History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

English Methodism in giving corporate form to an oligarchic entail of governmental power. It has
been the direct or indirect cause of all the divisions in it, rendered all the more conspicuous by the
singular unity of all Methodists as to doctrine, means of grace, and its great operative forces — "a
revival church in its spirit and a missionary church in its organization." The several offshoots from
the parent body, numerically and materially, nearly equal in their aggregation the Wesleyan body at
an estimate for 1891 of 550,000. Thus, but for the disintegrating tendencies of a polity which was
sincerely, but erroneously, proposed to unify, transatlantic Methodism would today be a million
strong. True, its divisions are far from being an unmixed evil, if an evil at all, in view of the zeal
provoked and the restraints imposed upon the parent body. Precisely in the measure of the legal
imperatives of the Poll-Deed, all else having from time to time been wrested from it as concessions
to a popular demand under the educative influence of the secedent bodies, it has preserved Wesleyan
conferential authority and proprietary rights in chapels and vested funds, and so perpetuated a system
which many admire and loyally uphold as the wisest and best. Largely, it is a matter of type and
temperament in the human personality. Many prefer to be governed in that way for the privilege in
their grade of governing others themselves. The protesting bodies have no right to complain of their
preference. What they claim is a right to their own preference and the undisturbed privilege through
their own liberal methods of demonstrating that they are most consonant with primitive and
apostolical precedents, and in line with the religious and civil liberties of God's people, and so the
wisest and best.
A closing fact needs clear enunciation. In comparative estimates of the numerical success of
English Methodism, as set over against American Methodism, it must not be overlooked that,
through all the years of the last century, at least, the former have been constantly and vastly depleted
by foreign emigration, thus feeding the latter, so that the American Methodist web has not only been
spread to catch all who come within its radii, but to an extent not fairly acknowledged heretofore,
the web itself is spun out of the bowels of the British spider. Another fact needs emphasis: the
respective losses and gains by home migration. It is asserted, as a fair calculation, that the Wesleyan
Conference and the Episcopal Methodisms lose by migration of their members not more than one
in four as accretions to the secedent bodies, while these bodies lose by accretions to the parent
denominations not less than three of the four. It is specially true of America. The Episcopal webs are
spread all over the country, and the migrating Liberal Methodist falls into them by the necessity of
the situation three cases out of four, because the webs of the secedent bodies are so territorially
circumscribed; and for the same reason they catch in turn not more than one in four from the parent
bodies. These facts may be farther enlarged when the statistics of Methodism are under particular
consideration at a later period. Thus a concise view of English Methodism in all its phases has been
given, first as historical information, which all Methodists may claim in common, and second as it
bears upon the struggle between the oligarchic and democratic systems of government, respectively
defended and maintained by their adherents.
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