“Very Startling Statements.”
THE Boston Journal says: “Prof. Christlieb, of Bonn, Germany, read a paper before the recent meeting of the Evangelical Alliance at Copenhagen, which contained some very startling statements. According to the statistics of the last twenty years, he said, there has been a large falling off in attendance upon religious services throughout Europe, and this has been followed by an increase of crime. Paris has more atheists to-day than ever before existed in any great city. In no Christian country, however, were things so bad as in Germany. In many districts in Berlin there was only one church to every 50,000 of the population. In New York there were 200 places of public worship; in Berlin, only 50. Besides this, out of the whole population of Berlin, namely, one million, only 20,000, or two per cent., attend divine service. Hamburg was even worse, for, out of a population of 400,000, public worship on Sundays was attended only by 5,000. In certain provinces of Germany there are suicides at the rate of forty a week. The ordinary religious teaching of the country is quite dead, and Christianity resolved into mere education. Skeptical works are popular with the working classes, and in the middle and upper classes hundreds are led away by the influence of scientific discovery and invention.”