PART III.

ITS CAPABILITIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES FOR THE FUTURE.

THE capabilities of American Methodism, for continued and increased usefulness, have already been shown in the historical view of its practical methods, its theological teachings, and its actual results. It stands strong to-day in its essential doctrines and methods; and it has the additional ability and responsibility of greater financial resources than it has ever had before. Its people, originally the poorest of the land, have become, under its beneficent training, perhaps the wealthiest. Not only has it more diffused wealth than any sister denomination, but its cases of individual opulence have, within the last quarter of a century, greatly multiplied. As the leading Church of the country, it bears, before God and man, the chief responsibility of the moral welfare of the nation. The better consecration of its wealth to the public good is therefore one of the principal responsibilities of its future.

We have seen how providentially it met the moral exigencies which grew out of the early rapid growth

of the American population; exigencies that could not otherwise have been met. But a greater demand, if possible, is to be made upon it in the future. This wonderful growth of population is to advance at a rate which threatens to outstrip the provisions for its intellectual and religious training. In less than forty years from the present date more than one hundred millions of human souls will be dependent upon these provisions for their intellectual and moral nutriment. They bear now no adequate relation to the real necessities of the land. If, after more than two centuries of religious and educational efforts, under the most auspicious circumstances of the country, we have but partially provided for thirty-five millions, how shall we, in forty years, meet the immensely enlarged moral wants of nearly three times that number? The question is a very grave one. Our rapid growth, so much the boast of the nation, is not without imminent peril; it may be too rapid to be healthful; it is to be the severest test of both our religion and our liberties, for one is the essential condition of the other. And yet it cannot, by any probable contingencies, be restrained. It has a momentum which will bear down and overleap all the ordinary obstructions of population. We cannot want work, we cannot want bread; and where these exist, population must advance as inevitably

as the waters under the laws of the tide. Every growth of this population provides indeed somewhat, morally as well as materially, for the next growth; but the law of proportion must fail in this respect, under our rapid advance and the peculiar elements of our growth, unless the religious bodies of the land, to which its education is so largely confided, make special provisions for it.

When we remind ourselves that so much of this popular increase is from abroad, that Europe has been in an "exodus" toward our shores, that its ignorance and vice-wave overtopping wave-roll in upon the land, the danger assumes a startling aspect. In about thirty-six years from this day our population will equal the present aggregate population of England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Denmark. A step further in the calculation presents a prospect still more surprising and impressive: in about sixty-six years from today this mighty mass of commingled peoples will have swollen to the stupendous aggregate of two hundred and forty-six millions-equaling the present population of all Europe. According to the statistics of life, there are hundreds of thousands of our present population who will witness this truly grand result. What have the friends of education and religion to do within that time! If our present intellectual and moral provisions for the people are

far short of the wants of our present thirty-five millions, how in sixty-six years shall we provide for more than two hundred and eleven additional millions, and these millions, to a great extent, composed of semi-barbarous foreigners and their mistrained children?

We may well ponder these facts, and feel that on us, the citizens of the republic, at this the middle of the nineteenth century, devolves a moral exigency such as, perhaps, no other land ever saw; an exigency as full of sublimity as of urgency— as grand in its opportunity as in its peril. This immense prospective population-certain, though prospective is to be thrown out, by the almighty hand of Providence, upon one of the grandest arenas of the world. Here, on this large continent, bounded in its distant independence by the Atlantic, the Pacific, the great tropic gulf, and the Arctic; here, away from the traditional governments and faiths and other antiquated checks of the old world, it is to play its great drama of destiny-a destiny which, as we have shown, must, numerically at least, be in less than seventy years as potential as all present Europe, and how much more potential in all moral, political, and commercial respects ? What an idea would it be, that of all Europe consolidated into one mighty, untrammeled commonwealth, in the highest liberty, religious enlighten