VOLUME 4 — BOOK VI — CHAPTER XIV
ACTUAL AND PROSPECTIVE RESULTS: 1820

Statistical Results of the Period — Comparative Statistics — Subsequent Results — Aggregate Statistics of the different Methodist bodies of the United States — Relative Importance of Methodism in Modern Protestantism — The Problem of its Success

We may well pause again, before recording the concluding facts of these pages, to consider the actual and prospective results, and the causes of the extraordinary, the almost incredible, success which we have been contemplating, and especially to view it in its more legitimate form as presented by the aggregate results of the various Methodist bodies which have sprung from the parent Church.

The statistical exhibit of Methodism in 1820 astonished not only the Church, but the country. It was evident that a great religious power had, after little more than half a century, been permanently established in the nation, not only with a practical system and auxiliary agencies of unparalleled efficiency, but sustained and propelled forward by hosts of the common people, the best bone and sinew of the Republic — and that all other religious denominations, however antecedent, were thereafter to take second rank to it, numerically at least, a fact of which Methodists themselves could not fail to be vividly conscious, and which might have critical effect on that humble devotion to religious life and work which had made them thus far successful. Their leaders saw the peril, and incessantly admonished them to "rejoice with trembling." The aggregate returns show that there were now 273,858 members in the Church, with between nine and ten hundred itinerant preachers.[1] In the sixteen years of the period there was a gain of no less than 158,447 members, and of more than 500 preachers. In the twenty years of the century the increase was 208,964 members, and 617 preachers; the former had much more than quadrupled, and the latter much more than trebled.

The first native American Methodist preacher was still alive, and was to see both this large membership and its ministry more than doubled.

The comparative statistics of Methodism (if they may be given without the appearance of invidiousness) showed its peculiar energy; its communicants already lacked but about 13,000 to be equal to those of it elder sister, the Regular Baptist Church, which dates its American origin more than a century and a quarter before it, and, in one decade later, they were to be nearly a hundred thousand in advance of them. They were already much more than double the number of those of the Presbyterian Church, and more than eleven times those of the Protestant Episcopal Church.[2] In a few years more Methodism was to advance to the front of the Protestantism of the new world, and thenceforward, for good or evil, lead its van with continually increasing ascendency. It had advanced, by this year, to the front of the Methodist world, with a majority of 1,700 over the parent British denomination.

It had by 1820 a well-defined ecclesiastical geography, covering all the settled parts of the Republic and Canada, with its eleven immense Conferences, subdivided into sixty-four presiding elders' districts, and more than five hundred circuits, many of the latter full five hundred miles in range; and, as has been shown, it now possessed, in more or less organized form, nearly a complete series of secondary or auxiliary agencies of usefulness, literary, educational, and missionary. It seemed thoroughly equipped, and had only to move forward.

The wonderful success, thus far characteristic of the denomination, was to have no serious reaction in the remainder of its history down to our day. Great as that success now appears, it was to become comparatively small in contrast with the statistics of the centenary jubilee in 1866. On this memorable occasion the Methodist Episcopal Church alone was to see a full million of communicants within its pale, and in its congregations four millions of the population of the Republic. But it had become several bands; yet all were identical, save in some points of ecclesiastical polity. Its first assembly, in Embury's private house, had multiplied to thousands and tens of thousands of congregations; its first chapel, of 1768, to at least twenty thousand churches, studding the continent from the northernmost settlements of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Its first two classes of 1766, recording six or seven members each, were now represented by 2,000,000 communicants;[3] its first congregation of five persons by about 8,000,000 of people; its three local preachers, Embury, Strawbridge, and Webb, who founded the whole cause, by at least 15,000 successors in their own order of the ministry; Its first two itinerants, Boardman and Pilmoor, who reached the New world in 1769, by about 14,000 traveling preachers; its first educational institution; opened in 1787, by nearly 200 colleges and academies, with an army of 32,000 students; its first Sunday-school, started by Asbury in 1786, by at least 20,000 schools, 200,000 teachers, and over 1,500,000 scholars; its first periodical organ, begun in 1818, after a previous failure, by thirty periodical publications, the best patronized, and among the most effective in the nation; its first Book Concern, with its borrowed capital of $600, begun in 1789, by four or five similar institutions in the United States and Canada. The festivities of the centenary jubilee of the denomination were to be tempered, as well as enhanced, by the startling fact that it bore the chief responsibility of Protestantism in the new world, its aggregate membership being about half the Protestant communicants of the country, its congregations between one fifth and one fourth of the national population; and that, if the usual estimate, by geographers, of the Protestant population of the globe (80,000,000) is correct American Methodism, with its eight millions of people, is responsible for one tenth (with general Methodism for one seventh) the interest and fate of the Protestant world.

The influence of this vast ecclesiastical force on the general progress of the new world can neither be doubted nor measured. It is generally conceded that it has been the most energetic religious element in the social development of the continent. With its devoted and enterprising people dispersed through the whole population; its thousands of laborious itinerant preachers, and still larger hosts of local preachers and exhorters; its unequaled publishing agencies and powerful periodicals, from the Quarterly Review to the child's paper; its hundreds of colleges and academies; its hundreds of thousands of Sunday-school instructors; its devotion to the lower and most needy classes, and its animated modes of worship and religious labor, there can hardly be a question that it has been a mighty, if not the mightiest, agent in the maintenance and spread of Protestant Christianity over these lands. The problem (so called) of this unequaled success has been the subject of no little discussion; but we may well hesitate to admit that there is any such problem. I have failed to interpret aright the whole preceding record, if it does not present, on almost every page intelligible reasons of its extraordinary events. A principal error in most of the discussions of this alleged problem has been the attempt to find some one fact or reason as its explanation. The problem (if such it may be admitted to be) is complex, and no single fact can suffice for its solution. Doubtless the theology of Methodism has had a potent influence on its history — its Arminianism, its doctrines of Regeneration, the Witness of the Spirit, and Sanctification. But it should be borne in mind that Calvinistic Methodism was, during most of the last century, as energetic as Arminian Methodism. It is as much so today in Wales, where it presents the best example of Sabbath observance and Church attendance in the Christian world. Whitefield was an ardent Calvinist, but was he less a Methodist, less a flaming evangelist, than Wesley? Moravianism shared the theology of Methodism, especially its most vital, most experimental doctrines; but not its prosperity. Indisputably one of the greatest responsibilities of the denomination, for the future, is the maintenance and diffusion of its theology; but this cannot be assigned as the single, or the special, cause of its success.

The legislative genius of Wesley, to practical system of Methodism, has been pronounced the chief cause of its progress. It has been, doubtless, hardly less important than its theology; we have seen its power throughout this whole narrative. But neither of them explains the problem, for neither of them, nor both together, could have succeeded without something else. The whole Methodistic system, introduced into some of our comparatively inert modern denomination, could only result in a prodigious failure. Could they tear up their ministerial families by the roots every two or three years, and scatter them hither and thither? Could they drive out their comfortably domiciled pastors to wander over the land without certain homes or abiding places, preaching night and day, year in and year out? Could they throw their masses of people into class-meetings for weekly inspection respecting their religious progress or declension? The system, momentous as it has been, presupposes prior and infinitely more potential conditions.

If we must narrow the explanation to the fewest possible conditions, it may be said that there have been two chief causes of the success of Methodism, one primary, the other proximate.

First, it was a necessity of the times, a providential provision for the times. The government of God over our world is a unit; the history of his Church is a unit; and however unable we may still be to correlate its divers parts, yet in ages to come, perhaps after hundreds of ages, the world will behold its perfect symmetry. History, if not as much under the sway of laws as physics, is nevertheless a providential process. The apostolic ministry founded the kingdom of Christ in the world, but the apostles themselves predicted the rise of Antichrist and the great "falling away." The medieval night, a thousand years long, followed; the Renaissance, with the Reformation, began the modern history of the world. The Reformation proclaimed the right and responsibility of the individual conscience in the interpretation of the word of God, and reproclaimed the apostolic doctrine of justification by faith. It went far, if not as far as it might have gone; but in the eighteenth century its progressive power seemed ab out exhausted. It had made no great territorial advancement after about its first half century, and in the eighteenth century the Historical Criticism and Rationalism arose, and, with the prevailing popular demoralization, threatened, as Burnet affirms, not only the Anglican Church, but "the whole Reformation." It had become necessary that some new development of Christianity should take place. It was a providential necessity, and God provided for it. At this very period of apparent danger the world was in the travail of a new birth. The American and French Revolutions were drawing near. The most important phases of the civilized world were to be transformed. Science, commerce, government, religion were to pass into a new cycle, perhaps their final cycle. The revolution in religion was to be as conspicuous as any other change in the grand process. The rights of conscience were to be more fully developed; the separation of the Church from the State, and the "voluntary principle," were to be introduced. For the first time, in recorded history, was about to be seen the spectacle of a great nation without a state religion. Medieval dogmatism was to be more fully thrown into abeyance; ecclesiasticism and hierarchism to receive a shock under which they might still reel for a while but only to fall, sooner or later, to their proper subordination or desuetude. The permanent, essential principles, not so much of theology (so called) as of religion, were to revive with the power of their apostolic promulgation. Missions, Sunday-schools, Bible societies, popular religious literature, all those powers which I have affirmed to have arisen with Methodism, were to come into activity in the religious world co-ordinately with the new energies of the secular world. The Church, in fine, was anew to become a living, working organism, and to be not only the Church of the present, but, probably, the Church of the future. The old questions of rationalistic biblical criticism and of ecclesiasticism were not to be immediately laid, but they were to become only occasional incidents to the Christian movement of the new age. Colenso and the Essayists, Pusey and the Oxford Papal tendencies, were yet to appear, but not seriously to obstruct the march of evangelical truth. Methodism had its birth at the date of Rationalism in Germany. The biblical criticism of Colense and the Essayists was anticipated in the writings of Bolingbroke and other English authors before Methodism had fairly started. That criticism is much older. Spinoza's Politico-Theological Treatise is almost entirely made up of it — in many respects a much abler discussion than modern English doubt has produced. We know not how far modern critical skepticism may yet go; we know not what, if any, demonstrations it may reach; but one thing we absolutely know, that the ethical purity which speaks in the gospel, the spiritual life which filled the primitive Church with saints, heroes, martyrs, and which is now filling the Christian world with good works, sanctified homes, and peaceful deathbeds, can never be overthrown; that against a living, loving, working Church the gates of hell can never prevail; and that the very existence of such a Church presupposes the coexistence of all essential theology. The production of such a Church was the special providential appointment of the eighteenth century, a "continuous revival" of spiritual life, as Wesley was able to say after fifty years, in the old world; a still continued "revival," as we are able to say today, after a hundred years, in the new world. If we may not venture to affirm that Methodism, distinctively so called, is this modern development of Christianity, we need not hesitate to say, with Isaac Taylor, that the religious movement of the eighteenth century, called Methodism — Calvinistic and Arminian — Is its true historical exponent — "the event whence the religious epoch now current must date its commencement."

Such was the providential origin of Methodism, such the primary condition of its success. But what was its other chief; or proximate cause?

The "Holy Club" was founded at Oxford, and the title of Methodism given to it in 1729, ten years before the recognized epoch of the religious movement which it was to introduce. The Wesleys, Whitefield, and other mighty men were then or soon after in it; but they had no notable success, for they had not yet received "power from on high." The Wesleys came to America, and labored faithfully here, but still without success, and they returned home defeated. something was yet needed. They preached and suffered in England, but still without appreciable effect. As Methodism was to be the next great stage of religious progress, after the Reformation, it was to have affinity with the Reformation. The salient doctrinal fact of the Reformation was justification by faith. Wesley had been feeling after this as in the dark during all these ten years; but now, by the very writings in which Luther had declared it at the Reformation, he was to find it. On the 24th of May 1738, sitting in a little religious meeting in Aldersgate Street, listening to the reading of Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans, the great truth flashed upon his soul. "I felt," he writes, "my heart strangely warmed; an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." Here is the proximate cause of all the Methodism in the world today, for this was the "dispensation of the Spirit," which has since continued in a baptism of fire upon the Churches. On that, memorable night genuine Methodism had its birth. What would have been Wesley's theological opinions without this quickening of the Spirit? — Tenets only of the brain, exciting him to unavailing struggles, as they had for ten years. What his practical system, had he even been able to devise it, but a wretched failure, from which he and his people would soon have recoiled,, as from a burden intolerable to be borne? This new spiritual life, this "strange" warmth of the heart, made his theology vital, his system practicable; gave power and demonstration to his preaching, and spread like contagion through his assemblies. It intoned their hymns, and kindled their prayer-meetings, band-meetings, classes, and love-feasts. The manner of its inspiration, the time of its experience, its effects and evidences, and the extent to which it could be perfected, became the themes of discourse in their meetings and in their familiar converse all through the British realm. Conversion, the Witness of the Spirit, and Sanctification, were but its corollary truths. It inspired men to enter the ministry, it inspired their preaching, and produced the peculiar power of their preaching, and of all their denominational methods, as witnessed throughout the world. Without it almost everything else that is charateristically Methodistic would have been not only ineffective, but inpracticable. The multitudes, the very mobs, recognized this power of personal religion, this divine power and glory of the regenerated man in the representatives of the new movement; they saw it in their countenances, in their tears, and heard it in their tones. It was the magical power by which they controlled riots, and led persecutors in weeping processions from the highways and market-places to the altars of their humble chapels. If it be inquired what has been the one chief force in the success of Methodism, and what is the chief power for its future success, I reply, it is this "power from on high," this " unction from the holy One."

Such, I think, were the primary and proximate conditions of the success of Methodism. There were also many others doubtless: its catholicity; the subordination, not to say insignificance, to which it reduced all exclusive or arrogant ecclesiastic pretensions; the importance which it gave to good and charitable works while insisting on a profound personal, if not a mystic piety; the unprecedented co-operation of the laity with the clergy in at least religious labors, which it established; the activity of women in its social devotions; these, and still more.

I mention further but one, and particularly because it affords an important admonitory lesson — the character of its chiefs. And I mean not merely their greatness. They were indeed great men, as the world is beginning to acknowledge: Whitefield, the greatest of modern preachers; Wesley, the greatest of religions organizers; Asbury, unquestionably the greatest character in the ecclesiastical history of this hemisphere judged by the results of his labors. But it was not so much by their great abilities, as by qualities in which all may share, that they made Methodism what it is. Its leaders were its exemplars, and that fact expresses more of the philosophy of its history than any other except the of the "baptism from on high." There is no human power above that of character. The character, not the genius, of Washington has made him chief among the military or civic sons of men. The character of a military leader can make a whole army an array of heroes or a melee of cowards. The army of the Shenandoah was rolling back shattered and hopeless, but when its chief arrived on his foaming steed, after that long and solitary ride, it stood forth again invincible; the drawing of his single sword before it, flashed lightning along all its bayonets and banners, and it dealt back the blow which sent the enemy reeling irrecoverably to destruction. The greatest of talents is character, and character is the most attainable of talents.

Had John Wesley, when his cause was somewhat established, retired from his self-sacrificing labors, and acted the dignified, well-endowed prelate in City Road parsonage, his whole system would soon have fallen through. By traveling more, laboring more, and suffering more than any of his preachers, he kept them all heroically traveling, laboring, suffering. Asbury kept Methodism astir throughout this nation by hastening from Georgia to Massachusetts on horseback, yearly, for nearly half a century, preaching daily. None of his preachers exceeded him in even the humblest labors of the ministry. His power was military, and he used it with military energy; but, as has been shown, he imposed on the ministry no task that he did not himself exemplify. Under his command the Conferences moved as columns in the field of battle, for they knew that their leader would be in the thickest fight, would be chief in suffering and labor as in authority and honor. Asbury's daily life was a challenge to the humblest of them to endure all things. It became a point of chivalric honor among them to evade no labor or suffering; they consented to be tossed from Baltimore to Boston, from Boston to beyond the Alleghenies. How would all this have been changed if Asbury, at his episcopal ordination, had housed himself in Baltimore, reposing on his dignity, and issuing his commands, without exemplifying them! The Church should understand, then, that its great men must be great workers in whatever sphere they occupy; that this is a requisite of the age, and has always been a requisite of Methodism. An itinerant superintendency or episcopacy has ever been a favorite idea of its people. They have instinctively perceived its importance, and the founders of the Church declared in its constitutional law that the General Conference shall not "change or alter any part or rule of our government so as . . . to destroy the plan of our itinerant superintendency." The unity of the denomination, the fellowship of the Churches, their cooperation in great common undertakings, and the self-sacrificing spirit of the ministry generally, have been largely attributable to this fact of their system, a fact peculiar to Methodism among Episcopal Churches.

With changes of time must come changes of policy, if not changes of what have been deemed fundamental opinions. Methodism has, through most of its history, been taking on new adaptations. Unrestricted by any dogmatism whatever in ecclesiastical polity, and less restricted, as we have seen, by theological creeds, than any other evangelical Church, it stands unequaled its future career. That it will change, that it has changed, cannot be doubted; but devoting itself, as it has been increasingly, to the elevation of its people, to education, literature, liberty, civil and religious, missions, the amelioration of its own acknowledged defects, and all charitable works, there would seem to be, not only possible, but feasible to it, a destiny hardly less grand than its history.

______________________________________________________

ENDNOTES

1 An error in the Minutes of 1820 (vol.1, p.346) is corrected by the Minutes of 1821, (ibid., p.366.) The Minutes cannot be followed for the aggregates of any given calendar year, for the reason that the returns of the Western Conferences, printed in any given year, were made up the preceding year. I correct this defect in the estimate in my text. Bangs followed the Minutes without this modification; Goss's. "Statistical History" has followed Bangs. The preachers for 1820 are given in the Minutes as 904, but this includes the preachers of the West only for 1819. The Minutes of 1821 give the ministry as 977; this Includes the western preachers of 1820, but also those of the East down to the end of the spring (and one Conference beyond it) of 1821. The statement in the text is sufficiently precise.

2 See Goss's tables, "Statistical History," etc., chap. v; but the reader must qualify them according to my preceding note.

3 I give the aggregates of the different Methodist bodies in America. The details can be found in the "Centenary Book" heretofore mentioned, cited mostly from official sources.

---

Text scanned and proofread by Rev. & Mrs. Duane V. Maxey
Holiness Data Ministry
P. O. Box 482
Coeur D' Alene, WA 99208

HTML conversion by Paul Leclerc and George Lyons
Copyright 2000 by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology
of Northwest Nazarene University,
Nampa, Idaho 83686.

Text may be freely used for personal or scholarly purposes, provided this notice is left intact.
This text may not be redistributed in any for-profit form or mirrored at any other website without the expressed, written consent of the Wesley Center.

If you have any questions regarding these files, please contact the Wesley Center for Applied Theology.