THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
personal administration of the bishops. Continual secessions from the church followed and local combinations were made. A general convention of such was assembled, which framed a constitution and discipline; this was amended and adopted, and a new denomination formed, The Methodist Protestant Church. According to its last analysis, the reformers declared the point of controversy to be an unmixed question of representation of the laity. In twelve years the Methodist Protestant Church included eighteen conferences and 50,000 members. The Methodist Protestant Church included, among those who formed it, many whom the Methodist Episcopal Church could ill afford to lose, such as Asa Shinn, orator, debater, and powerful preacher, and Nicholas Snethen, seldom equaled as a polemic speaker and author. The Methodist Episcopal Church South and the Methodist Episcopal Church have fulfilled the prediction of Snethen made in 1864:
" If we are true to it [the pure, unmixed question of representation], if we are not ashamed of it, if we glory in it, it must finally prevail, and proselyte every Methodist in the United States. They may, indeed, remain episcopal Methodists, but so sure as we are not moved away from our high calling, the whole lump will be leavened into representative Methodists."
Its government is the embodiment of the representative principles for which it contended. In no period of its existence has it failed to be represented by men of rare ability. Among those of the middle period was Thomas Hewlings Stockton (q.v. ), who had few if any superiors as a preacher. Another was Dr. Alexander Clark, orator, author, editor, traveler, no mean poet, and the principal compiler of the Voice of Praise, the hymn-book of the denomination. This communion has always been interested in education, and maintained useful institutions. For many years it aided the foreign mission work of other denominations. The Woman's Foreign Missionary Society was formed in 1879, and the Board of Foreign Missions in 1882. Its work has been chiefly in Japan and China.
The membership in 1909 numbered 188,806, a gain of over sixty per cent since 1892.
4. Wesleyan Methodist Connection or Church of America: Divers uncompromising abolitionists conferred together in 1842 as to the wisdom of secession from the Methodist Episcopal Church. In that year Orange Scott, Jotham Horton, and Leroy Sunderland announced, in a paper called the True Wesleyan, their withdrawal, and issued a call for a convention of all who agreed with them to prepare a plan of government and to organize a church which should be non-episcopal and anti-slavery. The convention met May 31, 1843, at TJtica, N. Y., and founded the Wesleyan Methodist Connection of America. About 6,000 joined, twenty-two of whom were traveling ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and as many more from the Methodist Protestant and Reformed Methodists. To these were added forty-four who reported by letter. The discipline of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection of America differs in various particulars from that of other sections of the Methodist family. Members are forbidden to join any secret society, and if any break this rule and refuse to
withdraw " they shall without trial be declared withdrawn from the church." Unstationed ministers are allowed to speak in the conference but not to vote. In less than eighteen months after it was founded the membership increased from 6,000 to 15,000; but thirty-two years later it had no more. Its rigid condemnation of secret societies repelled many, and after slavery was destroyed, nearly one hundred ministers, accompanied by thousands of communicants, returned to the Methodist Episcopal Church. This denomination of Christians strives faithfully to convert men, and to enforce the stringent rules which it conscientiously holds to be just — to be Christian. Its present roster shows 19,485 members.
5. The Free Methodist Church: This church was organized in 1860 at a convention of ministers and laymen. The action was the culmination of an agitation in the Genesee conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Certain ministers in that body had, for several years, been declaring that the church was tolerating worldly practises, and contradictory teachings on entire sanctification; that primitive Methodist simplicity was disappearing, unconverted persons being received into the church; that little attention was paid to discipline, and that many Methodists were allowed to belong to secret societies. They condemned the renting of pews, choir-singing, all worldly amusements, and the building of costly churches. In 1858 B. T. Roberts and Joseph McCreary were expelled from the Methodist Episcopal Church on charges of contumacy and alleged immoral and unchristian conduct. The charge of contumacy was based upon Roberts' publishing and circulating a second edition of New School Methodism and a pamphlet giving a short account of his previous trial. Many considered the expulsion of these ministers as persecution. Several ministers of the conference publicly expressed their sympathy, and four of them were expelled on similar charges, and two others were retired from the itinerant ministry to the local. At the general conference of 1860 the cases were taken up and the appeal of Roberts was not allowed. The conference affirmed that an unendurable spirit of censoriousness and insubordination was the cause of the action against them, and that their expulsion was in harmony with the regular forms. In the government of the Free Methodist Church a general superintendent, elected quadrennially, was substituted for the episcopacy. In all church courts the number of laymen was made equal to the ministry. The office of presiding elder was retained, but the officer is entitled district chairman. Two articles of faith were added to those of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The first is on entire sanctification, and the second on future reward and punishment. B. T. Roberts, who was long general superintendent of the body, having been reelected several times, was an alumnus of Wesleyan University, a good writer, and in private intercourse a man of both commanding and persuasive ability. The Free Methodist Church has furnished many illustrations of heroic self-denial. Limited as are the resources of the body, it has sm^ll missions in Africa, India, San Domingo, and