RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Polity, Ecclesiastical
the Brethren (qq.v.). The Congregational element (in certain features of local self-government) discoverable in the churches mentioned is relatively inconspicuous. Recent developments in these communions have been largely in the direction of enlarging the sphere of popular government. By the last part of the nineteenth century all had come to include laymen in the higher governing assemblies. The same kind of development has been illustrated in non-episcopal Methodism, as, for instance, among the English Wesleyans (see Methodists, I., 1, §§ 6, 8). In the Methodist Protestant Church lay delegation has been a feature from the start (see Methodists, IV., 3).
Within the principal Methodist churches the list of assemblies includes quarterly, annual, and general conferences. Between the first 2. Resultant and the second the district conference Forms of is often interposed. Where existing Govern- it assumes various functions which ment. otherwise would fall to the quarterly conferences. The latter are made up of the officials of the individual church — its resident ministers, local preachers, trustees, stewards, class leaders, Sunday-school superintendent, etc. The district conference consists of ministerial and lay delegates. The annual conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church is (1910) a ministerial body; that of the Methodist Episcopal Church South includes, besides the ministers, four laymen from each presiding elder's district. The general conferences of both churches are made up of ministers and laymen in equal numbers. Among the United Brethren in Christ (q.v.) laymen are accorded a place in all the governing assemblies. The general conference is the supreme tribunal in the entire group of communions under consideration. Within certain constitutional limitations it exercises full legislative and judicial authority. A special feature in the constitution of the Methodist Episcopal Church South is the provision that the board of bishops may challenge the constitutionality of a rule or regulation passed by the general conference, and hold it suspended until it has been approved in the use of the regular method for amending a " restrictive rule " (that is, one of the cardinal limitations imposed by the constitution) . As a Presbyterian element finds illustration in the governing assemblies of the Methodist economy, so an Episcopalian element is exemplified in its ministerial ranks. In that economy deacon and elder (or presbyter) are related much as they are in the Church of England and in the Protestant Episcopal Church (q.v.). Methodist episcopacy, on the other hand, has a special character as being non-diocesan. It is also free from the aristocratic assumptions often connected with the episcopal form of organization. Methodist bishops are simply the foremost rank of executives in their respective communions. In the Book of Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church a note prefixed to the form of episcopal consecration implies that bishops represent a distinc^office rather than a distinct order. It remains true^rtevertheless, that in the larger Methodist bodies very weighty official (executive, not legislative) responsibilities are devolved upon the bish-
ops. The legal prerogative is with them to station all the ministers (outside the limited circle of general conference appointees), though the advice of the presiding elders and the preferences of the individual churches are practically of great moment. Methodist communions generally which have an episcopal organization, as also the United Brethren in Christ and the Evangelical Association (qq.v.), make use of a kind of subepiscopate embodied in presiding elders or district superintendents, who are placed over divisions of the territory of the annual conferences. Among the Unity of the Brethren the Presbyterian feature is prominent, the bishops, aside from the function of ordaining, having ex officio no administrative significance, and coming in practise to possess such significance only as being customarily elected to the governing boards and conferences.
Connection with the State has been foreign to Methodist history, and the same is true of the doctrine of the divine right of a specific form of ecclesiastical polity. On this theme Methodists stand with Lutherans, and only insist that in its spirit ecclesiastical administration is obligated to be conformable to the demands of the New-Testament conception of Christian citizenship.
IX. Conclusion: In view of the enthronement of an extreme dogma as respects ecclesiastical monarchy in the Roman Catholic Church, and the propagation of a radical type of sacerdotalism through a considerable section of the Church of England, it can not be said that recent movements in the field of church polity have been uniformly in a single direction. There has been an undeniable advance in the line of the most pronounced Highchurch assumptions. But some rather significant tokens of reaction are already apparent. The universal movement toward constitutional rule in the secular sphere tends to make men restive under the demands of a pretentious sacerdotalism. In the ecclesiastical sphere generally, outside of the specified domains — not to mention the comparatively stationary Orthodox Eastern Church — the development in recent times has been almost uniformly in favor of popular government. Whether it has been in the interest of the specifically democratic form of ecclesiastical polity, with its emphasis on the autonomy of the local church, is a question which is likely to elicit different answers. Probably the balance is not on that side, but rather on the side of some form of representative government, though in constructing this form it may not be out of place to give a larger scope to the proper Congregational element than is done ordinarily in Presbyterian communions or in those which combine Presbyterian with Episcopalian characteristics.
On a couple of points the development has been quite pronounced. The doctrine of divine right, in anything like a stringent form, has been consigned to a diminishing constituency. A close union of Church and State, or one which makes either essentially a dependency of the other, has become through a widening circle a matter of distinct opposition. Henry C. Sheldon.
Bibliography: Richard Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, London, 1594-1662, best ed. by J. Keble, 3d ed., 3 vols.,
Pollock Polycarp