peful
method of conciliating and naturalizing a foreign element in the
community to treat them with suspicion and hostility as alien enemies.
The shameful persecution which the mob was for a brief time permitted to
inflict on Catholic churches and schools and convents had for its chief
effect to confirm the foreigner in his adherence to his church and his
antipathy to Protestantism, and to provoke a twofold ferocity in return.
At a time when there was reason to apprehend a Know-nothing riot in New
York, in 1844, a plan was concerted and organized by "a large Irish
society with divisions throughout the city," by which, "in case a single
church was attacked, buildings should be fired in all quarters and the
great city should be involved in a general conflagration."[321:1]

The utmost that could have been hoped for by the devoted but inadequate
body of the Roman Catholic clergy in America, overwhelmed by an influx
of their people coming in upon them in increasing volume, numbering
millions per annum, was that they might be able to hold their own. But
this hope was very far from being attained. How great have been the
losses to the Roman communion through the transplantation of its members
across the sea is a question to which the most widely varying answers
have been given, and on which statistical exactness seems unattainable.
The various estimates, agreeing in nothing else, agree in representing
them as enormously great.[321:2] All good men will also agree that in
so far as these losses represent mere lapses into unbelief and
irreligion they are to be deplored. Happily there is good evidence of a
large salvage, gathered into other churches, from what so easily becomes
a shipwreck of faith with total loss.

It might seem surprising, in view of the many and diverse resources of
attractive influence which the Roman Church has at its command, that its
losses have not been to some larger extent compensated by conversions
from other sects. Instances of such conversion are by no means wanting;
but so far as a popular current toward Catholicism is concerned, the
attractions in that direction are outweighed by the disadvantages
already referred to. It has not been altogether a detriment to the
Catholic Church in America that the social status and personal
composition of its congregations, in its earlier years, have been such
that the transition into it from any of the Protestant churches could be
made only at the cost of a painf