ferent branches* reporting in our day more than a hundred thousand members and nearly one thousand traveling preachers.

Before the end of the century Methodism had planted its standards from Nova Scotia to Georgia, from the Atlantic coast to the furthest western

line of emigration. It ended the century with eight Annual Conferences, or Synods, with three bishops, Coke, Asbury, and Whatcoat, with two hundred and eighty-seven traveling preachers, besides hundreds of local preachers, and with nearly sixty-five thousand church members, of whom more than thirteen thousand were Africans. In the first Annual Conference, 1773, all the preachers save one, William Watters, were foreigners; but after the first General Conference (1784) Wesley dispatched no "missionaries" to America. All his former missionaries, except Asbury and Whatcoat, had returned to Europe, or located; but American Methodism had now its native ministry, numerous and vigorous. Besides Asbury, Coke, and Whatcoat, it still retained many of the great evangelists it had thus far raised up, Garrettson, Lee, Abbott, O'Kelly, Crawford, Burke, Poythress, Bruce, Breeze, Reed, Cooper, Everett, Willis, Dickins, Ware, Brush, Moriarty, Roberts, Hull, Losee, and others. A host of mighty men,

* The Canada and other Wesleyan Conferences, and the Methodist Episcopal and New Connection Churches.

who were yet young and obscure, had already joined these standard-bearers: M'Kendree, George, (both afterward bishops,) Roszel, Nolley, M'Gee, Smith, Gibson, M'Henry, Kobler, Fleming, Cook, Scott, Wells, Pickering, Sharp, Bostwick, M'Claskey, M'Combs, Bartine, Morrell, Sargent, Taylor, Hunt, and scores more. These were soon to be followed, or rather joined, by another host of as strong if not stronger representative men: Roberts, Hedding, Soule, Bangs, Merwin, Capers, Pierce, Winans, Kennon, Kenneday, Douglass, Redman, Thornton, Finley, Cartwright, and many others equal to them; and amid an army of such were to arise in due time, to give a new intellectual development to the ministry, such characters as Elliott, Ruter, Emory, Fisk, Summerfield, Bascom, Olin, and others, some surviving to our day, men of not only denominational but of national recognition.

The Church retained vividly the consciousness and spirit of its original mission as a revival of apostolic religion. Its ministry was remarkable for its unction and preached with demonstration and with power; its social and public worship was characterized by animation and energy; it was continually promoting "revivals" and "reformations," extending them, not only over conferences or single states, but sometimes simultaneously over much of the nation. Therefore was its growth rapid beyond parallel; the

65,000 members with which it began our century, had swelled by the year 1825 to nearly 350,000, its 287 preachers to more than 1,300.

By the year 1844, when it was divided by the secession of the South, it comprised more than 1,170,000 members, and more than 4,600 traveling preachers; it had gained, in the preceding four years, 430,897 members and 1,325 preachers, an average of 107,724 members and 331 preachers per year. Thus, in the hour of its most gigantic strength and capacity for usefulness, when its arms could be outstretched to the ends of the world with the blessings of the Gospel of peace, was the mighty Colossus broken in twain.

But the loyal Church fast recovered its strength and moved onward, so that by 1850 it reported nearly 690,000 members, 4,129 traveling and 5,420 local preachers. In 1860 it reported 994,447 members, 6,987 traveling and 8,188 local preachers; and the two bodies, North and South, enrolled 1,743,515 members, 9,771 traveling and 13,541 local preachers.

This hundredth year of the denomination witnesses in the Methodist Episcopal Church alone 60 conferences, 928,320 members, 6,821 itinerant preachers, 8,205 local preachers, 10,015 churches, valued, with their 2,948 parsonages, at $26,883,076.* Including both branches of Methodism, North and

* Minutes of 1864, the latest published before the present volume goes to press.

South, the aggregate is 1,628,388 members, 9,421 traveling, and 13,205 local preachers.* Its congregations are among the largest in the country, and its terms of Church membership are among the most stringent known in Protestant Christendom. It is a moderate calculation that there are three members of its congregations to one of its communicants, including its numerous children and youth; at this rate the aggregate population, more or less habitually under the influence of its two leading Churches, North and South, can hardly be less than 6,710,000; it is more likely about 7,000,000, more than one fifth of the population of the nation.

Adding the other branches of Methodism, there must now be in the United States 1,950,000 members and 12,000 traveling preachers religiously training, more or less, a population of 7,800,000 souls. In the whole western hemisphere, including the West Indies and British North America, there are at least 2,100,000 Methodists.

In the four Middle states, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, "Methodism had in 1850, according to the United States census, 2,556 churches, while the four remaining evangelical and leading denominations-the Baptist, Congregationalists, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian-had an aggre

*The latest Southern reports are for 1860. The war has doubtless affected them, as the above figures show it has Northern Methodism.

gate of only 3,600, showing that Methodism holds about three quarters of the popular power of evangelical Christianity in that central division of the country, where the leading state and the metropolitan city of the continent are found. In the ten Southern states and the District of Columbia, the above-named denominations have 4,458 churches, the Methodists 5,015, which gives Methodism an excess of several hundred churches over this combined evangelical competition; and in the eleven Western states, the comparison stands: the four denominations, 4,899 churches; Methodism, 4,863, which, with the statistics of the territories compiled since the census of 1850, will give to the youngest leading religious body in the land a relative ascendancy still greater than in the states of the South. The sum of it all is, that in New England, Methodism is rapidly gaining on the ancestral religion; that in the Middle states, it nearly balances the four great evangelical denominations; that in the states of the South, it more than balances them; that in the great West, which is soon to wield a weightier influence than all the other states combined, it has taken a still stronger position."*

* Tefft's Methodism, p. 199.