Applied Christianity Moral Aspects of Social Questions (Social Problems and Social Policy--The American Experience)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: ... Applied Christianity Washington Gladden APPLIED CHRISTIANITY. CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. The Christian economists of America are confronting a great problem. The wealth of the country is increasing at a prodigious rate. Every census shows the population multiplying, and wealth multiplying much faster than the population. In 1860 the estimated valuation of all the property, real and personal, in the United States was a little over $16,000,000,000; in 1870 it was a little more than $24,000,000,000 ; and between these dates came a wasting war, with the destruction of a million of producers, and the extinguishment of property in slaves reckoned at $1,500,000,000. The census estimates for 1880 put the wealth of the nation at $43,642,000,000, and make the United States the richest nation in the world, exceeding Great Britain by several hundred millions. Signs of this increase of wealth appear on every hand: railroads, factories, farm buildings and machinery, warehouses and docks, long lines of wholesale stores and retail shops, great financial institutions -- banks, insurance companies, trust companies for the storage and use of capital; houses going up in the cities and the towns by the hundred thousand, many of them palaces; equipages, furniture, rich costumes, costly works of art. The one impression made upon the mind of the philosophical observer who makes a tour of the watering-places, and notes the scale on which multitudes of his fellow-citizens are living, is that this is a rich country. He may doubt whether these people can all afford to spend so much ; but the money is here, else they could not be spending it. It may not all rightly belong to them, but it is in their hands, and no one can see the floods of