Preface

Contents Preface

We often call Americans our friends, but only rarely do we admit that we scarcely know them at all. Russian literature has not yet produced even a single serious work bearing the mark of genuine study of American life. Yet such study could be instructive for us in many respects. The young American people have practically resolved many of those questions that fruitlessly agitate the aging nations of Europe. This applies equally to the social and political spheres as to the religious one. But while the social and political life of the American people has found some reflection in Russian and translated foreign literature, their religious life has reached us almost not at all, even through foreign literature. Meanwhile the religious life of the American people at this moment presents perhaps even more instructive interest than its social and political life. The study of this life can have important direct significance. In it the mind of a religious person will find encouragement and confirmation of the faith that the disbelief and coldness toward religion spreading in the Old World are not the result of high culture, but rather the fruit of moral decay—since on the contrary religion has never greater energy and significance than among the most educated people in the world, in America. This book is the result of study and personal observation of American religious life during our stay in New York and aims to lift even one corner of the dark veil that conceals from us the religious life of the American people. It is a collection of separate articles written by us at various times and later incorporated into our specialized investigation on Roman Catholicism in America, where they appear in their organic connection. Since they have independent interest, we deemed it not superfluous to publish them separately. Of the questions examined in it, the first concerns the general religious state of the American people, and in the first article the reader will find an exposition of the deeply interesting process of centralization of American religious consciousness, expressed in the weakening of sectarian ferment and in the search for the one true Church. The second article depicts the tragic epic of the missionary labors of the Jesuits among the Native Americans, ending in the complete ruin of the fruits of their terrible efforts. The third examines the important question of religious liberty of conscience in America, about whose nature so little is known among us, despite the fact that references to it as a model are so often heard from advocates of all manner of freedom. Finally the fourth article presents an outline of the religious question in the American school, the clarification of which is all the more necessary since the so-called secularization of the American school constitutes the secret dream of a significant portion of Russian journalism, which so often dislikes what is its own because it lacks proper understanding of what is foreign.