THE PRESBYTERIAN QUARTERLY AND PRINCETON REVIEW. NEW SERIES, No. 20.-OCTOBER, 1876. Art. I.-AMERICAN METHODISM IN 1876.* By REV. W. J. R. TAYLOR, D.D., Newark, N. J. IN 1776 the whole Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America was composed of twenty-five ministers and five thousand members, in eleven circuits, on the Atlantic slope. In 1781 it crossed the Alleghanies, and laid the foundations of the "Old Western Conference," which extended from the Northern lakes to Natchez on the Mississippi. Its first General Conference was held in Baltimore in 1784, at which Francis Asbury was ordained its first bishop at the age of thirty-nine. There were then about eighty preachers and fifteen thousand members. Thirty-two years afterward, when this remarkable man died, in 1816, the church numbered over seven hundred itinerant preachers and more than two hundred and eleven thousand members. Soon after Washington was inaugurated as President of the United States, Bishops Coke and Asbury read to him the congratulatory address of the General Conference, which was then in * Proceedings of the General Conference held at Baltimore, May, 1876. session in New York, May 29, 1789, and they received his reply to this first ecclesiastical greeting upon his accession to the Presidency. The organization of this branch of the Christian Church in this country dates substantially from the separate and independent national existence of the United States, although the centenary of its origin was completed and celebrated in 1866 with great religious observances and with splendid munificence. In 1876 the minutes of the General Conference report 12 bishops, 81 annual conferences, 10,923 ministers, 12,881 local preachers, making a total of 23,804 preachers, 1,642,456 communicants; 15,633 churches, valued at $71,350,234; 5,017 parsonages, valued at $9,731,628; 19,287 Sabbath-schools, 207,182 teachers, and 1,406,168 scholars. The increase in the last four years has been: 1,234 itinerant and 1,499 local preachers, making a total of 2,723 preachers, 159,236 lay members, 2,183 churches, 808 parsonages, 1,732 Sunday-schools, 13.207 teachers, and 138,426 scholars, and a total value of church. property of $16,386,175. The Methodist Episcopal Church South has 8 bishops, 3,485 itinerants, 5,356 local preachers, 712,765 lay members, 7,204 Sunday-schools, with 48,825 teachers and officers, and 323,634 scholars. The whole number of Methodists, Episcopal and non-Epis copal, in the United States is reported as embracing 21,995 itinerant ministers, 26,875 local preachers, 3,146,356 lay members, representing about nine or ten millions of population. The grand total of Methodists in the world is summed up at 28,380 itinerants, 66,935 local preachers, and 4,173,047 lay members. The purpose of this article is not theological nor controver sial, but chiefly to exhibit the historical development and the practical system of American Episcopal Methodism, as it is represented in its two most numerous and powerful branches, which are substantially one; to show the apparent causes of its growth, its strength, and its weakness; its tendencies, and its probable future. 1. First among the causes of the rise and progress of Methodism is its providential character. The Wesleys, Whitefield, and their co-laborers, to whom it owes its origin, were "chosen vessels," raised up by the providence and grace of God for this great work. This is the general verdict of secular and ecclesiastical historians. They were men of learning, eloquence, administrative and practical ability, single in their aims, tenacious of their principles, popular with the masses, and, above all, they were "men whose hearts God had touched." Southey and Isaac Taylor long ago made John Wesley the hero of their brilliant pages, and that fastidious. critic, Lord Macaulay, wrote of him: "He was a man whose eloquence and logical acuteness might have rendered him eminent in literature; whose genius for government was not inferior to that of Richelieu; and who devoted all his powers, in defiance of obloquy and derision, to what he sincerely considered the highest good of his species." No candid reader can even cursorily examine Mr. Tyerman's three massive volumes of the Life and Times of John Wesley, nor any of the recent monographs of English and American writers upon "the founder of Methodism," without coming to the conclusion, that his historical place has already been fixed, in the judgment of friendly and opposing critics, among the reformers of religion in Christendom. 2. The religious movement called Methodism" was a genuine reaction against the palsying formalism of the Church of England in the eighteenth century, which had also, to a very great extent, infected the non-conforming or dissenting bodies throughout Great Britain. Wesley, himself, until his "evangelical conversion," at the age of thirty-five, was a rigid high churchman, a dry, unevangelical theologian, and a cold legalist. For twenty-five years he struggled through many varying phases of religious experience, until at last, .and chiefly through the godly counsel of Peter Böhler, the Moravian, he found peace in believing. Like Luther and Whitefield, it was only after fruitless vigils, fastings, and other forms of selfrighteousness, that he understood the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and then he went out to "preach Christ and him crucified" over two continents. At first ridiculed, opposed, assailed, maligned, persecuted, driven from the pulpits and churches to the fields and the streets, he and his preachers could not be silenced, and the movement became successively a revolution, a reformation, and a great ecclesiastical organiza tion, which has been characterized as "a ferment of life among all the churches." 3. It sprang up out of the proudest of English universities, in the hearts of "The Holy Club," with men of education, culture, and faith; but it rooted itself almost immediately among "the common people," who "heard them gladly," and as it progressed, they were made use of to carry it on. In this it closely resembled the processes of the growth of the primitive Christian church under the leadership of men of the highest endowments, and among the poor and the most despised of such populations as those of Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, Ephesus, and Corinth. Here again the history of the Reformation of the sixteenth century repeated itself in the eighteenth as a popular movement, headed by men of the greatest renown and power. 4. The methods and objects of Wesley's first movements were very simple. Dr. James Rigg, of England, in his valuable monograph on The Living Wesley, says, that "To revive the doctrine of salvation by faith through grace, by the ordinance of preaching, became henceforth Wesley's great life-work. He became, above all things, himself a preacher, and he founded a preaching institute; with preaching, however, always associating close personal and individual fellowship. "The whole of Methodism unfolded from this beginning. To promote preaching and fellowship was the one work-fellowship itself meaning chiefly a perpetual individual testimony of Christian believers as to salvation by grace through faith. Preaching and fellowship-this was all, from first to last; true preaching, and true, vital, Christian fellowship, which involved opposition to untrue preaching and to fellowship not truly and fully Christian. From this unfolded all Wesley's life and history. His union for a season with the Moravians, and then his separation from them, when their teaching became for the time mixed up and entangled with demoralizing error; the foundation of his own society-that of the people called Methodists; his separation from his brother Whitefield and from Calvinism; his field preachings; his separate meeting-houses and separate communions; his class-meetings and band-meetings, and all the discipline of his society; his conference, and his brotherhood of itinerant Methodist preachers; his increasing irregularities as a churchman; his ordinations, and the virtual, though not formal or voluntary, separation of his societies from the Church of England-all resulted from the same beginning: from his embracing 'the doctrine of salvation by faith; from his receiving the instructions of Peter Böhler, the Moravian minister.'"-(pp. 233, 234.) 5. In like manner it is historically true that "the practical system of Methodism" grew up spontaneously from small providential beginnings, and by the necessities of its expansion and of its adaptation to the times and to the people of successive generations. One thing led to another, not by prophetic forecast, but by wisdom adapting means to ends. Driven from the pulpits of the Establishment, Wesley preached in the open air to crowds which no church building could hold. The erection of chapels led to the system of contributions of a penny a week to pay for them. These weekly gifts, by companies of twelve, with a leader for each, who received their pennies, brought the givers together for payment and for prayer and praise, and thus originated the class-meetings, which have always been among the most powerful formative and preservative agencies of Methodism. The itinerancy, the local lay ministry, the circuit preaching, all were originated and have been perpetuated by the rapid advances, the scattered societies, the pioneer evangelism, and other self-evident necessities of the work. The quarterly, district, and general conferences, the general superintendency, the presiding eldership, the financial system, the educational and publication schemes, and the missionary institutions of the church, also grew with its providential development as they were needed; but all of them are the normal results of principles which have made the Methodist system at once unique, flexible, and specifically adapted to its world-wide expansion. Resting its whole theory and practice of church. government, not on divine right, but upon "Christian expediency," "American Methodism is ready for any modifications of its system which time may show to be desirable for its greater effectiveness." The latest exhibition of these views is the final adoption of lay representation in its General Conference, after many years of discussion and of strong opposition. This principle of "Christian expediency" can always be used to popularize the government of the Methodist Church, and it is not improbable that it may gradually effect the union of most of the episcopal and non-episcopal branches of the communion in this country. 6. Methodism has always been remarkably free from the conventionalities of society, and the rigidity of older church organi |