The Baptist churches of America, the torch-bearers of religious or soul-liberty, have grown from the one church which Williams founded in Providence into a mighty host. From twelve members in one church organization in 1639 that denomination has grown in America until today, according to the latest government statistics, it has the largest membership of any Protestant denomination in America, 7,236,650. Its one preacher has become a great host of 39,734, serving 53,133 churches. Instead of one college with one student in 1764, it now has 463 schools in America, with 68,513 students. Instead of one lone missionary to the Indians, it now has a large army of missionaries in the home and foreign fields. Doctor Masters, Secretary of Publicity of the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, in tabulating the figures from the preliminary statistics furnished by the United States Census Department, calls our attention to the fact that the approximate Baptist population of America, including members and other adherents, is twenty-two millions. The Baptists are thus in the lead of every denomination, Catholic or Protestant, in America; our net gain for ten years is the greatest of all denominations, 28 per cent, compared with 10.8 per cent of the Roman Catholics. He gives the comparative strength of Romanists and evangelicals in America as eighty million evangelicals to 15,700,000 Roman Catholics. Before the days of the great war, Pres. E. Y. Mullins, with prophetic vision wrote: We are approaching the Baptist age of the world, because we are approaching the age of the triumph of democracy. Like a vine growing in the darkness of some deep cavern, and slowly stretching itself toward the dim light shining in through the distant mouth of the cavern, so has humanity slowly crept on toward freedom. The mighty hordes of the Asiatic and European world, weary and sad yet courageous and resolute, are hastening forward with unresting feet toward the gates of destiny. Toward those gates these hundreds of years the Baptists have been pointing, and today in the foremost files of time they lead the way. As humanity enters they will shout with the full knowledge that God in Christ has led all the way.... And the goal of human progress shall be realized in an eternal society wherein absolute democracy is joined to absolute monarchy, God the Father being the monarch, and his people a vast family of free children.