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

Methodism was now entrenched in every state of the Union, and was penetrating every one of its
opened territories. The few itinerants who had followed Gibson to the Natchez country invaded West
Florida and East Louisiana. The germs of Churches now obscurely planted in Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois, were never to die, but to yield, in our day, the mighty harvest of 116,000 members and 600
preachers in Ohio; 90,000 members and 450 preachers in Indiana; 90,000 members and 560
preachers in Illinois; and to spread out sheltering boughs over all the West to the northern lakes and
the Pacific coast. We shall hereafter see the yet feeble forces of Western Methodism, hitherto so
scattered that we have hardly been able to make anything like adherent record of them, consolidated
into thirty-five powerful Conferences, with three thousand itinerants, and half a million
communicants, aside from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and all other branches of the
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denomination. Though it began in the West nearly a quarter of a century after its beginning in the
East, and was yet in the former but a dispersed and struggling band, it was destined to embody, in
its ultramontane Conferences by our day, fully one half of its ministerial strength, and to move
forward in the van of all the other Protestant Christianity of the Valley of the Mississippi.
But in all other sections of the Republic, not excepting New England, the inherent vitality and
progressive energy of Methodism had now become indisputable, and it was henceforward to advance
with a celerity [speed -- DVM] unknown to any other form of Christianity in the nation. In the last
decade of the last century (1790 -- 1800) the ratio of the increase of the population of the United
States was 35.02 per cent., that of Methodism, meanwhile, was but 12.60 per cent; but this
disproportion between the growth of the nation and the denomination was to cease for our age, if not
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forever, with the close of the eighteenth century. Excepting the periods of the secession of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and of the southern Rebellion, the ratio of the increase of the
Church has far outsped that of the nation. Even dating from 1790, and making no allowance for these
two formidable drawbacks, the average ratio of the increase of the Methodist Episcopal Church has
been, down to our day, (1865,) 56.85 per cent. For each ten years, while that of the population of the
republic has been 35.82 per cent. The Church has led the nation at the rate of twenty-three per cent.
Each decade. And yet this statement, applying only to the Methodist Episcopal Church, gives no
adequate estimate of the incredible vigor of Methodism, for about half its numerical force in the
United States is outside of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The astonishing gains of the latter have
been made in spite of secessions, (averaging about one for every fifteen years,) by which half the
actual strength of American Methodism stands organized beyond its ecclesiastical lines, though
identical with it in doctrine and internal discipline, and nearly so in ecclesiastical economy.
We stand, then, at present (1804) in a most interesting stage of its progress, about midway of the
decade in which, after faltering long, in the ratio of its growth, behind that of the country, it was
about to wheel from its position in the rear and advance with its triumphant banner to the front, not
only of all other denominations, but of the nation itself, in the ratio of its increase; and
thenceforward, for good or ill, lead the Christianity of the North American continent, adding to its
ranks an annually masses of population which not only astonished its own humble laborers, but the
Christian world, and sometimes, in a single year, exceeded the entire membership of denominations
which had been in the field generations before it. At such a crisis, the detail with which I have thus
far recorded the early history of this curious and important religious development, will not perhaps
appear irrelevant, for it is by such facts, showing its genetic conditions, but too often ignored in
history, that we are to learn its true genius and probable destiny, and unfold, to its present and future