colliers and their children religion, and then to read, write, and cast accounts. It was to be a night school as well as a day school, and Wesley said that he expected scholars of all ages, EDUCATIONAL some of them gray-headed, to come there early in the MOVEMENT. morning or late at night, and that the old would be taught separately from the children.' This school has continued to the present day, though not long after its foundation it was limited to the education of ministers' boys, and in 1851 removed to new and larger buildings at Landsdowne, near Bath. One school being found insufficient for the education of ministers' boys, another was opened in 1812 at Woodhouse Grove, at Appleby, near Leeds. Wesley's earnestness for ministerial education was illustrated in his collecting the preachers together at Kingswood in 1749, dividing them into classes and giving them instruction in theology, using Pearson, On the Creed; in logic, using Aldrich's text-book ; and in elocution. Whether this was done later than 1749 we do not know, but Wesley always insisted on his helpers reading the Christian Library and other books. This diligence in study made some of his preachers learned men; as, for example, Thomas Walsh, the ascetic young Irishman who became remarkably proficient in Hebrew and Greek; Adam Clarke, the commentator; and Joseph Benson, also commentator and theologian. In 1835 a theological institution was opened at Hoxton, London; in 1839 another at Abney House, Stoke Newington, which places were used until buildings were erected at Richmond, London, and Didsbury, Manchester, when (about 1841) the students were removed to them. Various other institutions, theological or classical, have been opened since then. English Methodism has reared many men of ability and influence in various fields. Henry Moore, the biographer of Wesley; Adam Clarke, one of the most learned, as well as pious, men of his time; Joseph Benson, the literary champion of the Methodists after Wesley's death; Alexander Kilham, an ecclesiastical statesman 1 Tyerman, Life of Wesley, i, 269, 270. Charles Wesley in a letter dated March 3, 1749, says: "I spent half an hour with my brother at Kingswood, which is now very much like a college. Twenty-one boarders are there, and a dozen students, his sons and pupils in the Gospel. I believe he is now laying the foundation of many generations."-Tyerman, ii, 35, note. 2 Tyerman, ii, 34. For an admirable historical account of the efforts for ministerial education in Methodism in England, and especially in America, see the late Daniel P. Kidder, in the Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1876, pp. 558 ff. 3 See a biography of this most remarkable man by Faulkner, in McClintock and Strong, Cyc., x, 870, 871. METHODIST who first united Methodism to a representative system of Church polity; Richard Watson, the theologian; Jabez Bunting, perhaps the most influential minister of his time in England; Samuel Warren, pious and able, whose wife was another Mrs. Fletcher, and who led a revolt against the rule of Bunting; Robert Newton, the eloquent preacher; Thomas Jackson, author and editor; William Dawson, the great lay preacher and spiritual genius; William Carvosso, saint and hero of faith; James Dixon, preacher, orator, and antislavery advocate, who spent the last half of his life in blindness; Richard D. Waddy, of brilliant intellect, flashing wit, and great soul;' Luke H. Wiseman, the missionary secretary; Luke Tyerman, the author of three great biographies, which will remain permanent authorities for centuries; William B. Pope, who was the first to write a Systematic Theology for English-speaking Methodists from the standpoint of modern scholarship; these, and other men who have passed away, not to mention those living, have rendered notable service to the Church of Christ. MISSIONS. Methodism had so much home missionary work on hand that it could not at once address itself to the foreign field. Its first mission was to Africa. Some Methodists had gone to Sierra Leone, in 1792, where Mingo Jordan, a colored man, had gathered a society. They sent to England for a missionary, and in 1811 George Warren was sent as the first Methodist foreign missionary. Since then English Methodism has not only had a flourishing mission in Sierra Leone, with thousands of members, but has established missions on the Gambia, on the Gold Coast, Ashantee, and in other countries of the West, Cape Colony and Natal, among the Kaffirs, Hottentots, Fingoes, Bechuanas, Zulus, and other tribes, and in the South African republics. In 1812 Samuel Leigh was sent to Australia, where a class of Methodist emigrants had already been formed, and where he laid broad and deep the foundations of the Church. Thomas Coke, who took an intense interest in missions, and begged from door to door for the Methodist missionaries in Amer THOMAS ica, France, and the Jersey Islands, in his old age was consumed with longing to found evangelical Christianity in India. On June 18, 1813, he writes (he was then 1 He was the father of Samuel Warren, the great novelist, who was the father of the Rev. E. Walpole Warren, rector of Holy Trinity Church, New York. 'See an article on him by Faulkner in McClintock and Strong, Cyc., sup. vol. ii, 843. 66 1 sixty-six): "I am now dead to Europe and alive for India. God himself has said to me, Go to Ceylon. I am so fully convinced of the will of God that methinks I had rather be set naked on the coast of Ceylon, without clothes and without a friend, than not to go there. . . . The fleets sail in October and January. If the Conference employs me to raise the money for the outset I shall not be able to sail till January. I shall bear my own expenses, of course. I shall probably be here till this day fortnight; then I set off for Liverpool." In the next Conference Coke pleaded as a man for his life to be sent to India. The night before the day fixed for the official debate he spent in prayer for India. In the debate Coke told of the providential circumstances which had led him to this mission, the favor shown to it by some men of power, and the duty of preaching the Gospel to the millions of the East, and then offered himself and other ministers who had consented "to dare with himself the dangers of the enterprise," and added finally, "that if the Conference could not bear the expense he would himself defray the initial expenditure to the extent of six thousand pounds." The Conference passed a resolution in which it "authorizes and appoints Dr. Coke to undertake a mission to Ceylon and Java, and allows him to take with him six missionaries, exclusive of one for the Cape of Good Hope." Thus began Methodist missions to Asia, in which some of the greatest triumphs of the Gospel, as well as of consecrated scholarship, have been realized. Methodist missions have also reclaimed from cannibalism and given to commerce and civilization many islands in the South Seas, and the story of the enterprise there is a romance of daring and heroism not surpassed in the annals of adventure or discovery. Methodism has stimulated enterprises in other fields outside its own borders. Scotland received a fresh religious life; the Church of England received a new illumination; the New Connection of General Baptists, which has had a great METHODIST and noble history, was formed by Methodists in 1770; THE GENERAL Sunday schools were formed by the Methodists before LUMP. Robert Raikes received his beautiful inspiration, and "Sophia Cooke, another Methodist, who afterward became the wife of Samuel Bradburn, was the first to suggest to Raikes the Sunday school idea, and actually marched with him at the head of his troop of ragged urchins the first Sunday they were taken to the parish church." The Methodists organized the first Bible Society. The London Missionary Society, a Congregational organization 1 Ethridge, Life of Thomas Coke, pp. 478, 479. 'Ibid., p. 481. 55 LEAVEN IN which has had a glorious history, was started, it is said, in an appeal from Melville Horne, who for some years was one of Wesley's preachers, and became the successor of Fletcher at Madeley; the Church Missionary Society issued from a devout circle of evangelical clergymen in the Established Church; Wesley established the first tract society, at least seventeen years before the founding of the Religious Tract Society, itself the outcome of the evangelical revival; and Wesley established the first dispensary twenty-four years before the Royal General Dispensary opened at Bartholomew Close, London, in 1770.1 RECENT DE- English Methodism has taken on new vigor within the last few years. The introduction of lay representation in the Wesleyan Conference in 1878; the work of public common school education by Methodist day schools led chiefly by James H. Rigg; the beautiful charity for orphaned and homeless children led by Thomas Bowman Stephenson; the Forward Movement in East and West London led by Hugh Price Hughes and Peter Thompson, and similar movements in other large cities; the great church building movement inaugurated by the munificence of Sir Francis Lycett; the proposition for the union of the New Connection and Wesleyan Methodists; the Ecumenical Conferences in London in 1881, and Washington in 1891; the Million Guinea Twentieth Century Fund movement, started in 1899, which has been taken up and carried forward with immense enthusiasm, and which has been characterized by many pathetic instances of sacrifice, the splendid service rendered by the London Quarterly Review for scholarship and literature, and the able books by English Methodist authors-these all show that if they are true to the spirit of their founder in evangelism and learning and doctrine a brilliant future awaits the Methodist Churches in the motherland. "I mentioned to the society my design of giving physic to the poor. About thirty came the next day, and in three weeks about three hundred. This we continued for several years till, the number of patients still increasing, the expense was greater than we could bear. Meantime, through the blessing of God, many who had been ill for months or years, were restored to perfect health."-Journal, Dec. 4, 1746. 2 CHAPTER V. MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. A NEW TYPE THE evangelical movement, which sent its currents of warm life throughout Anglicanism, had not spent its force when the nineteenth century was born. It turned the religious and political life of the nation into new channels, and made a new type of clergyman. It is true that as to this last the kindly and sensitive pagan John Keats (d. 1821) gives a different impression. He says in one of his letters, "A parson is a lamb in the drawing-room, and a lion in a vestry. The notions of society will not permit a parson to give way to his temper in any shape; so he festers in himself till his features get a peculiar diabolical, selfsufficient, ironical, stupid expression. He is continually acting. He is a hypocrite to the believer and a coward to the unbeliever." But this caustic description, though doubtless true of some, was by no means true of many Anglican ministers. John Newton (d. 1807) was one of the most devoted and exemplary of ministers, who, after a depraved and profligate life, became a shining light and gave comfort and hope to thousands. He was the pastor of William Cowper, with whom he wrote the Olney Hymns (1779), and whose poems powerfully helped the cause of morality and religion. Cowper's description of the false and true preacher has ever remained a beacon light of warning and of guidance. "I venerate the man whose heart is warm, Whose hands are pure, whose doctrine and whose life, That he is honest in the sacred cause. To such I render more than mere respect, Whose actions say that they respect themselves. In conversation frivolous, in dress Of ladyships, a stranger to the poor; 'Letters of John Keats, ed. by H. Buxton Forman, Lond., 1895. |