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only fair and full way to do that was to join the church. His name was never removed from the records of that church, located on Fifth Avenue at Forty-eighth Street.

He gladly aligned himself with church people when he said to Dr. Iglehart, who had appealed to him on a moral issue:

You know full well that on moral questions the church people and I are in perfect agreement. Why? I am one of the church people myself, and stand, work and fight for the things which they represent. Our personal friendship is the outgrowth of our mutual support of the things for which the church stands (Iglehart, p. 139).

William Allen White wrote me: "I have heard him express a high value upon the churches of our country." Theodore Jr. explained to me:

My father had great respect for and confidence in the church. He was, however, little interested in mere dogma, but earnestly lent advocacy when the church had an ethical point at issue.

The New York Sun quoted Mr. Roosevelt on his return from South America as expressing his conviction that Roman Catholic workers and churches should be increased there:

A very short experience of communities where there is no church ought to convince the most heterodox of the absolute need of a church. I earnestly wish that there could be such an increase in the personnel and equipment of the Catholic Church in South America as to permit the establishment of one good and earnest priest in every village or little community in the far interior,

He also urged the advantage not only to the people but to the Roman Catholic Church itself of a multiplication of Protestant institutions. There ought to

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be a marked extension and development of the native Protestant churches, such as I saw established here and there in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentine, and of the Young Men's Christian Associations. . . . Not only is the establishment of such churches a good thing for the body politic as a whole, but a good thing for the Catholic Church itself; for their presence is a constant spur to activity and clean and honorable conduct and a constant reflection on sloth and moral laxity.

Discussing the effect of a church on a community, he admits that mere "religious formalism" has been an enemy to religion from the day of the Pharisees until the present day and then says:

Nevertheless, in this actual world a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed at or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid down grade.

He affirms that it is only the exceptional family or individual who reaches high and full ethical development without the help of the church. But hear him as he writes in The Ladies' Home Journal:

It is perfectly true that occasional individuals or families may have nothing to do with the church or with religious practices and observances and yet maintain the highest standard of spirituality and of ethical obligation. But this does not affect the case in the world as it now is, any more than that exceptional men and women under exceptional conditions have disregarded the marriage tie without

moral harm to themselves interferes with the larger fact that such disregard, if at all common, means the complete moral disintegration of the body politic.

In the West he noticed that a pioneer section disintegrated if a church was not erected:

In the pioneer days of the West we found it an unfailing rule that after a community had existed for a certain length of time either a church was built or else the community began to go downhill.

When church membership and work has decreased in the older sections of the country they have gone backward:

In these old communities in the Eastern States which have gone backward it is noticeable that the retrogression has been both marked and accentuated by a rapid decline in church membership and work. . . . This has occurred not only in the "poor white" sections of the South, but in the small hamlets of the "abandoned farm" regions of New England and New York. As the people grow slack and dispirited they slip from all effective interest in church activities.

But when religious organizations are strengthened such communities revive:

The building up of a strong country church or Young Men's Christian Association in such a community often has an astonishing effect in putting such a virile life into them that their moral betterment stimulates a marked physical betterment in their homes and farms.

Mr. Hagedorn, the secretary of the Roosevelt Memorial Association and an extensive editor of Mr.

[graphic][subsumed][merged small]

THE OYSTER BAY HOME (CHRIST) CHURCH.

1. The exterior among the trees.

2. The Interior-the Communion Altar.

3. The Fourth Seat from the rear-the 200th

Anniversary bronze tablet.

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