THE vital and universal significance of the Christian Science movement, its place in the providential ordering of the world's spiritual advance, cannot be duly appreciated or even understood apart from a knowledge both of its revolutionary and constructive teaching, and of the religious thought conditions into the midst of which it has been projected.
Respecting these thought conditions very much is being said to-day by religious authorities who demand a hearing. In an article on "The Ebb of Ecclesiasticism," which appears in one of our leading reviews, the writer presents an array of facts and summations which fully supports his startling statement that the Christian Church as a whole is not maintaining its power in the social fabric of to-day. In support of this contention he quotes from the eminent religious writer and statistician, Rev. Dr. Josiah Strong, to the effect that while the population of the United States is increasing at the rate of 2.18 per cent annually, the average increase of the seven largest Christian denominations is but 1.94, while the average decrease of all religious bodies is 1.69 per cent. From the same authority we learn that of two leading Protestant denominations, one reported 2,390 and the other 2,270 churches without a single addition to their membership during the year 1906.
The showing respecting church attendance is equally striking. Speaking of one of our great metropolitan cities, Dr. Anson P. Atterbury, president of the federation of its churches, is quoted as saying, "Our churches are decreasing in numbers and power as the population grows. Unless the Christian people of the Nation rise to its rescue, this metropolis is doomed!" A careful census of church attendance in the above city, undertaken by two prominent dailies, disclosed the fact that the total church attendance, Protestant and Catholic, amounts to only twenty-five to twenty-eight per cent of the population, while the showing in a decrease in the number of churches and of candidates for the ministry, with respect to the population, is equally remarkable. In 1850 there was one Protestant church for about every one thousand of the population. To-day there is an average of but one for every sixty-five hundred, while in thirty theological seminaries of the United States the number of students is to-day about four hundred less than it was ten years ago. That these conditions are common to other Christian countries is indicated by the recent statement of a prominent London clergyman. He says, "Nearly seventy-five per cent of the adult population [of England] remains permanently out of touch with organized religions," while "on the Continent this falling away of the people from the churches is even more marked than in England."
