(11) The Last Half Century. The progress in the last half century has been uniform and great. In 1848 there were hut six hundred and forty-two thousand nine hundred and twenty seven communicants lay and ministerial. There are now, as before said, just about three million. And the encouraging feature about it is that the lastest years have shown the most rapid advance. In 1883, eighteen years ago, we had eighteen thousand seven hundred and forty-one churches; there are now about twenty-seven thousand. In 1883 our total membership was OTIC million seven hundred and sixty-nine thousand five hundred and thirty-four ; we had in our foreign missions forty three thousand one hundred communicants; the total value of church and parsonage property was $79,238,o85. It will be seen from these figures, compared with those given before for the present, that the Church seems to be just beginning to grow.
Nor do we find on examination that this out ward prosperity has been won by any sacrifice of spiritual life or any criminal conformity to worldly folly. Outward methods and habits are different but the heart is no less sound and true. Revivals are still of constant occurrence, and there is very deep interest on all subjects per taining to the higher Christian life. There has been no lowering of the rigid standard of morals for which from the start Methodism has been nobly conspicuous. It still occupies the foremost position on the temperance question it still pro ...
nounces strongly against demoralizing worldly amusements. Dr. Buckley, one of the latest his torians of the church, asking at the close of his volume, "Has Methodism lost to a dangerous degree its original vital impulse?" finds himself able to answer it in the negative. Ile says, "The flames of pure devotion burn upon many an altar, accessions by conversion are numerous, many preachers deliver truth in the power of the lloly Ghost, and every society contains those who cry continually, 'Wilt thou not revive us again, that thy people may rejoice in thee?'" He thinks that the many institutions which have been superadded to the simpler methods and forms of the fathers are being made tributary to the great work for which Methodism was established. NVe are quite certain that this is the case, and that the original purposes of the Methodist Episcopal Church are still being carried out under changed conditions. It started, in the language of the Discipline, "to evangelize the continent and spread spiritual holiness over these lands." It is still doing this. and is likely to continue it with un abated efficiency. Its sources of strength. under God, are in itself, its record has been every way creditable, and its future seems bright. Its progress has not been due to any government aid, nor to. members received from emigration,
nor. to prestige on.account of great wealth, social position. or superior educational facilities. All these things have been against it. It has been the church of the masses. Its growth has been due to. its reasonable doctrines, its earnest piety, its military form of church government. It has been, and still is, a church thoroughly missionary in its organization and well adapted to avail itself promptly of all favorable openings, filled with reverent fire and burning with a zeal to bring men .to God, brotherly and social in its spirit, identifying itself with all classes and making them feel at home within its walls, liberal in its opinions yet high-toned in its spiritual life, and admirably adapted every way to the wants of the new nation in which Providence placed it. How could it, being thus, do anything else but thrive as church never throve before.
Dr. J. M. Buckley says, "The most potent forces which account for the numerical increase of Methodism, the mutual labors of pastors and people in the local societies, are incapable of his toric description. Yet without them the visible fabric of Alethodism would be as the log-hut in which the fathers preached compared with the elaborate ecclesiastical structures which prosperity has made possible." Bishop Charles H. Fowler says, "What does Methodism mean? It has the fecundity of the acorn. It shall wave on the mountains like the forests of Lebanon. It shall whiten all seas and all worlds with the sails of its spiritual commerce. It has the enlightening power of the school ; it shall shine into every dark corner, driving all superstitions and all goblins from the earth's sur face. It has the vigilance of the invisible police; it shall expose with the glare of its searchlight every stealthy criminal. It has the compact or ganization of an army, it shall march with its swing of conquest through every known valley and plain, and plant the cross of the Redeemer on every hilltop and mountain peak." Dr. Abel Stevens, the principal historian of Methodism in this country, at the close of the last of the four volumes in which he narrates the rise and development of the Methodist Episcopal Church, says: 'This lowly Methodistic story is but the reproduction in substance, of the apostolic history, and presents, in full vitality, that original, that only example of evangelical propagandism, which, when all dogmatic conflicts and hierarchical pretensions, with their wasted passions and pomps, are recorded as historical failures. will bear for ward to universal triumph the ensign of the cross by a catholic, living, working church of the common people." J. M.