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What in some ways was the most important aspect was the impact individually on the millions who constituted the nation.

As we have seen, a growing proportion, although in 1914 still a minority, were members of churches.

Presumably those who did not have a formal church connexion had also felt the influence of Christianity to a greater or lesser extent.

Many of them had once been members of a church or at least had been given instruction in Christianity but for one or another reason had allowed the connexion to lapse.

The form of Christianity to which they were exposed was for some the Protestantism of the older stock, for others the Protestantism of the nineteenth-century immigration ; ;

for still others, mostly of the nineteenth-century immigration, it was Roman Catholicism, and for a small minority it was Eastern Orthodoxy.

Upon all of them played the intellectual, social, political, and economic attitudes, institutions, and customs of the nation.

Upon most of these Christianity had left an impress and through them had had a share in making the individual what he was.

Yet to determine precisely to what extent and exactly in what ways any individual showed the effects of Christianity would be impossible.

At best only an approximation could be arrived at.

To generalize for the entire nation would be absurd.

For instance, we cannot know whether even for church members the degree of conformity to Christian standards of morality increased or declined as the proportion of church members in the population rose.

The temptation is to say that, as the percentage of church members mounted, the degree of discipline exercised by the churches lessened and the trend was towards conformity to the general level.

Yet this cannot be proved.

We know that in the early part of the century many Protestant congregations took positive action against members who transgressed the ethical codes to which the majority subscribed.

Thus Baptist churches on the frontier took cognizance of charges against their members of drunkenness, fighting, malicious gossip, lying, cheating, sexual irregularities, gambling, horse racing, and failure to pay just debts.

If guilty, the offender might be excluded from membership.

As church membership burgeoned, such measures faded into desuetude.

But whether this was accompanied by a general lowering of the moral life of the membership we do not know.