The authority of the Pope in the United States is maintained by being carefully withheld from all danger of challenge. The American Catholic is not conscious of any restraint in the tie that binds him to Rome because the rope is always paid out as freely as his movements require. Again, it would seem that the Roman Catholic exaltation of the contemplative life over the active can never be accepted by American Christianity. There are no Catholics to whom the monastic life makes so faint an appeal as the Catholics of the United States. Perhaps a stronger admixture of the spirit of Mary might be beneficial, but American Christianity is emphatically a child of Martha. On the other hand, however, there is much in Latin Christianity that appeals strongly to the American. His extraordinary genius for organization, in which he probably surpasses even the modern German whose great organizing capabilities have less of individual initiative, and the ancient Roman with whom, again, it was the characteristic of a class rather than of a people, dispose him to appreciate the great organizing skill that has always been shown by the Roman Catholic Church. Further, the catholicity of that Church, its wonderful power to assimilate and build up within itself all races and languages and classes, cannot but appeal to a people engaged in solving a parallel problem. Modern American Christianity, moreover, is more and more unsectarian, even anti-sectarian. It does not glory in division and isolation. There is in it a growing passion for unity, a growing yearning for a strong, commanding, national type of Christianity that is much more akin to the imperialism of the great Popes, like Gregory VII. and Innocent III., than to the parochialism and sectarianism that have generally and naturally been associated with Protestantism. American Christianity is fast losing all interest in denominationalism. All this is bringing it nearer to the temper of Latin Christianity. _d_. American Christianity compared with Teutonic.