Part 21

"Hotels, boarding houses of many descriptions, stores, saloons and gambling dens, are visible on every street. Everything suggested money-making and money-spending." [Footnote: The Outlook--February 17, 1915.]

This typical mining town does not pretend to have any sacred days or sacred hours. Business, money-making and sporting are the great aim of life. The mines work seven days each week and twenty-four hours each day. The great concentrators know no pause; the cables are ever busy transporting the mineral from the tunnels to the mills.

The streets are full of busy teams on the Sabbath, just as on any other day; the same is true of all the stores but one, the proprietor of which put out as his first advertisement, "This store will be closed on the Sabbath." The saloons and gambling dens boom in iniquity on the Lord's Day as well as on any other day.

The first service was held on the street. A wagon answering for pulpit, platform and choir-loft, the noble few, interested and willing-hearted, were organized for Christian work; and after a long, severe, self-sacrificing struggle, with help of friends here and there, a comfortable meeting house was completed, even to a bell in its tower. The Sabbath bell is now heard, What a message it declares! What memories it awakens! Who can tell what its influence shall be?

"'The next thirty-five miles is an American Sodom,' said the conductor.

"What did the converted coal miner find, when he accepted this difficult trust? Saloons in abundance--in one town eleven in a row--each saloon with its attendant gambling den, dance house, etc. He found this region a hotbed of infidelity. He saw multitudes of young people of all nations under the sun making holiday of the sacred hours of the Sabbath, and, saddest of all, knowing no better. There were no gospel services, nor Sunday-schools, for there was no place to hold them.

"While I have spent much time in visiting the five towns of this neglected field, I selected one place as a center for extra effort, and here I commenced a series of gospel meetings. The result is a church of seventeen members and a Sunday-school of fifty scholars. As all these towns are dreadfully cursed with saloons, we are trying to create a temperance sentiment. Fifty have already signed the pledge, among them some of the worst drunkards in the town. Forty-five children have joined the 'Children's Band' and are trying to keep their lives clean. We have bought half an acre of ground, whereon to build a church and parsonage. Work is already commenced in good faith."

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"With the opening and development of the hard coal mines of Pennsylvania in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a large migration of Welsh miners began to arrive in the state. They were Protestants and fervently religious. Immediately the organization of religious life began. In 1831 different denominational elements gathered together and began Sunday-school and church life in Carbondale, Pa. The Congregational Church there has been a steady factor of religious life ever since, first among the Welsh exclusively, but later among all classes.

"In similar manner churches were organized all over the anthracite district. To-day fully two-thirds of the churches of the Congregational faith in the state are of Welsh origin, and barring a few in agricultural regions all are among miners or mill hands, joyfully affording the privileges of the Gospel to the poor.

"These churches have made a large contribution to the religious life of the state; they are fervently and effectively evangelistic. It is probably true that the Welsh people are the most thoroughly evangelized of any in the state to-day. Twelve churches have received one hundred or more members each on confession of faith within a year.

"In these later months these Welsh Christians are pressing into the evangelization of other nationalities, which constitute a very large part of the population in the anthracite regions, and their splendid zeal helped to make the 'Billy Sunday' campaign in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton the most wonderful, even that spectacular man has ever conducted. As personal workers they are unsurpassed, and since the revivals they have organized workers' bands and Bible classes, and have gone out into all the country for fifty miles around holding meetings in which singing, personal testimony and prayer have been made marvelously effective, while their earnest labors in local churches which they have joined as members, have in many cases verily revolutionized the life and multiplied the power of the churches." [Footnote: Rev. A.E. Ricker, Congregational Home Missionary Society.]

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The Italian immigrant is perhaps more widely distributed throughout our land than any of the other nationalities composing the immigration of the past twenty years.

From New Orleans, with its 60,000, to New York with its nearly half a million, scarcely a city is without an Italian colony, and even villages and rural districts show a quota of these ubiquitous, hard working, promising new Americans.

Italy, the land of art and beauty, contributes to us citizens with an enormous capacity for industry and economy, warmth of nature, response to beauty and openness to religious appeal, with a tendency to crimes of passion and, in general, a most un-American attitude toward the child, using him at the earliest possible age as a commercial asset for the family.

Physically they are of marvelous vitality and strength, and like other hardy peasant stock have great endurance and are very prolific. Early marriages, arranged by the parents, and large families, are the rule among them.

All of these factors are of greatest significance to us as a nation, though we can not here enter into a discussion of the grave potentialities involved in the absorption by our nation of a virile, prolific, though not highly intelligent class.

We cannot, however, fail to be impressed with the urgent necessity of imparting to such a people the ideals and standards essential to their adoption into our body politic.

The church is qualified beyond all other agencies to accomplish this end, and to give spiritual direction to the Italian-Americans who are turning from the superstition and inadequacy of the religion which is fast losing its hold upon them in Italy, as well as America, and from which they are rapidly drifting into indifference and unbelief.

In a late investigation made by the Italian government into conditions in southern Italy the beneficial effect of the returning immigrant was expressed in the strongest terms.

In effect this report said that "greater than the benefit any laws that the government could pass, better than any training which the government could give the people was the beneficial influence of the returning immigrant. Not merely did he bring new wealth into the country, but what was of still greater importance than the imported wealth, he brought with him the American spirit of intelligence, and enterprise which made of him a much worthier and more helpful citizen." [Footnote: The Immigrant Problem--Jenks and Lanck.]

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He came of generations of Waldensian Protestant ancestry in Italy, this alert, efficient, cultured Italian pastor. He found the parish to which he was assigned composed of several thousand of his countrymen in a Hudson river town; the building to be used for church purposes a dirty, run-down old hall, a part of the most disreputable corner of the town.

There was not one Italian Protestant, or sympathizer, so far as he could discover, in the community and there seemed to be the greatest apathy to the Mission on the part of the old aristocratic church of the town.

Several blocks away a fine new brick church was in process of construction, to be used for Italian Catholics. Truly the prospect was not encouraging for the Protestant Mission.

However, generations of those who endure and overcome had written deep within him an unfailing courage and a conquering faith.

He began to cultivate Italians in their stores, on the streets, in their homes, wherever he might. His charm and sincerity opened the way and won true friends. In his discussions with them he found those who were questioning the authority of their former faith; it seemed out of harmony in this new land, and they were turning from it to unbelief.