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

$250,374, (including its offspring of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to half a million,) and
its total receipts, down to the last year of his life, more than four and a half millions, not including
the southern society. He was to witness the rise (chiefly under the auspices of the society) of
American-German Methodism, an epochal fact in the history of his denomination, next in
importance to the founding of the Church by Embury and Strawbridge. Without a recognized
missionary for some time after its origin, the society was to present to his dying gaze a list of nearly
four hundred, and more than thirty-three thousand mission communicants, representing the
denomination in many parts of the United States, in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland,
Bulgaria, India, China, and South America. Assisting in this great work, and rejoicing in its
triumphs, he was to outlive all its original officers but three, and all its original managers save three.
The next General Conference (in 1820) sanctioned the scheme. Emory submitted an elaborate
report on the subject. After reasoning at length upon it, he asked, "Can we, then, be listless to the
cause of missions? We cannot. Methodism itself is a missionary system. Yield the missionary spirit,
and you yield the very life-blood of the cause. In missionary efforts our British brethren are before
us. We congratulate them on their zeal and their success. But your committee beg leave to entreat
this Conference to emulate their example." The Conference adopted, with some emendations, the
constitution prepared for the society by Bangs. He thus saw his great favorite measure incorporated,
it may be hoped forever, into the structure of the Church. He writes: "These doings of the Conference
in relation to the Missionary Society exerted a most favorable influence upon the cause, and tended
mightily to remove the unfounded objections which existed in some minds against this organization."
By the session of the General Conference of 1832 the society's operations had extended through
the states and territories of the nation, and had become a powerful auxiliary of the itinerant system
of the Church. Hitherto it had been prosecuted as a domestic scheme, for the frontier circuits, the
slaves, the free colored people, and the Indian tribes; it had achieved great success in this wide field,
and was now strong enough to reach abroad to other lands. It proposed, with the sanction of this
Conference, to plant its standard on the coast of Africa, and send agents to Mexico and South
America to ascertain the feasibility of missions in those countries. Thus were begun those foreign
operations of the society which have become its most interesting labors.
Its domestic Indian missions had now become numerous, and some of them were remarkably
prosperous; "attended," Bangs says, "with unparalleled success." In Upper Canada they numbered,
in 1831, no less than ten stations, and nearly two thousand Indians "under religious instruction, most
of whom were members of the Church. Among the Cherokees; in Georgia, they had at the same date
no less than seventeen missionary laborers, and nearly a thousand Church members. Among the
Choctaws there were about four thousand communicants, embracing all the principal men of the
nation, their chiefs and captains." And, more or less, along the whole frontier, Indian Missions were
established. Meanwhile the destitute fields of the domestic work proper were dotted with humble
but effective mission stations, from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and these stations were
rapidly passing from the missionary list to the Conference catalogue of appointments as
self-supporting Churches.
Melville B. Cox, whose baptism, and the reception of his family into the Church, by Kibby, in
[9]
Maine, have been noticed, sailed for Africa, the first foreign missionary of American Methodism.