been accomplished, the demand should be considered as an arrant humbug. From a religious standpoint, therefore, American money and sympathy is absolutely thrown away when it is sent to France. If it be announced that much misery and physical suffering is relieved by these foreign missions, the French might well ask if charity does not begin at home. The French are a peculiarly thrifty people. Few are poor, beggars are scarce and charitable institutions are rich and numerous. Hence, devoting American dollars to the relief of French distress is much like sending coals to Newcastle, if it is not a piece of sheer impertinence, like our protesting to the Czar against his Siberian convict system, when we have one quite as cruel in full swing in some of our states. While it is true that the Catholic church, at least as a church, still has a strong hold on the French nation, it is also quite true that indifference and free thought are on the increase. Matthew Arnold says, in his essay on Tolstoi, written in 1887: "Between the age of twenty and that of thirty-five he (Tolstoi) had lost, he tells us, the Christian belief in which he had been brought up, a loss of which examples nowadays abound certainly everywhere but which in Russia, as in France, is among all young men of the upper and cultivated classes, more as a matter of course, perhaps, more universal, more avowed, than it is with us." Arnold could have enlarged, at least in the case of France, his limits and stated that in the cities the middle, and lower classes, too, particularly the male portion, have abandoned the old beliefs."
If Stanton's letter be true France progresses backward rather than forward.