After the conclusion of the nineteenth century's most important social crusade, the one which sought to liberate thousands of Americans from legal though involuntary servitude, Wendell Phillips, a prominent abolitionist and a farsighted reformer, predicted that “the time will come when our cities will strain our institutions as slavery never did” (quoted in Strong, 1898: 101–102). Indeed, the pace of change implied by urban growth in the late nineteenth century was to try severely the social institutions transplanted from the countryside and established in a more settled time. One of those institutions, organized religion, is the subject of this study. A social historian notes of this period that “the growth of the metropolis, with all that it implied in secularism and anti-traditionalism, gave the churches the greatest challenge in their history” (Wish, 1952: 148). In fact, the development of the city, as another historian (Abell, 1943: 3) has observed, tested the structure of American religion “to the breaking-point.”

On the one side stretches the older America–the America that was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural, that devoted its energies to the conquest of the continent, that enjoyed relative isolation from the Old World, that was orthodox in religion, optimistic in philosophy, and romantic in temperament. Over the horizon, on the other side, came the new America–an America predominantly urban and overwhelmingly industrial, inextricably involved in world politics and world wars, experiencing convulsive changes in population, economy, technology, and social relations, and deeply troubled by the crowding problems that threw their shadow over the promise of the future.