efer to the Protestant faith._ For the most part
Bohemians conversant with their history as a people are naturally
hostile to the Catholic Church, and when the restraints which held them
in their own country are removed by emigration, many of the more
enlightened quietly drop their allegiance, and, through lack of desire
or opportunity, fail to ally themselves with any other. So strong is
this non-religious tendency among the Bohemians--especially in the
cities--that it has resulted in active unbelief, and hostility to Church
influence. _This spiritual isolation_, with its resultant social
separation, _is doing great harm in retarding assimilation_. Aside from
this matter of religion, the Bohemian falls into American customs with
surprising readiness."

[Sidenote: Protestant Opportunity]

Thus a member of this race points out to Protestants their opportunity.
Here is a people with inherited Protestant tendencies. They have been
driven in Bohemia by an enforced Roman Catholicism into antagonism to
the Church as they know it.

[Sidenote: Freethinkers' Society]

In Chicago, where over 100,000 of them make of that city the third
largest Bohemian center in the world, they have a strongly organized
Freethinkers' Society, with three hundred branches, which issues an
atheistic catechism, and has it taught in its numerous Sunday-schools,
as they are called. But there are thousands who do not belong to this
cult, and who are open to the gospel. The same is true of the Bohemians
in New York, Cleveland, and elsewhere who have not advanced to the
Chicago infidel standpoint. Their character has not been well
understood. They possess excellent qualities for the making of good
Americans. Christianity in pure and true form is all they need.

[Sidenote: A Home-loving and Musical People]

The Bohemians are a home people, social, and fond of organizations of
every kind. Music is their passion, and their clubs, mutual benefit
societies, and loan associations, successfully run, show large capacity
for management. They have forty-two papers, seven of them religious, two
Protestant. Their freethinking is not all of it by any means of the
dogmatic sort which has its catechism of atheism. There is another
class, represented by an old woman with a broad brow over which the
silvery hair is smoothly parted, who says to the missionary, "I have my
God in my heart, I shall deal with him. I do not want any priest to step
between us." That is the