The Church, with her faiths, her sacraments, and a part of her ministry, was an integral part of the colonization of the County from the beginning and continuously. Everywhere, with the spreading population, substantial edifices for public worship were erected and competent provision made for the maintenance of all the decencies and proprieties of Christian religion. The influence of these institutions, and of the faith which they embodied, was most benign and salutary. They gave to the age of the Revolution its noble character and its deep-seated principles, the force and momentum of which have come down, with gradually decreasing power, to our own day. But with these institutions and with their proper effect and influence was mingled the fatal leaven of secularity. * * * * * All the leading denominations are represented in Loudoun by churches and congregations to the extent shown by the following table of statistics, representing conditions as they existed at the close of the calendar year 1906, and based upon the returns of individual church organizations so far as received by the Census Office, through which Bureau they were obtained for initial publication in this work. =========================================+==============+============ | Total |Communicants | number of | or members. Denomination. |organizations.|------------ | |Total number | |reported. -----------------------------------------+--------------+------------ All denominations | 97 | 7,606 _Baptist bodies_: | | Baptists-- | | Southern Baptist Convention | 11 | 1,199 National Baptist Convention | | (colored) | 15 | 1,235 Free Baptists | 2 | 55 Primitive Baptists | 6 | 171 _Friends_: | | Society of Friends (Orthodox) | 2 | 122 Religious Society of Friends | | (Hicksite) | 3 | 278 _Lutheran bodies_: | | General Synod of the Evangelical | | Lutheran Church in the United | | States of America | 4 | 645 _Methodist bodies_:[17] | | Methodist Episcopal Church | 19 | 1,179 Methodist Episcopal Church (South) | 21 | 1,716 Colored Methodist Episcopal Church | 1 | 45