The truth is that as the foreigners have moved into down-town New York the old-time Protestant churches have moved out, in great measure abandoning the field, on the assumption that there was no constituency to maintain an American church. It did not seem to dawn upon the rich churches which moved up town that the new population needed evangelization and could be evangelized. The result is that the immigrant accustomed to imposing churches and splendid architecture and impressive ritual, sees little to impress him with the existence of Protestant Christianity. Go through that teeming East Side in New York, and here and there you will find a mission supported in desultory fashion by some church or city mission society or mission board, and in quarters conducive to anything but worship or respect. There is nothing to make the new arrival feel the presence and power of the religious faith that created this free Republic and still predominates in its best life. So it is wherever you go. The home mission work is in its beginnings, and these are manifestly feeble and inadequate. [Sidenote: An Example] The Roman Catholics teach us some practical lessons. They build large and impressive churches for the immigrants. They abandon no fields, and immediately occupy those left by Protestants. They expend money where it will go furthest. The Protestants of New York should have been far-sighted enough to plant strong evangelistic and philanthropic institutions in the fields from which they withdrew their churches. Valuable ground has been lost for want of this missionary insight and impulse. [Sidenote: Need of an Awakening] The conditions in New York are symptomatic of those obtaining generally, in country as well as city. The Protestant churches, not recognizing the supreme home mission opportunity to Christianize the immigrants, have in many cases become weak where a zealous evangelism would have kept them strong. Too many of the American Churches have been satisfied with their own prosperity and unmindful of the growing need of the gospel all around them. As a missionary worker says:[93] "There are plenty of Christians who believe that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation in a vague and general way; but there are not enough people who clearly believe that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to the Italian working on the railroad, or the Hungarian in the shops, or the German on the farm. Too many of us have no faith at all in foreign missions at home." [Sidenote: Reasons for Present Conditions]