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

and the moral prospects of the world. Its missionary development has preserved its primitive energy.
According to the usual history of religious bodies, if not indeed by a law of the human mind, its early
heroic character would have passed away by its domestic success, and the cessation of the novelty
and trials of its early periods; but by throwing itself out upon all the world, and especially upon the
strongest citadels of paganism, it has perpetuated its original militant spirit, and opened for itself a
heroic career, which need end only with the universal triumph of Christianity. English Methodism
was considered, at the death of its founder, a marvelous fact in British history; but today the
Wesleyan missions alone comprise more than twice the number of the regular preachers enrolled in
the English Minutes in the year of Wesley's death, and nearly twice as many communicants as the
Minutes then reported from all parts of the world which had been reached by Methodism. The latest
reported number of missionary communicants in the Methodist Episcopal Church equals nearly one
half the whole membership of the Churches the year (1819) before our narrative closes -- the year
in which the Missionary Society was founded -- and is nearly double that with which the
denomination closed the last century, after more than thirty years of labors and struggles.
Such, then, were some of the results with which Methodism was pregnant, by the development
of its practical system, at the period of its history which we have reached, for all these great measures
were initiated, as has been shown, before 1820. Nor are these all the results of those measures, for
Methodism was yet a unit, save the comparatively limited schisms of O'Kelly (in our day extinct)
and the African Methodist. All the existing Methodist bodies of the country have sprung from it, and
their combined strength alone properly shows the aggregate result. Most of them have Book
Concerns, periodicals, Sunday-schools, missions, academies, and colleges, all primarily the product
of the Church of 1820, as of that of 1766. Half the Methodism of the country stands to day beyond
the ecclesiastical limits of the Methodist Episcopal Church, but it all legitimately belongs to the
prospective view of our present standpoint.
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