volumes suitable for their libraries, chiefly by the labors of Rev. Dr. Durbin, who prepared its first Library volume and its first Question Book; but no adequate, no systematic attention was given to this sort of literature. It was obvious, on a moment's reflection, that an almost illimitable field for the enlargement of the business of the Concern and the diffusion of useful knowledge was at its command in this direction. Accordingly the "Union " was organized on the 2d of April, 1827. Dr. Bangs says: "The measure indeed was very generally approved, and hailed with grateful delight by our friends and brethren throughout the country. It received the sanction of the several Annual Conferences, which recommended the people of their charge to form auxiliaries in every circuit and station, and send to the general depository in New York for their books; and such were the zeal and unanimity with which they entered into this work that at the first annual meeting of the society there were reported 251 auxiliaries, 1,025 schools, 2,048 superintendents, 10,290 teachers, and 63,240 scholars, besides above 2,000 managers and visitors. Never, therefore, did an institution go into operation under more favorable circumstances, or was hailed with a more universal joy, than the Sunday-School Union of the Methodist Episcopal Church." This great success, however, could not save it from the misfortunes of

bad management. Under "an injudicious attempt," writes Dr. Bangs many years later, "to amalgamate the Bible, Tract, and Sunday-School Societies together, by which the business of these several societies might be transacted by one board of management," and by other causes, it declined, if indeed it did not fail, until resuscitated by the zeal of some New York Methodists and by an act of the General Conference of 1840. It passed through modifications till it assumed its present effective form of organization, and grew into colossal proportions under the labors of its indefatigable secretaries, Rev. Drs. Kidder and Wise. It now has (aside from its offspring in the Methodist Episcopal Church South) 13,400 schools, more than 150,000 teachers and officers, and near 918,000 scholars, about 19,000 of whom are reported as converted during the last year. There are in the libraries of these schools more than 2,529,000 volumes. They are supported at an annual expense of more than $216,000, besides nearly $18,000 given to the Union for the assistance of poor schools. There are circulated among them semi-monthly nearly 260,000

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Sunday-School Advocates," the juvenile periodical of the Union. The numbers of conversions among pupils of the schools, as reported for the last eighteen years, amounts to more than 285,000, showing that much of the extraordinary growth of the

Church is attributable to this mighty agency. The Union has four periodicals for teachers and scholars, two in English and two in German, and their aggregate circulation is nearly 300,000 per number. Its catalogue of Sunday-school books comprises more than 2,300 different works, of which more than a million of copies are issued annually. Including other issues, it has nearly 2,500 publications adapted to the use of Sunday-schools. In fine, few if any institutions of American Methodism wield a mightier power than its Sunday-School Union.

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CHAPTER V.

ITS MISSIONARY LABORS.

A DISTINGUISHED English writer, a layman of the Church of England, has said that "the Methodism of the last century, even when considered apart from its consequences, must always be thought worthy of the most serious regard: that, in fact, that great religious movement has, immediately or remotely, so given an impulse to Christian feeling and profession, on all sides, that it has come to present itself as the starting-point of our modern religious history; that the field-preaching of Wesley and Whitefield, in 1739, was the event whence the religious epoch, now current, must date its commencement; that back to the events of that time must we look, necessarily, as often as we seek to trace to its source what is most characteristic of the present time; and that yet this is not all, for the Methodism of the past age points forward to the next-coming development of the powers of the Gospel." *

These remarks are especially true in respect to the relation of Methodism to modern Christian Missions. The idea of religious Missions is as old as Chris

Isaac Taylor's Wesley and Methodism, Preface.