ITS MISSIONARY LABORS.

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officers were chosen: Bishop M'Kendree, President; Bishops George and Roberts, and Nathan Bangs, Vice-Presidents; Thomas Mason, Corresponding Secretary; Joshua Soule, Treasurer; Francis Hall, Clerk; Daniel Ayres, Recording Secretary. The following managers were also chosen: Joseph Smith, Robert Mathison, Joseph Sanford, George Suckley, Samuel L. Waldo, Stephen Dando, Samuel B. Harper, Lancaster S. Burling, William Duval, Paul Hick, John Westfield, Thomas Roby, Benjamin Disbrow, James B. Gascoigne, William A. Mercein, Philip J. Arcularius, James B. Oakley, George Caines, Dr. Seaman, Dr. Gregory, John Boyd, M. H. Smith, Nathaniel Jarvis, Robert Snow, Andrew Mercein, Joseph Moses, John Paradise, William Myers, William B. Skidmore, Nicholas Schureman, James Wood, Abraham Paul. The historian of the society (Dr. Strickland) says: "It is obvious that almost its entire business was conducted by Dr. Bangs for many years. In addition to writing the constitution, the address and circular, he was the author of every Annual Report, with but one exception, from the organization of the society down to the year 1841, a period of twenty-two years. He filled the offices of Corresponding Secretary and Treasurer for sixteen years, without a salary or compensation of any kind, until his appointment to the first named office by the General Conference of 1836. That he has con

tributed more than any other man living to give character to our missionary operations, by the productions of his pen and his laborious personal efforts, is a well authenticated fact, which the history of the Church fully attests." In this single instance of his manifold public life he was to be identified with a grand religious history. He was to see the annual receipts of the Society enlarged from the $823 of its first year to $250,374, (including its offspring of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to half a million,) and its total receipts, down to the last year of his life, more than four and a half millions, not including the southern Society. He was to witness the rise (chiefly under the auspices of the Society) of American-German Methodism, an epochal fact in the history of his Church, next in importance to the founding of the Church by Embury and Strawbridge. Without a missionary for some time after its origin, the Society was to present to his dying gaze a list of nearly four hundred missionaries and more than thirty-three thousand mission communicants, representing the denomination in many parts of the United States, in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Africa, India, China, and South America. Assisting in this great work, and rejoicing in its triumphs, he was to outlive all its original officers but three, Joshua Soule, Francis Hall, and Daniel Ayres: and all its original mana

gers save three, Dr. Seaman, James B. Oakley, and William B. Skidmore.

The next General Conference, in 1820, sanctioned the scheme. Dr. Emory submitted an elaborate report on the subject. After reasoning at length upon it, he asked, "Can we, then, be listless to the cause of missions? We cannot. Methodism itself is a

missionary system.

Yield the missionary spirit, and you yield the very life-blood of the cause. In missionary efforts our British brethren are before us. We congratulate them on their zeal and their success. But your committee beg leave to entreat this Conference to emulate their example." The Conference adopted, with some emendations, the constitution prepared for the Society by Dr. Bangs. He thus saw his great favorite measure incorporated, it may be hoped forever, into the structure of the Church. He writes: "These doings of the Conference in relation to the Missionary Society exerted a most favorable influence upon the cause, and tended mightily to remove the unfounded objections which existed in some minds against this organization.”

By the session of the General Conference of 1832, the Society's operations had extended through the states and territories of the nation, and had become a powerful auxiliary of the itinerant system of the Church. Hitherto it had been prosecuted as a domestic scheme, comprehending the frontier circuits, the

slaves, the free colored people, and the Indian tribes; it had achieved great success in this wide field, and was now strong enough to reach abroad to other lands. It proposed, with the sanction of this Conference, to plant its standard on the coast of Africa, and send agents to Mexico and South America to ascertain the possibility of missions in those countries. Thus were begun those foreign operations of the Society which have since become its most interesting labors.

Its domestic Indian missions had now become numerous, and some of them were remarkably prosperous; "attended," Dr. Bangs says, "with unparalleled success." In Upper Canada they numbered, in 1831, no less than ten stations and nearly two thousand Indians “under religious instruction, most of whom were members of the Church. Among the Cherokees, in Georgia, they had at the same date no less than seventeen missionary laborers, and nearly a thousand Church-members. Among the Choctaws there were about four thousand communicants, embracing all the principal men of the nation, their chiefs and captains." And, more or less, along the whole frontier, Indian Missions were established. Meanwhile the destitute fields of the domestic work proper were dotted with humble but effective mission stations, from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and these stations were rapidly passing from the mission

ary list to the Conference catalogue of appointments as self-supporting Churches.

He

In 1832 Melville B. Cox sailed for Africa, the first foreign missionary of American Methodism. organized the Liberia Mission.

He fell a martyr to

the climate, but laid on that benighted continent the foundations of the Church, never, it may be hoped, to be shaken. The next year a delegation from the distant Flathead Indians of Oregon arrived in the states soliciting missionaries. Their appeal was zealously urged through the Christian Advocate, and received an enthusiastic response from the Church. Dr. Bangs, who had been a leading promoter of the African Mission, now, in co-operation with Dr. Wilbur Fisk, advocated this new claim with his utmost ability. Jason and Daniel Lee, and Cyrus Shepard, were dispatched as missionaries in the spring of 1834. An extraordinary scheme of labors was adopted, involving great expense; but, writes Dr. Bangs, "the projection of this important mission had a most happy effect upon the missionary cause generally. As the entire funds of the Society up to this time had not exceeded eighteen thousand dollars a year, and as this mission must necessarily cost considerable, with a view to augment the pecuniary resources of the Society, a loud and urgent call was made, through the columns of the Christian Advocate and Journal, on the friends of missions to 'come