them to the counties and districts in which they have laboured or reside, the Ministers and Lay Representatives who shall compose the first mixed Conference in Wesleyan Methodism, will be able to satisfy themselves as to the degree in which, locally or generally, it has been able to keep pace with, or has lost ground in comparison with the progress of population.

It will be noted, that, in the whole list, the Connexional percentages are higher than those of the General Census in nearly all counties, the exceptions being Cheshire, Gloucester, Lancashire, Leicester, Nottingham (slight), Surrey, Worcester; the contrasts, in favour of our Connexion, growing stronger and stronger in the following list:

The plates (or maps), to which we now come, are, of course, ocular illustrations of the conclusions, favourable or unfavourable, to which a strict study of the Tables would, without their help, have led minds qualified for, and addi ted to, dealing with statistics. They will enable the multitude of us, to whom such figures are always dry, frequently repulsive, and not seldom confusing, to survey the fifteen sections of the whole field of enquiry at our leisure, and to catch, almost at a glance, the salient features of the grand case submitted. It is not in our ingenuity, we confess, to suggest a single point in which the picture could have been more vividly or more distinctly spread before the

eye.

We begin, of course (Plate I.), with the First London District; with

which, on account of geographical adjacency, that of Bedford and Northampton is associated in one. map; the words Oxford District on the south-west, Birmingham and Shrewsbury on the west, Nottingham and Derby at the north, and Norwich and Lynn at the east, showing us, as in the whole series successively, whereabouts we are. A dotted blue line indicates clearly enough the county boundaries; but the limits of the Districts are staringly exhibited by a broad line of true blue. A red line tells you which are the roads traversed by fire, a round blue dot standing for stations; parallel lines of unequal thickness describing the high roads, and thin ones, like those of a garden spider's web, the byways that run among the villages.

No two marks can be confounded. What, you say, is meant by that coloured orb, blue, green, or red, which catches my eye, surrounded by a belt of dots like Saturn with his ring? That is a Circuit town; and the satellites that encircle it, and seem, by similarity of colour, to be reflecting its rays, represent, by that circumstance, the villages belonging to the same Circuit. But what are those smaller rounds which have no colour at all? Those are the head-quarters of parishes, townships, or other places, on which the light of the Circuit town has neither been shed nor reflected; where, in plain terms, there exists no WesleyanMethodist chapel or preaching-house. Moreover, the places with or without this privilege are further distinguished by their names, large capitals indicating the Circuit towns, small the country stations, and italics the villages and hamlets, which thus dumbly utter such cries as, 'Come over, and help us ;' or, 'No man cared for my soul;' or, 'Carest thou not that we perish?' On the other hand, places more favoured are denoted by c when they have a chapel, by s

when they have a school, and by s c when so happy as to have both.

It is obvious that, even on so large a scale as Mr. Tindall had the courage to adopt, the metropolis, though it has been admirably done, demands a map to itself before this portion of the case can be fairly presented to the eye. But, with this single exception, the densest portions of the maps are sufficiently distinct; showing by these comparatively crowded circles, lines and names, where you are to look for such great centres or peripheries as Cornwall, Bristol and Manchester; while they serve, by a sharp and somewhat melancholy contrast, to bring out in more palpable relief the waste and neglected places whose forgotten claims Mr. Tindall seems to plead, with more or less urgency, in every plate he has so carefully delineated.

Let no one impute to him a spirit of boasting, as the inspiration under which he has plodded through this Herculean task. Neither for himself nor for others does he cry, 'Is not this great Babylon, that I have built... by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?' As little can he be charged with the sin of David, whose heart smote him after he had numbered the people.

6

The pictorial representations of Methodism here given,' he assures us, 'have been prepared and arranged with a directly religious aim;' while, as to the spirit in which the work has been done, his own mind and heart, it is evident, were set, not on what has been effected by Wesleyan-Methodism, as though its agents might 'rest and be thankful;' but, to use his own words, on stimulating future aggressive evangelistic work,' by showing an exact portraiture of its present geographical position,' side by side with the many fields of labour still open to its enterprise.'

This, beyond a doubt, is the true use to be made of the multum actum:

as a motive for setting about the quid superesset agendum. Who can enjoy the inner sense, the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed,' and not feel the motives to new tilth which the fruits of that blessing on former labours call into force? What has been accomplished here may be effected yonder. What our fathers, amid every kind of difficulty and discouragement, were enabled to do, shall we, furnished with facilities of all sorts they never dreamt of, hesitate to reproduce with emulative faith, zeal and self-denial? They, by Divine help, created those numerous centres, from which it is our duty, and ought to be our delight, to proceed, until we have reached circumferences at every point intersecting one another, and embracing every habitable acre of the island. There is not a bare spot in all these maps which lies so far out of reach for us as almost every part lay beyond that of the founders of our great Connexion, when they first buckled to the work.

And yet, in this very first map, we find, in every county, the metropolitan county of Middlesex excepted, a blank array of these empty little rounds that have no colour in them.

Essex, 'the garden of Dissent,' is almost a sheet of white paper, for anything Wesleyan-Methodism has done to colour it. Manningtree is, indeed, an oasis in the desert; though it has at its elbow the important town and ancient Circuit of Colchester, which dates as far back as Manchester, and has few, if any, seniors besides Leeds, London, Bristol, and Newcastle! Chelmsford has a small constellation of red dots towards the estuary of the Blackwater; but, on every other side, it is as solitary as a pelican of the wilderness or an owl of the desert. Were an Essex rustic of the present day to ride by rail to London instead of (like one of his ancestors) paying the Coggeshall

wagoner for the privilege of walking thither under the abri of his wain, he would be able to count, as he passed, thirty-five villages on the right and forty on the left, before he got to Stratford-le-Bow, all without the shadow of a Wesleyan-Methodist chapel or preaching-room in them! And Hertfordshire, if not worse, is quite as bad. The tinted circles show more frequent in the Bedford and Northampton District, especially around such focal spots as Daventry, Towcester, Higham Ferrers, Newport Pagnell, Luton, and Dunstable; but, on every hand, there are melancholy stretches of vacant ground, the subsoil not yet upturned by the share of the Gospel plough.

And certainly, the map on which we have dwelt, is at least up to the average of the whole kingdom. The Second London District, however, shows much better than the First,embracing, as it does, the Southern section of the metropolitan circle,owing to the blood-red arteries of railroad which pervade it in every direction. But, even in highlyfavoured Kent, there remains 'yet very much land to be possessed;' while most of Surrey looks like No Man's Land. We except the locality of Aldershot Camp, which, by a broad blue belt, Mr. Tindall makes over to the Home Missionary Committee.

Bristol shines resplendent with its tricolour red, green, and blue; the red satellites outnumbering the green as far as the green the blue, and over a wider range beyond the three foci of this singular ellipse. Ledbury has its fair share of Herefordshire, where we count no fewer than fifteen minor red spots encircling the belted spot on every side. Swindon, too, is attended by nineteen, while Newbury has a train of seventeen, so admirably dispersed as with the more ease to gather the outcasts of Israel.' In Oxfordshire, Banbury takes a decided

lead, with a following of twenty-one ; but Oxford itself, besides two villages in its immediate outskirts, stretches out towards Banbury one hand with eight fingers upon it. Little Marlborough holds no fewer than fourteen places, and has nothing to do but press on to Everley; but Reading, which has boasted its Valpys, Cadogans and Shermans is still feeble, as the yellow ink of its disk and that of its quaternion of country places intimates.

The Bath District shows vastly better than the Portsmouth, which would come poorly off but for Poole, Wimborne and Salisbury. Winchester and Chichester each look like 'a lodge in a garden of cucumbers; but that Bognor and Littlehampton may afford hope of better fruit under that style of cultivation which the late Dr. Hook endeavoured to imitate when Vicar of Leeds, but seems to have found no stimulus for as Dean of Chichester. There are five chapelless villages even in the Isle of Wight.

The map ineluding the three West of England Districts makes here and there a fair show on the Bath side, at Torquay, in the Three Towns,' and at such places as Barnstaple, Kilkhampton and Holsworthy, in the north of Devon. But the indications of Methodist life do not begin to thicken till we get to Cornwall; and, even then, the tinted spots, though they grow numerous, do not absolutely thicken upon the eye, until we approach Truro, from which, to the Lizard and the Land's End, the map is like a Persian carpet and rich mixtures of colour; and it is difficult, if not impossible, to find half-a-dozen places, however small, without a Wesleyan-Methodist chapel: Grampound itself, though disfranchised by Parliament, being endowed with a privilege which, let us hope, its few inhabitants have learned to make better use of than their fathers made

of theirs. In fact, the county seems to have been fruitful on every side to the very margin of the ocean; like the vine brought out of Egypt, which God caused to take deep root, till it filled the land, sending out 'boughs unto the sea, and branches unto the river.'

It is not possible to survey the spacious territory of the Norwich and Lynn District without being struck by the hardly numerable abundance of villages, whose names in italics darken on every hand the entire region. Between Diss and Yoxford, for example, there is almost nothing else right down to the southern boundary; but, what might much more practically be considered, with a view to immediate results, are the several instances in which such villages are crowded together so closely, and so intermingled with others, whose smallcapital importance marks the presence of a chapel, that it seems as if they might easily be comprehended in the Circuit scheme, and be made parts, however small, of its working organization. The sparseness of places and people at the northern end betwixt Lynn and Dereham and the coast, presents obvious difficulties to a system of universal extension; but what of Bury St. Edmund's, at the opposite extremity of the District, where, of some seventy villages, one only, and that belonging to Mildenhall, can boast of chapel or preaching-place?

For the honour of Fletcher, Madeley has but one name in italics within its immediate circle; while, as to Shrewsbury, which lends its name to the Midland District, much that is substantial cannot be reasonably expected, standing, as the old town does, amidst fields and parks. But, drawing a rude parallelogram between the four points of Codsall, Bodymin Heath, Acocks Green, and Kinfare, we discover not more than a dozen names in italics; but the large capitals, implying the highest im

portance, are repeated sixteen times and, for the multitude of places entitled to capitals in the second degree, the map-maker could find room, only by reducing the characters to the scale found necessary in charting the metropolis.

The Macclesfield, Sheffield, and Nottingham and Derby Districts present an almost uniform appearance. With some exceptions in the more agricultural parts, the area in which those flourishing regions are included wears the aspect of what the manufacturers of Axminster and the ladies everywhere would style a wellcovered carpet;' in which, we may add, the brightest colours intermingle, producing the rich and cheerful effect of the old Devonshire patterns. The reds of Tunstall are in proportion with the reds of Macclesfield, and the blues of Congleton with the blues of Newcastle-under-Lyme; while Burslem, with a pretty rivalry betwixt silk and porcelain, throws in a copious half-contrast of spring-like green. It occurs to us here, and will occur again, to wonder what Mr. Tindall would have done had his plan comprised all the Methodist offshoots the New Connexion in the Potteries and the Primitives in Bishop Wordsworth's and other dioceses. Coming to his Lordship's quarters, we are content enough with what we see in the great agricultural districts of Lincoln, to offer them as almost perfect examples of the possibility of supplying with our Connexional institutions counties, or parts of them, in which farms are large, populous towns sparse and few, and villages evenly scattered over the wide surface, but remarkably far apart.

In the Isle of Man-in the same map as the Liverpool District-there are but five or six inhabited spots, out of between fifty and sixty, left without a chapel. The densities in this map, though respectable in size and

number, disappoint the preconceptions of a desiring eye. In South Wales, as we turn to Brynmawr, Swansea, Neath, and some other busy parts, the contiguity of squares and circles elicits the admiring cry, 'Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! But lo! from Llanbrynmair down to Pontar Dulais, with the single exception of Llandovery, there is not a chapel in which to unite, nor any people to agree or squabble, if we except a handful of mountaineers who shiver by themselves at Yspytty-yestiad-meime, Mynachlogfawr, etc. In this respect, North Wales resembles South, with signs of both secular industry and religious animation along the Dee and the English border, but with all the desolateness of a wilderness in the vast rhomboid between Conway and Llanfair, Festiniog and Corwen.

But we find ourselves in Goshen when we turn the leaf and gaze upon the two great Lancashire and the two chief Yorkshire Districts. Here, indeed, may we appropriate the words of the sacred chronicler, and say: 'So Joshua took all that land, the hills, and all the south country, and all the land of Goshen, and the valley, and the plain, and the mountain of Israel, and the valley of the same.'

Cumberland and Westmoreland,

like the two sections of the Principality, labour under special disadvantages from the scantiness of the population. But we see at Penrith and Appleby, bold battling with local circumstances. In the Whitby and Darlington District we observe marks of efforts nearly commensurate with the wants of a dense and busy population, particularly in the triangular nook, where Darlington, pushing a long way northward, insists upon taking an emulative share with Bishop-Auckland and Spenny-Moor.

We come to a very splendid windup in the Newcastle District, yet not without its dash of doubt and difficulty. There are vast wilds in upper Northumberland, that, on this map, seem to have neither town nor village, church nor chapel. Methodism appears to have found at Haltwhistle a bourn she may not pass. Wark is the farthest point at which she has found any work to do! Redesdale appears to have nothing beyond it but reeds and rushes. But along the coast and inward, including the busy parts of North Durham, we have as fair a proof of what Methodism, under God's blessing, can do for a thriving people as in Lancashire, Yorkshire or Cornwall. Wherever there is coal beneath, there is fire above. For obvious reasons, all movements, secular or sacred, hug the coast line when there is one.

J. M. H.

enfolded within us all, to be developed according to God's purposes and laws. But in dealing with us He recognizes the reason and will which He has