I attended a Lutheran church one Sunday evening when it was crowded largely by young people, all of them wage-earners in the lower walks of life. The whole burden of the sermon of nearly forty-five minutes’ length was the thought that salvation is not in morality or merit or good deeds, but that the only thing necessary to it is a proper definition of the nature of Jesus Christ. There was not one ethical note in the whole sermon, and if it is a fair sample of that man’s discourses, his flock of more than fifteen hundred souls is feeding upon barren pasture. When I called upon a Lutheran pastor who was pointed out to me as a liberal, I found, upon asking him to define his liberality, that it turned entirely upon social habits and had nothing to do with theology. “I want to drink my beer whenever I want to,” was the article in his creed that had driven him into the arms of a more liberal synod.
Among the Germans of the Northwest there is a good deal of infidelity, fostered by the Turner societies; but they are languishing and dying, and with them dies the unbelief. I was told in Milwaukee by a business man that the disappearance of those societies is due to the fact that men of affairs discovered that it was poor business policy to belong to them, because it arrayed against them the conservative church element, and that the cessation of infidel agitation is not a sign of more faith, but simply a sign of more common sense. One free-thinking paper is still published in Milwaukee; but its constituency is gradually growing smaller, and the lecturers on infidelity, of whom there used to be many, have dwindled to one or two. They find it hard to make a living out of a thing that has no life. Yet the German immigrant contributes positive good to this nation’s life; he brings usually a sound body, and while seldom intellectual, he is nearly always intelligent. He is scrupulously honest in business affairs, and has elevated the business morals of his community. By his love of music he has robbed the social life in America of some of its sternness; and the German singing societies are known not so much for the artistic quality of their performance, as for keeping alive the spirit of good fellowship.