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

Missionary Societies. Collections had been taken in many of the circuits for the Institution, and in
1793 the Conference formally ordered a general collection for it. Coke published accounts of its
"receipts and in this manner did Methodism early prompt the British Churches, and call forth the
energies of the British people, in plans of religious benevolence for the whole world. Its previous
missions in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the Channel Islands did much for the reformation of the
domestic population. Besides its efforts in 1786 in the West Indies, it began its evangelical labors
in France as early as 1791, and its great schemes in Africa in 1811; in Asia in 1814; in Australasia
in 1815; in Polynesia in 1822; until, from the first call of Wesley for American evangelists, in the
Conference of 1769, down to our day, we see the grand enterprise reaching to the shores of Sweden,
to Germany, France, and the Upper Alps; to Gibraltar and Malta; to the banks of the Gambia, to
Sierra Leone, and to the Gold Coast; to the Cape of Good hope; to Ceylon, to India, and to China;
to the Colonists and Aboriginal tribes of Australia; to New Zealand, and the Friendly and Fiji
Islands; to the islands of the Western as well as of the Southern hemisphere; and from the Gulf of
St. Lawrence to Puget's Sound. From 1803 to the present time Wesleyan Methodism has contributed
more than twenty millions of dollars for foreign evangelization. In England the "Church Missionary
Society" alone exceeds its annual collections for the foreign field; but the Wesleyan Society enrolls
more communicants in its mission Churches than all other British missionary societies combined.
The historian of religion during the last and present centuries would find it difficult to point to a
more magnificent monument of Christianity.
Coke, the first bishop of American Methodism, was to the end of his life the representative
character of Methodist Missions. In his old age he offered himself, as we shall hereafter see, to the
British Conference as a missionary to the East Indies. He died on the voyage, and was buried in the
Indian Ocean. His death struck not only a knell through the Church, but a summons for it to rise
universally and march around the world. He had long entertained the idea of universal evangelization
as the exponent characteristic of the Methodist movement. The influence of the movement on
English Protestantism had tended to such a result, for in both England and America nearly all
denominations had felt the power of the great revival not only during the days of Whitefield and
Wesley, but ever since. Anglo-Saxon Christianity, in both hemispheres, had been quickened into new
life, and had experienced a change amounting to a moral revolution. The magnificent apostolic idea
of evangelization in all the earth, and till all the earth should be Christianized, had not only been
restored, as a practical conviction, but had become pervasive and dominant in the consciousness of
the Churches, and was manifestly thenceforward to shape the religious history of the Protestant
world. The great fermentation of the mind of the civilized nations -- the resurrection, as it may be
called, of popular thought and power -- contemporaneous in the civil and religious worlds, in the
former by the American and French Revolutions, in the latter by the Methodist movement seemed
to presage a new history of the human race. And history is compelled to record, with the frankest
admission of the characteristic defects of Thomas Coke, that no man, not excepting Wesley or
Whitefield, more completely represented the religious significance of those eventful times.
Though American Methodism was many years without a distinct missionary organization, it was
owing to the fact that its whole Church organization was essentially a missionary scheme. It was, in
fine, the great Home Mission enterprise of the North American continent, and its domestic work
demanded all its resources of men and money. It early began, however, special labors among the
aborigines and slaves. The history of some of these labors would be an exceedingly interesting and