Wesleyan Methodism, though adhering to the Establishment, had taken an organic and permanent form; it had its Annual Conferences, Quarterly Conferences, Class Meetings and Band Meetings; its Watch-nights and Love-feasts; its Traveling Preachers, Local Preachers, Exhorters, Leaders, Trustees, and Stewards. It had districted England, Wales, and Ireland into Circuits for systematic ministerial labors, and now commanded a ministerial force of about seventy men. It had fought its way through incredible persecutions and riots, and had won at last a general, though not universal peace. Its Chapels and Preachers' houses, or parsonages, were multiplying over the country. It had a rich Psalmody, which has since spread wherever the English tongue is used; and a well-defined Theology, distinguished by two notable features that could not fail to secure popular interest, namely, that it transcended the prevalent creeds in both spirituality and liberality; in its experimental doctrines of Conversion, Sanctification, and the Witness of the Spirit, and in the evangelical liberalism of its Arminianism. It had begun its present scheme of Popular Religious Literature, had provided the first of that series of Academic institutions which has since extended with its progress, and was contemplating a plan of Ministerial Education, which has been effectively accomplished. Already the despondent declarations of Watts, Secker, and Butler, respecting the

prospects of religion, might be pronounced no longer relevant. Yet Watts had been dead but two years, and Secker and Butler still survived.

At the end of the third decade, the year in which it sent its first missionaries to America, it enrolled more than twenty-eight thousand members and one hundred and twelve lay traveling preachers, besides the Wesleys and their clerical coadjutors.

Wesley lived to see his cause established in the United States with an episcopal organization, planted in the British North American Provinces, and in the West Indies, and died at last, in 1791, with his system apparently completed, universally effective and prosperous, sustained by five hundred and fifty itinerant and thousands of local preachers, and more than a hundred and forty thousand members, and so energetic that many men, who had been his co-laborers, lived to see it the predominant body of Dissenters in the United Kingdom and the British Colonies, the most numerous Church of the United States of America, and successfully planted on most of the outlines of the missionary world.

In 1839 was celebrated the hundredth anniversary of English Methodism. The English Methodists appointed the 25th of October as a day of festive religious observance throughout their Churches in all parts of the world. Pecuniary contributions for certain great interests of the Church were called for,

and the call was answered by a liberality never before equaled in any one instance in their history, if, indeed, in the history of any other Christian body. The Wesleyans gave one million and eighty thousand dollars. The American Methodists gave six hundred thousand. On the appointed day Methodists throughout the earth met in their temples to thank God for his blessings upon the first cycle of their history. Signal indeed had been those blessings. Wesley, as we have seen, died in 1791, at the head of a host of 550 itinerant preachers, and 140,000 communicants in the United Kingdom, the British Provinces, in the United States, and the West Indies; at the centenary, less than half a century later, the denomination had grown to more than 1,171,000, including about 5,200 itinerant preachers, in the Wesleyan and Methodist Episcopal Churches; and, comprising the various bodies bearing the name of Methodists, to an army of more than 1,400,000, of whom 6,080 were itinerant preachers. Its missionaries, accredited members of Conferences, were about three hundred and fifty, with nearly an equal number of salaried, and about three thousand unpaid assistants. They occupied about three hundred stations, each station being the head of a circuit. They were laboring in Sweden, Germany, France, Cadiz, Gibraltar, Malta, Western and Southern Africa, Ceylon, continental India, New South Wales, Van Dieman's Land, New

Zealand, Tonga, Habai Islands, Vavou Islands, Fiji Islands, the West Indies. They had under instruction in their mission schools about fifty thousand pupils, and in their mission Churches were more than seventy thousand communicants. At least two hundred thousand persons heard the Gospel regularly in their mission chapels. The Methodist missionaries were now more numerous than the whole Wesleyan ministry as enrolled on the Minutes of Wesley's last Conference, and their missionary communicants were about equal to the whole number of Methodists in Europe at that day. Wesley presided over Methodism during its first half century and two years more; during the remainder of the century it reproduced, in its missions alone, the whole numerical force of its first half century. Thus far it had demonstrated its providential mission as a revival of apostolic spiritual life and apostolic propagandism.

CHAPTER II.

ORIGIN, FOUNDERS, AND PROGRESS OF METHODISM IN

AMERICA.

THOUGH Wesley sent no missionaries to America till 1769, the true epoch of American Methodism dates three years earlier.

The humbleness of its origin, contrasted with the greatness of its results, presents perhaps as striking an example as ecclesiastical history affords since the apostolic age, of the scriptural truth, that "God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty, and low things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence. The History of the Methodist Episcopal Church records that, in 1758, John Wesley visited the county of Limerick, Ireland; that his Journal reports there a singular community, settled in Court Mattress, and in Killiheen, Balligarrane, and Pallas, villages within four miles of Court Mattress; that they were not native Celts, but a Teutonic population, and that having been nearly half a century without pastors who could speak their