History of the M.E. Church, Vol. IV - Media Sabda Org

Robert Paine was president, and E. D. Simms one of the professors. In Virginia, Randolph Macon
College had been established, and M. P. Parks, of the Virginia Conference, was one of its professors,
and Stephen Olin was soon after placed at its head. Thus it will be seen that no less than five colleges
had sprung into existence in an incredibly short time, and were already in successful operation under
the supervision of the Church. Several Conference seminaries also had been established; such were
the Cazenovia Seminary, the Maine Wesleyan Seminary, Wilbraham Academy, Genesee Wesleyan
Seminary, Shelbyville Female Academy, and others, which were in successful operation in different
parts of the Church." [7]
The Church could not pause here. Wesley, as we have seen, had proposed ministerial education
at his very first Conference, and the British Methodists had embodied the proposition in two
imposing "theological institutions." The New England Methodists agitated the question in their
Church periodical, and in 1839 a convention was called, in Boston, to provide such an institution.
It was founded with the title of the Biblical Institute; it struggled through severe adversities, was at
first connected with the Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.., then with the Methodist
Seminary, at Newbury, Vt., but at last was located in Concord, N.H., where it has exerted no
inconsiderable influence upon the character of the New England Methodist ministry. In 1845 John
Dempster, of New York city, became its professor of theology. He threw his remarkable energy into
the cause of ministerial education throughout the denomination, and not only forced along the New
England institution against formidable discouragements, but became a leading founder of the
northwestern seminary at Evanston, Ill., where a Chicago Methodist lady, by the gift of property
amounting to $300,000, gave endowment and her name to the Garrett Biblical Institute.
Thus boarding academies, colleges, and theological seminaries have rapidly grown up in the
denomination till the Methodist Episcopal Church alone now (1866) reports no less than 25 colleges,
(including theological schools,) having 158 instructors, 5,345 students, $3,055,861 endowments and
other property, and 105,531 volumes in their libraries. It reports also 77 academies, with 556
instructors and 17,161 students, 10,462 of whom are females, making all aggregate of 102
institutions, with 714 instructors and 23,106 students. The southern division of the denomination
reported before the Rebellion 12 colleges and 77 academies, with 8,000 students, making an
aggregate for the two bodies of 191 institutions and 31,106 students.
The moral and social influence of such a series of educational provisions, reaching from the year
of the organization of the Church to our own day, must be incalculable; and could it point the world
to no other monuments of its usefulness, these would suffice to establish its claims as one of the
effective means of the intellectual and moral progress of the country.
We turn to another and more immediately ecclesiastical and evangelical interest, which was
formally initiated in the Church, as I have shown, before the expiration of the period which closes
our narrative. American Methodism could not long fail to imitate the example of British Methodism
in the "missionary cause," for the parent Church had early become pre-eminent before the Christian
world in this sublime enterprise. The idea of religious missions is as old as Christianity, and has been
exemplified by the Papal Church through much of its history, and in the ends of the earth. The
Moravians early embodied it in their system. In the Protestantism of England it had but feeble sway
till the epoch of Methodism. That grand form of it which now characterizes English Protestantism