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

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
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represented by 2,000,000 communicants; 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;