By GEN'L R. H. MILROY. V.- THE ORGANIC UNITY OF THE CHURCH, By WM. E. KNOX, D.D., Elmira, N. Y. By J. P. K. BRYAN, A.M., Princeton College. PRINCETON: MCGINNESS & RUNYAN. PHILADELPHIA: PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION. 1334 Chestnut Street. 75 cts. each will pe PUBLISHED BY SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO. A NEW VOLUME OF LANGE'S COMMENTary, Dr. PHILIP SCHAFF, General Editor. EZEKIEL, Translated, Enlarged, and Edited by PATRICK FAIRBAIRN, D.D., late Principal the Free Church College, Glasgow, and Rev. WILLIAM FINDLAY, Larkhall, Scotland, aided by Rev. THOMAS CRERAR, M.A,, and Rev. SINCLAIR MANSEN, M.A. DANIEL, Translated, Enlarged, and Edited by JAMES STRONG, S.T.D., Professor of Old Testa ment Exegesis in Drew Theological Seminary, Madison, N. J. One vol. 8vo, cloth, $5.00. Testament. There have been thus far issued of LANGE'S COMMENTARY Nine volumes on the Qis The New Testament is COMPLETE in Ten volumes. 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I.-AMERICAN METHODISM IN 1876.* IN 1776 the whole Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America was composed of twenty-five ministers and five thousand members, in eleven circuits, on the Atlantic slope. In 1781 it crossed the Alleghanies, and laid the foundations of the "Old Western Conference," which extended from the Northern lakes to Natchez on the Mississippi. Its first General Conference was held in Baltimore in 1784, at which Francis Asbury was ordained its first bishop at the age of thirty-nine. There were then about eighty preachers and fifteen thousand members. Thirty-two years afterward, when this remarkable man died, in 1816, the church numbered over seven hundred itinerant preachers and more than two hundred and eleven thousand members. Soon after Washington was inaugurated as President of the United States, Bishops Coke and Asbury read to him the congratulatory address of the General Conference, which was then in *Proceedings of the General Conference held at Baltimore, May, 1876. session in New York, May 29, 1789, and they received his reply to this first ecclesiastical greeting upon his accession to the Presidency. The organization of this branch of the Christian Church in this country dates substantially from, the separate and independent national existence of the United States, although the centenary of its origin was completed and celebrated in 1866 with great religious observances and with splendid munificence. In 1876 the minutes of the General Conference report 12 bishops, 81 annual conferences, 10,923 ministers, 12,881 local preachers, making a total of 23,804 preachers, 1,642,456 communicants; 15,633 churches, valued at $71,350,234; 5,017 parsonages, valued at $9,731,628; 19,287 Sabbath-schools, 207,182 teachers, and 1,406,168 scholars. The increase in the last four years has been: 1,234 itinerant and 1,499 local preachers, making a total of 2,723 preachers, 159,236 lay members, 2,183 churches, 808 parsonages, 1,732 Sunday-schools, 13,207 teachers, and 138,426 scholars, and a total value of church property of $16,386,175. The Methodist Episcopal Church South has 8 bishops, 3,485 itinerants, 5,356 local preachers, 712,765 lay members, 7,204 Sunday-schools, with 48,825 teachers and officers, and 323,634 scholars. The whole number of Methodists, Episcopal and non-Episcopal, in the United States is reported as embracing 21,995 itinerant ministers, 26,875 local preachers, 3,146,356 lay members, representing about nine or ten millions of population. The grand total of Methodists in the world is summed up at 28,380 itinerants, 66,935 local preachers, and 4,173,047 lay members. The purpose of this article is not theological nor controversial, but chiefly to exhibit the historical development and the practical system of American Episcopal Methodism, as it is represented in its two most numerous and powerful branches, which are substantially one; to show the apparent causes of its growth, its strength, and its weakness; its tendencies, and its probable future. I. First among the causes of the rise and progress of Methodism is its providential character. The Wesleys, Whitefield, and their co-laborers, to whom it owes its origin, were "chosen vessels," raised up by the providence and grace of God for this great work. This is the general verdict of secular and ecclesiastical historians. They were men of learning, eloquence, administrative and practical ability, single in their aims, tenacious of their principles, popular with the masses, and, above all, they were "men whose hearts God had touched." Southey and Isaac Taylor long ago made John Wesley the hero of their brilliant pages, and that fastidious critic, Lord Macaulay, wrote of him: "He was a man whose eloquence and logical acuteness might have rendered him eminent in literature; whose genius for government was not inferior to that of Richelieu; and who devoted all his powers, in defiance of obloquy and derision, to what he sincerely considered the highest good of his species." No candid reader can even cursorily examine Mr. Tyerman's three massive volumes of the Life and Times of John Wesley, nor any of the recent monographs of English and American writers upon "the founder of Methodism," without coming to the conclusion, that his historical place has already been fixed, in the judgment of friendly and opposing critics, among the reformers of religion in Christendom. 2. "The religious movement called Methodism" was a genuine reaction against the palsying formalism of the Church of England in the eighteenth century, which had also, to a very great extent, infected the non-conforming or dissenting bodies throughout Great Britain. Wesley, himself, until his "evangelical conversion," at the age of thirty-five, was a rigid high churchman, a dry, unevangelical theologian, and a cold legalist. For twenty-five years he struggled through many varying phases of religious experience, until at last, and chiefly through the godly counsel of Peter Böhler, the Moravian, he found peace in believing. Like Luther and Whitefield, it was only after fruitless vigils, fastings, and other forms of selfrighteousness, that he understood the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and then he went out to "preach Christ and him crucified" over two continents. At first ridiculed, opposed, assailed, maligned, persecuted, driven from the pulpits and churches to the fields and the streets, he and his preachers could not be silenced, and the movement became successively a revolution, a reformation, and a great ecclesiastical organiza |