was

[OISE is unnecessary in this year, 1903, to demonstrate the mighty force of the great movement initiated under God by "a man sent from God whose name John," born at Epworth, England, June 28, 1703. Even our enemies themselves being judges, this force is recognized as one of the most potent in modern Church history, and its benefits have been acknowledged not merely by our own Methodist historians, Smith, Stevens, and Tyerman, but by men of the world like Lecky, Greene, Leslie Stephen, Birrell, and Gladstone, and by ecclesiastics like Farrar, Stoughton, and Overton, nearly all of whom attribute to the Wesleyan Revival the rescue of England from the horrors of revolution. France refused the Reformation and got the Revolution. As Froude has said, "It rejected the light and was blasted with the lightning." England accepted the revival of Evangelical faith and walked into the nineteenth century in newness of life.

The triumphs of Methodism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cannot, however, meet its obligations in the twentieth. What a splendid, wise, and friendly admonition was that of President Roosevelt a few days ago in the great Methodist celebration in the vast Carnegie Hall in New York. The greatness of the fathers be

to the children a shameful if they use it only as an ex

cuse for inaction instead of as a spur to effort for noble aims." The aims we should set before us on this bicentennial occasion are numerous; for example, intensified and quickened spiritual life, enlarged missionary operations, charitable enterprises, of which we have so few in the way of hospitals, etc., closing our ranks in pushing the temperance reform.

These and similar aims are all of vital consequence, but a lesson which should be as much emphasized as any in this bicentennial celebration is that Methodism should not go further into this twentieth century without doing more for higher education. At the risk of wounding here our denominational pride, some things should be plainly said: In general intelligence, and in the absence of illiteracy, we are in advance of all other Churches, but in higher scholarship and literature we are behind. Let me propound a question and attempt to answer it. Why is Methodism so largely discounted, if not ostracised, in the matter of higher education and authorship? There is no use denying the fact herein implied. Ask ten representative scientists litterateurs, Which are the leading universities in higher culture and scientific research in the United States? I venture boldly to say that their answers would omit all of the excellent Methodist universities whose strength and influence and valuable work are familiar to Why is it so few Methodists are found in the highest ranks of science and literature? Some Methodist names could be cited,

us.

especially in Britain, of which we are justly proud, but whose relative importance we perhaps exaggerate. Why is it that the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, in its fifth volume, dealing with living leaders of religious thought, gives only ninety-eight Methodist names out of one thousand four hundred and fifty-six? Even Congregationalism, so small numerically, forces the recognition of one hundred and fifty-two names. Why are these things so?

I briefly suggest four answers to this inquiry.

1. Our energies have been devoted to other objects confessedly more appropriate to Church life, but to a degree out of proportion to our educational responsibility.

2. There is an element here I mention with much reluctance, antiMethodist prejudice, which affects not only narrow bigots, but men whom we treat as friends, who, by inherited prejudice, discount the actual importance of Methodism in higher education. This bias touches the student life of all the great universities; and young men, even of the best Methodist antecedents, morally and educationally, are weaned away by scores from the Church of their fathers. Such men ought to be strong enough to resist such influence, but all the same the terrible loss goes on. The loss of ten bright university men to Methodism and Evangelical faith more than balances the gain of fifty peasants, with all allowance for the moral and intellectual possibilities latent in the latter.

3. The itinerancy, though so effective in many ways, must be recognized here as unfavourable. There are hundreds of communities where the Methodist minister, perhaps stronger than his neighbours, is discounted in local educational activity and as a man of high culture, because he has no chance in

his brief pastoral term of being fairly known and appreciated.

4. We may as well confess our faults and say that as a Church we come short of our duty in this matter. Princely gifts are sometimes bestowed, but they are few and small in comparison with the benefactions received by other Churches. We boast of being the largest Protestant Church in Christendom, except the Lutheran, but no one can claim that we have a proportionate amount of intelligent sympathy with higher education. Authorship receives its greatest inspiration. from academic surroundings. Let us give our Methodist scholars and professors the same advantages in the matter of endowments and libraries and learned leisure as the colleges of other denominations afford-for example, the Church of England-and they will very soon make themselves felt as leaders of thought. The Methodist Church does not give its scholars a fair chance, but drives them out of seclusion and study into the daily burden of administration and mere routine work.

All of this impeachment will be resisted by some who can tolerate no reflection, however just, on the Church of their love. Others will admit the foregoing, but say, All right, as long as Methodism is active in promoting vital piety and morality, it may forego all else. Not so. If we must choose between a dead Church with culture and a living Church without culture, by all means we must choose the latter, but no such choice is thrust upon us. On the contrary, religion now, more than ever, is co-ordinated with intelligence and education. The Methodist Church cannot claim a monopoly of spiritual life. life. Other Churches manifest it to a large and growing and gratifying degree. It remains that that denomination will advance most

We

HE Church of the living God, divinely instituted, is divinely maintained. In her now, as of old, God is revealed, a mighty Will working a perpetual miracle in its enduring efficiency. ought more boldly to affirm the supernatural shown in the visible. organization which is God's witness, God's herald, and God's channel of communicated grace, and which, a wonder through the ages, is upheld against assaults without and defections within.

In the eighteenth century the Church of England had for the most part sunk into a dull, powerless, and discredited formalism. Sporting parsons, drunken parsons, desecrated the Sabbath and Sabbath services. Men like Swift, like Sterne, held ecclesiastical preferment. Where decorum still prevailed, sermons were often vapid were often vapid essays on the propriety and convenience of virtue. Like priest, like people. With some Sunday was an orgy of drink. Many a village green was loud through the Lord's day afternoon with the clamour of boxing, of wrestling, of singlestick and of other riotous sports. True, many feared God. The flame of family devotion shone upon many hearths. Almost swallowed in darkness, the light of the Gospel gleamed from some pulpits. But, speaking generally, irreligion, profanity, lewdness and intemperance held high revel, in all ranks of society, through the three kingdoms.

Yet God did not forsake his Church.

He called John Wesley from the Epworth parsonage, sent him to Oxford, gave him time for reflection in long voyages across the

Atlantic and on a Georgia plantation, taught him by the example of a few Moravian exiles, and strangely warmed his heart" at a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, in 1738. Thus prepared God drove Wesley from the seclusion of his Oxford fellowship to go forth, a homeless wanderer, proclaiming not only the Gospel as Luther saw it, the Gospel of forgiveness, but the Gospel as it was given himself to see it, the Gospel of victory over sin in the heart and in the life.

To rustics from his father's tomb at Epworth, to Cornish miners in Gwennap Pit, to grimy collier lads and lasses in the Black Country, far and wide in the British Isles, he held the light of eternal hope above the turbulent sea of distressed and ignorant humanity. During the fifty-two years of his strenuous ministry he saw the conversion of thousands, and stimulated to effort, unselfish as his own, hundreds of fellow-labourers.

It is impossible to account for the wonderful effect of John Wesley's unimpassioned, clear, and argumentative sermons except by the hypothesis of divine influence. It is not too much to say that he changed the face of England. When summoned to his reward in extreme age, he left behind him a well organized religious community, pervaded with his spirit, that has grown to be one of the most powerful spiritual forces on earth. As God gave Luther to deliver Germany from papal domination, so God gave the learned and consecrated John Wesley to be an apostle to the Englishspeaking people of Europe and America.

ANY years' residence at as stuOxford, first as dent at Christ Church, and afterwards as Fellow and lecturer in Greek at Lincoln College, had familiarized John Wesley with all the advantages of that noble university, but, at the same time, had shown him its defects. He recognized the necessity of moral as well as intellectual training, and desired that boys should have principles of manliness and industry instilled in them, while they were being trained in classics and logic.

At Kingswood, two miles from Bristol, a school had been built for the children of the colliers. Here Wesley desired to found an institution for the sons of Methodist people, where they might receive the best education and at the same time have a religious training.

While mentioning to a lady his intention of establishing such a school, she at once donated five hundred pounds and urged him to carry out his plans. Later, she gave him three hundred pounds for the same purpose. The school was opened in June, 1748, a square, factory-like structure, without

Few aspects of Methodism are more remarkable than its large expenditure of thought and money upon education. Of this the many hundreds of schools, academies, seminaries, colleges, and universities which it has established throughout the world are evidence. This gives peculiar significance to the planting of the germ

from which these manifold institutions have grown, This account prepared by Miss Gardiner, of Albert College, Belleville, of the Kingswood School, established by John Wesley, will be read with much interest in in connection with this Bicentenary celebration.-ED.

grace or beauty, and here Wesley's educational theories were put into practice.

He believed that boys should be secluded during their school life, lest the attractions of a city or town should divert them from serious studies. His rules regarding admission were very strict; none above twelve were to be received, those having already acquired bad habits might be excluded. The moral character of the parents must be above reproach. Parents must agree that they would not withdraw their children or take them home for recreation until their education was completed. completed. The school was taught every day in the year except Sunday. The hour for rising was to be four o'clock, and the time-table for each day was to be rigidly enforced. The pupils were not to have play hours, but were to take their recreation by working in the garden or in the fields under the direction of a teacher, for Wesley believed in the truth of the old German proverb: "He that plays when he is a child will play when he is a man." The diet was simple and regular.

The school was divided into eight grades, and the studies for each grade was carefully defined that all should proceed from the simple to the complex. The subjects taught were reading, writing, arithmetic, English, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, history, geography, chronology, rhetoric, logic, logic, ethics, geometry, algebra, natural philosophy, and metaphysics-a pretty stiff programme of study. John Wesley himself prepared grammars and other text-books when he could not find satisfactory ones. A more advanced course was provided for