USA > Maine > History of Methodism in Maine, 1793-1886 > Part 80
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TIIE SUNDAY SCHOOL AND LIBRARY.
exclusion, giving the assembly a semblance of intellectuality minus spirituality ; and making it a Sunday school only because holding Sunday sessions ; the rule of conduct being, not " search the Scrip- tures," but search the leaflets ?
Here, appropos, by Dr. Buekley, in a very recent number of the Christian Advotate : " THE UNHEALTHY CRY FOR ENTERTAINMENT. Many years ago, much too little was done for the young people in the Methodist Episcopal church. Now the desire to " entertain " young people has become morbid, and absorbs the greater part of the energy of the church. Comparatively little attention is paid to devising plans of genuine Christian work, apart from social entertainment.
The cry so often heard : We must get up an entertainment for the young people, they must have a chance to work for the church,-is a somewhat incoherent and contradictory ery. Get up an entertainment for the young people that they may have a chance to work for the church !
While an exclusive devotion to the popular sort of church work does not feed the souls of such young people as are converted, and they languish and starve under them, it prevents those who have been religiously impressed from taking any advance steps, and causes multitudes to affiliate with the church and congregation who never become genuine workers for Christ."
Let it not be faneied that this is the utterance of a eroaker, who forgets that he was onee a boy, or of one who proposes a yoke upon natural spirits, which would transform youth into an unnatural imita- tion of the gravity of age. It is rather a warning cry, suggested by the perception of undue absorption of the youth of the church in eer- tain things, and the eonsequent negleet of everything which goes to make the bone and sinew of a vigorous and fruit-bearing christian.
The writer was in almost at the beginning, and has had to do with the timely conceived, and early well eondueted institution ; and henee he does not write without the record. He knows whereof he affirms, when he says that, in 1815, boys could not swear so roundly, or so squarely, as in 1885, who now manfully, as they estimate, compete for the advanee rank of shame.
The lamentable results, even baek of the line of puberty, of fietitious education, are already becoming sufficiently alarming to arouse parents and churches every where, not only to thought, but to prompt, decisive, and united action.
This is a matter of importance, not half appreciated in its results
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EDUCATION AND DISTINGUISHING TITLES.
"or magnitude ; nor will it be, judging from the almost universally pre- vailing indifference to the clouds, seen in their gathering by those who are willing to see, till too late to apply the only remedy, by parents or. the church. And now, to conclude this, perhaps, unwelcome paper, the writer feels in duty bound to say, it has become painfully evident. that there must come either revolution of Sunday school literature, and change of front, or mental demoralization of coming generations. .
EDUCATION AND DISTINGUISHING TITLES.
It is the nature of the yankee to guess and to criticise ; to the latter . of which inborn traits the writer confesses to have been to the . "manor born." His present criticism shall be of the ministry and laity, relative to the foundation upon which the church has built so . wisely, and with so much success.
The question to be first mooted is of the possibility of making a ministerial hobby of promiscuous, unlimited, and aimless education, at the risk of drawing a line too distinctive between the educated minority and the so classed uneducated majority of ministers, by labeling the former with title. The more sharply the line is drawn the more the ambituous commoner will aspire to aristocratic rank, especially in a republic. The criticism is not, de facto, of education ;. but of making it, or its assumed representative title, a sine qua non,. that provokes the ambition of some to procure literary title, minus. qualification, which title is assumed to constitute eligibility to the. pastorate of a certain rank of churches.
The unchristlike, as well as unwesleylike craving; the indiscrim -- inate and unmeaning affix of literary or honorary titles has not yet- struck the East Maine Conference to mar its harmony, to adulterate. or tone down it doctrines, to blunt materially its weapons, or to corrupt its purity or Gospel simplicity.
As a class, its ministers aim less to please and more to build up, to . strengthen, and by all means to profit. Any, who become badly troubled with symptoms, start on a tour of inspection and trial for an adapted soil.
Aristocracy, which is really the drift of otherwise unmeaning titles,. is an ailment native to humanity. It has developed alike, though modified in form, in the social circle, and in the municipality, whether it be parish, town, city, state or nation. No where is it so utterly out of place as among men claiming to be, pro forma, delegated represen- tatives of Him, who, wearing a crown of thorns, " bowed his head
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EDUCATION AND DISTINGUISHING TITLES.
"and gave up the Ghost," and, who, though he was rich, yet for our "' sakes he became poor."
The disturbing element was probably ingrained by the fall, and made part of the curse. Even the chosen twelve were not exceptions. In Mark's Gospel, chapter 10, may be found an account of the out- cropping of this same aristocratic self secking. "James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came unto him, saying, Master, we would that thou shouldst do for us whatsoever we shall desire. And he said unto them, what would ye that I should do for you? They said unto him, grant unto us that we may sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on thy left hand, in thy glory. But Jesus said unto them, ye know not what ye ask." "And when the ten heard it, they began to be much .displeased with James and John." Matthew, chapter 20, "And when the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two brethren." "Jesus said, Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant ; even as the Son of Man came not to be minis- tered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many."
Passing by the horrors of aristocratic domination among the heathen, and in the Roman church, and, though in a milder form, among the Puritans in persecuting the Baptists into exile, and putting all practicable barriers in the way of actual and possible incoming denominations ; of whose conduct history tells us, " No where did the spirit of Puritanism, in its evil as well as in its good, more thoroughly ·express itself than in Massachusetts, of which Maine was then a ·district, and Rhode Island ; nor have its traces wholly disappeared even yet ;" otherwise than which fault of practising the persecution themselves had suffered, the Puritans were a fair specimen of "nature's noblemen and women." And such was the bigotry, and exclusive temper of the age in which they crossed the ocean to the North American wilderness, that we scarcely find it in our hearts to censurc conduct, which, in the eve of the nineteenth century, has no redeem- ing trait. Passing by all this, and leaving in their gloom the wrongs of greater ignorance of darker ages, the responsibilities of an age of ever accelerating light are to be considered ; and in our own fold we have not far to go to find the same disturber, call it aristocracy or what else you may please, of the peace, harmony, and joint working to the appropriate identical end. "Tis true, the disturber may have put off horns, and put on soft gloves, with a deceptive garb and a better show of manners. There is no need to search with. lighted candle to find the same genus ; differing only in species from the
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EDUCATION AND DISTINGUISHING TITLES.
repulsive processes of darker ages and grosser races; by insidious advances, stealthily creeping into the Methodist Episcopal church ; especially into some of the older, and emphatically into New England conferences.
The church has scriptural authority for the titles, Bishop, Elder, Deacon, but no more for Doctor of Divinity, to distinguish above, or among fellows, or peers, than for Pope or Cardinal.
And here, in illustration of the intent and adaptation of Methodism as it was, and as it should be, the following quotation from an article by Professor Austin Phelps, in a recent number of the Congregation- alist, title, "The debt of religion and theology to Methodism," cannot be out of place or ill-timed. "The Methodist Episcopal church is a striking illustration of the principle that every great christian sect is built on a necessity. It comes into being because it must come.
The rise of Methodism was the birth of a spiritual reform of which all the christian denominations in Great Britain and America were in desperate need. The established churches of England and Scotland were dying of spiritual andmia. Dr. Blair at Edinburgh, and Bishop Porteous, at London, were droning moral platitudes in the pulpit, while the masses of the people, especially in England, never heard of them, or of the gospel they professed to preach. Never before nor since has the phenomenon been so signally developed of christianity gasping in the struggle to live on the religion of nature. The religion of the realm was christianity without Christ. All that was peculiar to it, as a way of salvation, was practically ignored. Among the ruling classes religious convictions had no intensity, and religious life no reality. Bishop Butler gave it as a reason for publishing the Analogy, that "it has come to be taken for granted that christianity is no longer a subject of inquiry, but is now discovered to be ficticious."
As for the English Court, Bishop Stevens has told the whole story in saying, "it was a royal brothel". . Dr. Samuel Johnson was contemporary with John Wesley. He told his friend Boswell, "I can remember the time when it was common for English gentlemen to go. to bed drunk every night in the week, and they were thought none the worse for it." Such was England when Methodism came as an, angel of rebuke.
The chief power in saving to the future the old church of Cranmer. and Ridley was the Methodist revival. It broke upon the kingdom in tongues of flame. Then was the golden age of field-preaching. In the venerable cathedrals of England, the magnates of the church, on
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EDUCATION AND DISTINGUISHING TITLES.
the Lord's Day preached to a dozen hearers, sometimes to less, occasionally to no nobody but the sexton and the choir. An audience of two hundred was a crowd. The Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin, once preached to the sexton alone. His sermon, all told, as my memory recalls the story, was : "Be a good man, John, and a Tory."
At the same time Wesley and Whitefield were haranguing ten and twenty thousand at a time in the open air. The wisdom of the city fathers of Boston had not then illumined the world.
The movement began, as religious awakenings usually do, among the lower orders. But its refluent waves . soon rolled up over the heights of cultivated society. Methodism in those days had its baptism: (not of "Doctor of Divinity," but) of fire. It met the usual fate of religious reformations in being detested and maligned. The church of England could no more withstand it than she could have withstood the day of judgment. To her it was the day of judgment, but for the "remnant which was left" within her pale, which recognized the voice of a prophet, English christianity has never lost the elements of spiritual life which Methodism, by direct reproof, and by the power of contrast, then put into it."
The degree, if such it may be called, with the title appended, by which to attract attention to the party signified, as a boy might dip the tail of his kite in scarlet dye, is of no more importance than the " vermi- form appendix" attached to the human stomach, which affix, the anatomist has failed to find what it is there for. As it fails to add to the bigness of the big man, so the almost cabalistic initials not only fail to make the little man, on whom the degree is conferred, to feed his vanity, bigger, but really lessen his dimensions, because of the deformity.
The offensiveness of the decoration consists not so much in its wearing as in the ostentatious use made of it.
The titled disciple, and embassador of a crucified sovereign and redeemer, whose crown was of thorns, should beware lest a misappre- hended worldly ambition lead to a strike for an unrestricted pastorate for thic few, or, because of sectional assumptions and demands, the large majority be driven to strike for equal rights and privileges, as peers ; and the denominational peculiarity of limited itinerancy, on which the success of the denomination has been largely predicated, be wiped out.
And now by way of propitiation, the writer has only to say, that in this article, he is pleading the cause of Methodism as he found it
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TIME LIMIT OF APPOINTMENT OF ITINERANTS.
sixty years ago, then in its original simplicity, purity and power, as well as in its predominating spirituality, and single-minded pastorate, to which qualities its wonderful success and world-wide spread must mainly be ascribed.
Indeed may it not be assumed that those who compose the innovat- ing element must admit that the church as it was, and as it is, has made them what they are, and not they the church what it is?
TIME LIMIT OF APPOINTMENT OF ITINERANTS.
A very large majority of Methodist itinerants, aud as large a majority of the church membership, so far as the editor is informed, of the East Maine Conference, are absolutely content with the "time limit" as it is, assuming that an economy by which such wonderful results have been wrought is good enough, and should be let alone, instead of being perpetually tampered with by, and in the interest of the few ; who, ambitious of fame, and stimulated by partial success, granted by way of accommodation and compromise, to double their diligence in the use of the advance made, as a lever to start another boom every quadrennium ; but to assure success, qualifying their claim apologetically by assenting to indefinite extension, limited to special cases. They are willing to have it understood that they will not object to the making themselves the exceptions, while " the other fellows" shall good-naturedly itinerate around them, doing their assigned work in the same order by which the church, thoughi last to enter the field, has, in its wide-spread and numerical growth, taken the lead.
One thing however, it may be well for the few exclusive progressionists to consider, that in this republie the large majority of a voluntary organization will demand equal rights and privileges.
Already some of the most impatient of delay to accommodate, fearing ultimate defeat, have essayed to embark on a voyage of discovery, in search of a supposed better adapted parish outside the early chosen fold ; but these, failing to find the paradise sought, others, having like symptoms, availing of the experience of those who have pioneered, are wary enough to leave an anchor cast in the old harbor, by the aid of which, and a hawser attached, they inay warp back to the former moorings, wiser and better men and ministers, it is to be hoped, for their experience.
Of the reported failures of experimentists on the "go as you please" track, in pursuit of the El dorado where all winds blow and
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PULPIT SUPPLY COMMITTEE AND THEIR WORK.
all waters flow in the right direction, the following items may suffice for the encouragement, or otherwise, of those who may be taken the same way.
Recently, on occasion of the installation of a Methodist pastor over a Congregational church in Boston, the candidate told the Council, "that he had no change to make in theology, no objection to the discipline or polity of the Methodist Episcopal church, except on the one point of the three years' limit of the pastorate.
" His predecessor in the charge he now assumes was there less than three years, and the pastor who preceded him, less than one year, while the new minister leaves a Methodist church over which he has been pastor for three and a half years."
The following, from Wisconsin, is a fair show of the result of withdrawal from the Methodist Episcopal Church and going to the Presbyterian ministry, because of three years' limitation. The changeling said he had let others seleet his appointments for him for twenty-seven years, and now he thought he was capable of choosing for himself. "It really seemed so. His last appointment was second to none in the Conference, and he acquitted himself well. But, after unsuccessful candidating for some months, he became thoroughly convinced that this choosing was not all on one side, and he returned to the church that had made him all he was, a wiser man and a better Methodist."
The New York Tribune has said, "We talk," says a Baptist. layman of New England, " of the Methodist plan, but we have gone ahead of the Methodists in this particular. The average New England pastorate among the Baptists does not last more than two or three years. Too often, before a pastor has time to get settled down and ready for work, some one heads a combination against him, and the church is torn and lacerated. Almost every change of this kind leaves a sear. Families are disaffected ; they leave when the pastor leaves."
In concluding this article, the editor has only to say that he has not taken one step aside to find the items quoted. They have all, and more of the like, come in the course of his ordinary reading.
THE PULPIT SUPPLY COMMITTEE, AND THEIR WORK.
One more eritieism, and the editor intends to call duty done in this line of obligation, in defense and maintenance of Methodism as he found it, and as it found him.
He proposes now to write of a worm, if not the worm at the root of
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PULPIT SUPPLY COMMITTEE AND THEIR WORK.
the tree whose branches have come to be so wide spread, and whose sap is slaking the spiritual thirst of the nations. It is a borer, the more attentively and severely to be watched and looked after, because of the apparent remoteness of its bearing upou the threatening finality, the repeal, or absolute neutralization of the ecclesiastical feature upon which such wonderful growth, in so short a time, must be largely predicated.
The dangerous agitator, whether self constituted or pro forma, is essentially the same insidiously working worm, usually assuming the form and atitude of "the Pulpit Supply Committee," being an eccentric little wheel, aiming so to intercog with the main wheel, that the smaller shall virtually be the greater.
The work of this wheel within a wheel, though undefined and unre- stricted, may be understood, irrespective of all other conditions and relations, demands or necessities, to be to make sure the appointment of the minister in the choice of said committee.
1st. By stipulating with the man wanted, whether he be of the home Conference, or of another, from which he is to come by special transfer.
2d. By a course of hypothetical reasoning, not with the Presiding Elder, for whom the committee care little now, unless he be the committee's man, but with the Bishop presiding, whose ear they will reach direct.
3d. The further special business of said committee, we may suppose to be to prepare the way for the future, by securing the election to the next ensuing General Conference of accommodating delegates.
4th. To appeal to said Conference, caring as little now for Bishops as for Presiding Elders before. The appeal is now to be to the Conference direct, for special legislation, whereby to secure indefinite extension of time limit appointment in special cases, theirs, of course, being of the special order.
From all which sinister perversions, for the sake of a spiritual religion, " good Lord deliver us !"
Verily this " Pulpit Supply Committee" should be a sought for political caucus and canvassing committee. May it not be that is the school where they learned their tactics, and where they should practice ?
The sum of this matter of self seeking is, no lighted candle will be requisite to the conclusion that the Episcopacy is to become a dead letter, which, with the Presiding Eldership, being an expensive fifth
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TIIE WOMAN'S F. M. SOCIETY.
wheel, the sooner repealed the better ; which done, the denomination, like shorn Sampson, will go back to the weakness whence it has, though last in the raee, out run all the denominations, building upon the foundation which is now to be ruthlessly dynamited by a few ambitious aspirants to rank and place.
In eonelusion of the two preceding items, let the wise, in their own esteem above what the fathers, more devoted to God and less to self, have written, which has wrought so well to the end sought, who, apparently regarding nothing complete till they have mended it, beware lest they mar more than they mend. Rather let them accept and profit by what Washington C. DePauw, one of God's noble- men, a justly distinguished layman, said in the Eeumenieal Conference, the subject under discussion being the evangelieal ageneies of Methodism. After putting the question, " How are we to come baek to the old land-marks," he says, " we must come baek by conseerating ourselves and our homes, our lives, our poeket-books, our business, everything we have, to Christ. Take the Lord Jesus Christ in as senior partner in all our business ; never write a letter, never make an entry in our ledger, or say or do anything we would not be willing to say, or do, or write in the presence of the Master. Brethren, I think we have fallen in this." And then, taking leave of the argu- mentative form of speech, he said, "Glory be to Jesus Christ, the blood hath cleansed ; the blood of Jesus Christ ean eleanse from all sin, and it doth eleanse ; and I want to repeat it again in this temple where John Wesley preached, and where such saered, hallowed memories surround us, that the power of Wesleyanism and of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and of all the branches of Methodism, in my judgment, largely depends on our reconstrueting and giving ourselves anew to Christ."
THE " WOMAN'S FOREIGN MISSIONARY SOCIETY." BY MISS B. V. JEWELL.
The "Conference and Camp-meeting Auxiliary " was organized August 29, 1873, at Northport eamp-ground, . when Mrs. J. O. Knowles was chosen President, Mrs. W. T. Jewell, Secretary, Mrs. W. H. Crawford, Treasurer, Mrs. H. Ruggles, Mrs. S. H. Beale, Mrs. E. A. Helmershausen, Vice Presidents, Mrs. C. F. Allen, Corresponding Secretary.
Eleven joined the society, and it continued to increase in member- ship till it numbered forty members, when the question was raised whether the society was working in harmony with the Constitution
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PASTORAL DECLINE.
and By-laws of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, whereupon it was discontinued.
The Conference anniversary collections, by the "Conference and Camp-meeting Auxiliary," some years amounting to thirty dollars, were forwarded to the treasurer of the New England Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, in Boston. All monies raised in our Conference for the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society also go to the treasurer of the same branch.
Since the discontinuance of that auxiliary, the Conference Secretary and the District Secretaries have had the work of the society in charge.
The Conference minutes show no report of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society prior to the discontinuance, but since that date they show $3,000 raised, which probably does not include the sum raised by the Conference Auxiliary, (which is found only in the "Heathen Woman's Friend ;") the Conference report, including only receipts from circuits and stations. Instance, the Conference minutes show a credit of $293, whereas the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society shows $375.92 for the year 1885,
There are, on Bucksport district, four auxiliaries, Rockland district two, and Bangor district five. The first auxiliary of the East Maine Conference was organized in Bangor, March 10, 1872.
PASTORAL DECLINE.
Upon a thoughtful retrospect of two generations there occurs to mind another comparison between the old and the new, which com- parison the writer hesitates to institute, because so unfavorable, as he looks at it, to the new order of things ; but to which he is conscious of being moved by an unabated and unabating interest in the church of his early choice.
There is in this maturing age more attention and time given to pulpit preparation, and less to pastoral work ; whereas, inferring from a census taken anywhere, not more than one eighth of the average population attend Sabbath service.
Why is it thus, and where is the remedy ? is a question of too much importance to be lightly treated. In all humility the writer submits, may not one reason be that an excess of intellectuality put into the sermon, at the expense of pastoral labor, detracts from spirituality, or keenness of the weapon used? The word preached fails to reach the masses because they are habitually anywhere and everywhere, but where they should be on the Sabbath ; as sheep wandering, because no one cares
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