It must also teach him that besides its sacramental value it has service value, whose obligations rest upon priest and people alike.
Religion must wean him from his ancient enemies, intemperance and superstition, and when it has done this, it has rendered a service which may again make of the Slavs a homogeneous race; great, vital, virile and well prepared to play a leading part in the future history of Europe as well as America, where they are now, numerically at least, the most important element in the great immigrant tide.
That portion of our history, which began with the inflow of Germans from the Palatinate, seems to most of us a closed chapter; yet in the very heart of the Keystone State, where more than 200 years ago the German pietist began to build its cities, since grown to greatness, the German is still a foreigner.
Indeed, he is almost as complete a foreigner as the Slav who lives in the mining patches along the Wyoming arid Susquehanna Rivers. Germanic speech, habits and types survive, and it was in a crowded trolley car in Reading, Pa., just after I had finished a wearisome investigation among the Slavs, that a woman of generously Teutonic proportions said to me: "Setz dich a mahl zu mir her."
Let me add that although I had never seen the lady before, I obeyed the summons. First, because there was no other seat vacant, and, second, because I have been long enough in America to obey implicitly when a lady commands.
"Du acts wie ein stranger," the good woman continued, taking my hand; and then, discovering that I had a right to act like a stranger, she apologized profusely. She had mistaken me for her family physician. In spite of her evident embarrassment, we began a conversation, and my ears, accustomed as they now are to our rather monotonous and uneuphonic English, refreshed themselves by listening to this new speech--Pennsylvania Dutch. It required thinking in two languages, and that in their most archaic forms.
Four generations had passed since my neighbour's ancestors came to this country; yet her English, whenever she attempted it, smacked strongly of the Fatherland, and in an unguarded moment, when my sentences seemed to her rather involved, she said, "Du talkst a bissel zu fast."