Protestant sects furnish very unequal contingents to the little army of souls daily returning to the true faith; and it is a curious fact that the two sects which furnish the most are the Episcopalians, who, in their forms and traditions, approach nearest to the Catholic Church, and the Unitarians, who go to the very opposite extreme, and appear to push their philosophical and rationalistic principles almost beyond the pale of Christianity. These two sects generally comprise the most enlightened and intellectual people of North America. On the other hand, the denominations which embrace the more ignorant portions of the population (such as the Baptists, the Wesleyan Methodists, etc., etc.) furnish, in proportion to their numbers, but few converts. The principal Catholic review in the United States (Brownson's Review, published in New York) is edited by a well-known convert, whose name it bears, and who was formerly a Unitarian minister.

Further North—in New England—there is another Catholic group, of recent origin, formed of the Puritan states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. The first see here was established by Bishop Cheverus only sixty years ago. These bishoprics, however, have already acquired importance; for in the diocese of Hartford the Catholics are now sixteen per cent, of the whole population, and the rapidity of their increase and the completeness of their church organization give us ground for bright hopes of their future progress. Immigration {12} here does much to promote conversions, and it will not be extravagant to anticipate that in the course of a few years the number of the faithful will be doubled. The Pilot, the most important Catholic journal in the country, is published in Boston.

The far West, only a few years ago, was a great wilderness, with only a few French posts scattered here and there in the Indian forest, like little islands in the midst of a great ocean. Now it is divided into several states, and counts millions of inhabitants. In this rapid transformation, Catholicism has not remained behind. Many dioceses have been established, and the quickness of their growth has already placed this group in the second rank so far as regards numerical importance, while all goes to show that Catholicism is destined here to preponderate greatly over all other denominations. The states of Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota contained, in 1860, 4,575,000 souls, of whom 890,000, or 19 per cent., were Catholics. This is as large a proportion as we find in the central group. It is, moreover, rapidly rising, and only one thing is necessary to make these states before long the principal seats of Catholicism in the Union—that is, an adequate supply of priests. It is of the utmost importance that the demand for missionaries in these diocese be supplied at whatever cost.

The principal causes of this remarkable increase are, first, the crowds of immigrants attracted by the great extent of fertile land thrown open to settlers; and, secondly, the fact that the Catholic immigrants on their arrival clustered, so to speak, around the old French settlements, where the missionaries still maintained the discipline and worship of the Church. At first, therefore, it was easy to direct this great influx of people, since they naturally tended toward the pre-existing centres of faith. The consequence was that the Church lost by apostacies fewer members than one might have supposed, and fewer than were lost in other places. But now the daily augmenting crowds of immigrants are dispersing themselves through less solitary regions. They are coming under more direct and various influences; and hence the necessity for increasing the number of churches and parish priests becomes daily more and more urgent. At the same time, the means at the disposal of the bishops become daily less and less adequate for supplying this want, especially since the people of the country, new and unsettled as they are, and absorbed in material cares, furnish but few candidates for the priesthood. Here we see a glorious field for the far-reaching benevolence of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Nowhere, we believe, will the sending forth of pious and devoted priests produce fruits comparable to those of which the past gives promise to the future in this part of the United States. We spoke just now of the old French colonies, and our readers will perhaps be surprised that we should have made so much account of those poor little villages, which numbered hardly more than from 500 to 1,500 souls each when the Yankees began to come into the country. Nevertheless, we have not exaggerated their importance. It is not only that they served as centres and rallying-points; but so rapid is the multiplication of families in America that this French population which, if brought together in one mass in 1800, would have counted at most 14,000 souls, now numbers, including both the original settlements and the swarms of emigrants who have gone from them to the West, not fewer than 80,000. Their descendants are always easily recognized. Detroit, and its neighborhood in Michigan, Vincennes (Ind.), Cahokia and Kaskaskia (Ill.), St. Louis, St. Geneviève, Carondelet, etc. (Mo.), Green Bay and Prairie du Chien (Wis.), St. Paul (Minn.)—all these old settlements have preserved the deep imprint of our race. Even in the new colonies which were afterward drawn from them, the French population have uniformly kept up the practice of their religion, {13} the use of their mother tongue, and a lively recollection of their origin. Of this fact we have obtained proof in several instances from careful personal observation. Small and poor, therefore, as these settlements were, they had a powerful moral influence upon the great immigration of the nineteenth century. The Catholic immigrants felt drawn toward them by the attraction of a community of thought and customs; and God, whose Providence rules our lives, directed the movement by his own inscrutable methods.