British Churches, and call forth the energies of the British people, in plans of religious benevolence for the whole world. Its previous missions in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the Channel Islands did much for the reformation of the domestic population. Besides its efforts in 1786 in the West Indies, it began its evangelical labors in France as early as 1791, and its great schemes in Africa in 1811; in Asia in 1814; in Australasia in 1815; in Polynesia in 1822; until, from the first call of Wesley for American evangelists, in the Conference of 1769, down to our day, we see the grand enterprise reaching to the shores of Sweden, to Germany, France, and the Upper Alps; to Gibraltar, and Malta; to the banks of the Gambia, to Sierra Leone, and to the Gold Coast; to the Cape of Good Hope; to Ceylon, to India, and to China; to the Colonists and Aboriginal tribes of Australia; to New Zealand, and the Friendly and Fiji Islands; to the islands of the Western, as well as of the Southern Hemisphere; and from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Puget's Sound. From 1803 to the present time Wesleyan Methodism has contributed more than twenty millions of dollars for foreign evangelization. In England the "Church Missionary Society" alone exceeds its annual collections for the foreign field;, but the Wesleyan Society enrolls more communicants in its Mission Churches than all other British missionary societies

combined. The historian of religion during the last and present centuries would find it difficult to point to a more magnificent monument of Christianity. Methodism, gathering its hosts mostly from the mines and cottages of England, has embodied them in this sublime movement for the redemption of the world. Its poor have kept its treasury full. They have supplied hundreds if not thousands of their sons and daughters as evangelists to the heathen; and while they have thus been enabled to do good in the extremities of the earth, they have reaped still greater good from the reacting influence of their liberality upon themselves. They have received from it the sentiment of self-respect which comes from welldoing. They have been led to habits of frugality that their poverty might be consecrated by liberality. They have been elevated above the perversion of local or personal sentiments, by sympathies with their whole race. They have been led to a knowledge of the geography of the world, and to habits of reflection upon its religious, social, and political interests, by the habitual reading of missionary intelligence. They have been brought into closer social as well as Christian communion with one another by their frequent missionary meetings. Thousands of them have acquired habits of public usefulness by the management of their missionary affairs; and sentiments of universal philanthropy and religious

heroism have been spread through their ranks to ennoble their own souls while saving the souls of others.

Coke, the first bishop of American Methodism, the first Protestant bishop of the new world, was to the end of his life the representative character of Methodist Missions. In his old age he offered himself to the British Conference as a missionary to the East Indies; he died on the voyage, and was buried in the Indian Ocean. His death struck not only a knell through the Church, but a summons for it to rise universally and march around the world. He had long entertained the idea of universal evangelization as the exponent characteristic of the Methodist movement. The influence of the movement on English Protestantism had tended to such a result, for in both England and America nearly all denominations had felt the power of the great revival, not only during the days of Whitefield and Wesley, but ever since. Anglo-Saxon Christianity, in both hemispheres, had been quickened into new life, and had experienced a change amounting to a moral revolution. The sublime apostolic idea of evangelization in all the earth, and till all the earth should be Christianized, had not only been restored, as a practical conviction, but had become pervasive and dominant in the consciousness of the Churches, and was manifestly thenceforward to shape the religious history of the Protest

ant world. The great fermentation of the mind of the civilized nations-the resurrection, as it may be called, of popular thought and power-cotemporaneous in the civil and religious worlds, in the former by the American and French Revolutions, in the latter by the Methodist movement, seemed to presage a new history of the human race. And history is compelled to record, with the frankest admission of the characteristic defects of Thomas Coke, that no man, not excepting Wesley or Whitefield, more completely represented the religious significance of those eventful times.

Though American Methodism was many years without a distinct missionary organization, it was owing to the fact that its whole Church organization was essentially a missionary scheme. It was, in fine, the great Home Mission enterprise of the north American continent, and its domestic work demanded all its resources of men and money. It early began, however, special labors among the aborigines and slaves. The history of some of these labors would be an exceedingly interesting and even romantic record, but our limits admit but this passing allusion to them. The year 1819 is memorable as the epoch of the formal organization of its missionary work. Dr. Nathan Bangs, long distinguished as its secretary and chief representative, was also its chief founder. He made it the theme of much preliminary

conversation with his colleagues and the principal Methodist laymen of New York city. Rev. Dr. Laban Clark introduced it by a resolution to the attention of the metropolitan preachers at their weekly meeting, "consisting," says Dr. Bangs, “of Freeborn Garrettson, Samuel Merwin, Laban Clark, Samuel Howe, Seth Crowell, Thomas Thorp, Joshua Soule, Thomas Mason, and myself. After an interchange of thoughts the resolution was adopted, and Garrettson, Clark, and myself were appointed a committee to draft a constitution. When this committee met we agreed to write, each, a constitution, then come together, compare them, and adopt the one which should be considered the most suitable. The one prepared by myself was adopted, submitted to the Preachers' Meeting, and, after some slight verbal alterations, was finally approved. We then agreed to call a public meeting in the Forsyth-street Church on the evening of the 5th of April, 1819, which was accord. ingly done. I was called to the chair, and after the reading of the constitution Joshua Soule moved its adoption, and supported his motion by a powerful speech, concluding by an appeal to the people to come forward and subscribe it. He was seconded by Freeborn Garrettson, who also plead in favor of the scheme, from his own experience in the itinerant field from Virginia to Nova Scotia." The constitution was unanimously adopted, and the following