The itinerancy has always been a feature cherished with jealous care ty the Methodist bodies, and with re- spect to bishops it is hedged about by one of the re- strictive rides in the j\Ieth. I-3pis. Church (see their Dis- cipline, Powers of the General Conference). The length of time for which the travelling preachers may remain on the same " charge" (whether a circuit or station) has varied at different times in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and is now limited to three years. " Presiding eklers" can remain only four years on the same "dis- trict."
As to the advantages and disadvantages of the itiner- ant system, no one has given a more unbiased account of the objections that have thus far been presented against the continuation of " itinerancy" than Dr. Crane (Method. Quart. Rev., Jan. 1866, p. 73 sq.), and we follow him in the main, supplementing it only with what comes from other churches.
1. " The people are restricted in the choice of their pastors." If this be true, no other system so soon rem- edies the difficulty as the itinerancy, for it secures at the same time with the pastor a further change within a sliort period, without inflicting dishonor or injustice.
2. "At certain fixed intervals it removes the pastor with whom the people have become acquainted, and substitutes a stranger in his place." In return, it af- fords each chiu"ch the benefit of the varied endowments of many ministers, and, moreover, keeps ministers and people in vigorous action.
3. " Societies and congregations have less cohesive force than their own good demands." This, of all objec- tions, has been the one most frequently urged, and is, perhaps, the only one that it is hard to deny. It is with a view to ob\-iate this evil that many have advocated au extension of the term of service to five or more years.
4. " The change sometimes comes inopportimely." If this happen in some instances, and they can, after all, be but few, much greater are the advantages which arise from this system, as it never leaves a church without a pastor, and at the same time also secures to the minister a pastorate, so long as he is able to work effectively in the Gospel field. The greatest problem for other de- nominations to solve is " unemployed ministers." Thus a writer in the Intelligencer, speaking of the trials re- sulting from a want of an itinerant ministrj' in the Re- formed (Dutch) Church, says of Methodism: "No man who can work, and wants to work, need be idle, with fields appointed and the Church's benedictions upon those who strive to till them, and no man is laid upon the shelf till age, infirmity, or misconduct places him there; while, when age and infirmity come, that Church still supports and cherislics those who have worn life out in her and the ^Master's work. That a Church thus served with the whole life-long energies of her ministry should thrive and grow under the divine blessing, need surprise no one who properly weighs the bearings of cause and effect. The ruling out by our churches of half the aggregate effective force of the ministrj', which a growing fastidiousness in the matter of choosing and settling preachers causes to be practically lost to the Church, has a gloomy look for her future prosperity. The prospect of such a life-voyage is not apt to be spe- cially attractive to youth pondering whether or not to embark ; for, once embarked, unless it be a Methodist vessel that bears them, they may find themselves strand- ed high and dry, and that from no faidt of theirs, ere the voyage is half run."
5. " The brief pastorates are liable to create an unwise love of novelty and excitement." This, if somewhat true, is not a very formidable objection ; while, on the other hand, the evil of indifference and dissatisfaction, so liable to be produced by a long pastoral term, is far greater. The brief pastorates afford the minister time and mental force for tlie preparation of a comparatively small number of sermons, and arc therefore favorable to thorough preparation for the pulpit. Says Dr. Isaac Tay- lor ( Wesley and Methodism, Loud. 1851), "Any oite who, endowed with some natural facidty and fluency of ut- terance, has made the experiment, will have found it far from difficult to acquire the power of continuous and pertinent speaking upon familiar topics, especially upon religious topics, and so to hold out for thirty or forty minutes or more ; and if this habit of speaking be well husbanded, and kept always within the safe enclosures of conventional phrases, and of authenticated modes of thinking, this preacher may be always ready to ascend the pulpit, in season and out of season. His sermon, or his set of discourses, is, in fact, the glib run of the men- tal associations upon worn tracks, this way or that, as the mind may chance to take its start from a given text. This sort of mindless facility of speaking proves a sore temptation to many a located minister, and its conse- quence is to leave many a congregation sitting from year to year deep in a quagmire. Better than this, un- doubtedly, would be itinerancy— far better is a frequent shifting of monotonies than a fixedness of the same."