THE VITAL FORCES OF METHODISM.

BY REV. CYRUS D. FOSS.

THE HE human mind intuitively assumes that every phenomenon is the result of some cause, and, moreover, that there must exist a due proportion between the efficiency of the cause and the vastness of the result. In this fairest land beneath the sun there is exhibited a most remarkable phenomenon-a spectacle to angels and to men-upon which, during the past year, the eyes of the Christian world have been admiringly turned: a Church which dates back only one hundred years, and yet which stands foremost among all the Churches on the continent, for the number of its communicants and adherents, for the value of its Church property, and for its power among the masses of the people.

To the inquiry, Whence such successes? every thoughtful mind, as well as every devout heart, must exclaim, "What hath God wrought!" The great Head of the Church is the ultimate cause of these vast results. But we do well to search for the proximate causes; for those nearer links of influence which men attach to the golden chain of God's mercy; or, at least, if God welds them, which godly men seize hold upon and bring near to their lost fellows.

Let us inquire after the vital forces of Methodism-forces, not force; for this sublime result in which millions tremblingly rejoice can not be ascribed to any single agency; nor is there among the agencies which produce it any one which stands out in isolated prominence above all the rest. The vital forces of this great religions movement are to be sought in,

1. Its doctrinal system.

2. Its experience.

3. Its ecclesiastical peculiarities.

The gist of all is this: The power of Meth

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odism has always been, that it has held to the belief, the experience, and the promulgation of a free and full salvation. It is of course impossible to compress into one brief sentence all those incidental statements necessary to a full explanation of this proposition; but this is the central truth, the grand secret of the Church's power.

1. Methodism has always tenaciously held to all those fundamental doctrines in which all evangelical Churches agree: the unity of God, the deity of Christ, justification by faith, etc. But it has also held distinguishing doctrines. It alone of all the great denominations on this continent has a distinctively American theology. The absolute freedom of the will; the universality of the atonement, in the broadest and deepest sense of that word; the witness of the Spirit, not as the special gift of God to a few favored disciples, but as the common privilege of all; the admissibility of grace; perfect purity and perfect love these, in addition to those other truths already referred to as held by us in common with other sects-these are the inspiring truths with which Methodism has all along been plying the dull ear of the world. It may be said these doctrines were not new. admit it, and glory in it. Novelty in theology is proof positive of heresy. If an angel from heaven were to preach any new Gospel, we would call him. accursed, and would be able to back our anathema by apostolic authority. Methodism was a return to "the old paths." None of its doctrines were new, but several of them had been long buried beneath the rubbish of error, or wired together into grinning skeletons, and put on exhibition as "bodies of divinity." It was the peculiar glory of Methodism to exhume these buried truths from the dust of ages, to put flesh on these bones and life into them. It went every-where crying to men, You are lost; you are redeemed; you have

We

the gracious ability to turn to God now, and this is your imperative duty; if you turn, you shall be pardoned and renewed; the Holy Ghost will witness this to your heart. To struggling Christians, forever moaning, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" it said, This fierce combat with inbred sin may cease, for Jesus' blood is able to cleanse you from every spot, and to preserve you blameless, soul, body, and spirit, unto the day of his appearing.

It is not our purpose now to vindicate these doctrines against the objections which have been made to them. We simply assert that they have been a power. They have won to our communion myriads of heavy-laden sinners, and not a few doubting disciples. They compose a doctrinal system which may fairly be reckoned among the vital forces of the Church which holds it. They are in their nature more efficient than their opposites. They lay hold upon the hearts and consciences of men with a more powerful gripe. Let us see. Methodism has gone to every man with the assurance that he is just as certainly included in the provisions of grace as in the offer of mercy; that the fact of his possessing human nature is the sure warrant for his belief that Christ died for him, that the impartial Deity has not elected his neighbor to eternal life and passed him by. It has proclaimed that any state of grace attainable on earth may be lost and never regained, so that the certain knowledge of present acceptance furnishes no assurance of final salvation. It has always inscribed on its banners, "Holiness unto the Lord," and has insisted that though no man can have a perfect head, any man may have a "perfect heart." Are not these teachings in their very nature better calculated than their opposites to awaken sinners and encourage Christians? Have they not greatly helped to earn for Methodism the honorable appellation of a "revival Church?"

Why was it that the preaching of the pioneers sent out by Wesley and Asbury almost every-where awaked the dead? It was because their belief concerning the freedom of the will and gracious ability necessitated the conviction of the complete practicability of a present salvation. None asserted more strongly than they the imperative need of grace, but they also insisted that grace sufficient for the first step toward the cross is constantly bestowed, and devolved upon their hearers the instant duty of turning to God.

2. But no man can understand early Methodism simply by the study of its theology. Its experience impressed men even more than its

doctrines. It was not so much a creed as a life. And after all this is the great thing. As acute an observer of human nature as Channing said, "Men's characters are determined not by the opinions which they profess, but by those on which their thoughts habitually fasten." Such were the doctrines which we have considered, not formulas but forces, not useless lumber in the brain, but transforming energies in the heart. Salvation now, salvation consciously experienced and witnessed to the heart by the Holy Ghost, salvation for all men, salvation from all sin-these were the truths on which the thoughts of the early Methodists "habitually fastened"—these the doctrines which glowed in their experience.

Those who preached them were not manchosen ministers, trained from boyhood for a profession, coldly unfolding doctrines and discoursing about virtue; from the depths of renewed hearts they proclaimed what God had done for them. They cried with David, "Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul;" "He brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock." They remembered the Pauline method, "At midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven, . . . and I heard a voice, . . . whereupon, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision." A true, deep, thankful, outbursting experience glowed in their hearts, trembled in their hymns, fired their exhortations, distilled like dew, or poured like showers, or rolled like thunder from their sermons. They could say, "The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead; and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them and rose again;" and this indwelling love of Jesus burned like a fire in their bones, and drove them, as it did Paul, restlessly to and fro, to tell a dead world what God had done for them, and what he stood waiting to do for all men.

Just such an experience was the most urgent need of the English Church and nation at the epoch when Methodism began its sublime career. The whole land was in a state of fearful moral declension. Isaac Taylor called it “heathenism, or a state hardly to be distinguished from it." Leighton spoke of the Church as "a fair carcass without a spirit." The difference between professors of religion and non-professors was not in morals, nor in experience, but in forms and ceremonies-a condition of things peculiarly abominable in the sight of God.

what was wanted was a trumpet voice to call the slumbering Church and the dying world to God's forgotten requirements of the new birth and a triumphant experience.

To meet this specific want God raised up John Wesley. His providential training was the mold in which Methodism was cast. His fifteen years' legal struggle, and his instantaneous and conscious adoption into the family of God have molded the creed and the experience of millions. What would he have been more than many other men if he had not, after his long, hard service of God, become consciously a son of God? What would Methodism have been but for the fact that his heart was "strangely warmed?" There never was a more self-denying, faithful missionary than he had been in Georgia; yet he accomplished nothing there to make his name memorable. But after this new experience, into which God led him through the teachings of the Moravians, whenever he spoke fire seemed to stream forth from his calm lips. How could the only preaching possible to him there fail to come to the spiritually dead like an awakening blast from the trumpet of God? He could not call men to morality as the great end; nor to self-denial, penitence, beneficence, and the most pains-taking efforts to obey God. Had he not been foremost in all these things up to the age of thirty-five?

His associates and helpers caught his spirit and followed his example. The staple of all their sermons was a free salvation for all men now-a salvation which they themselves had but recently experienced, and which glowed like fire in their hearts and on their lips. Conceive of a community deeply sunk in irreligion and sin; most of the people without any pretension to the form of godliness; a few, from the force of habit, waiting on the services of a perfunctory ministry of the Establishment, who, on Sunday, would drone over a dull ethical homily, or a dry disquisition perhaps on the difference between homoousianism and homoiousianism, and then would play cards and attend horseraces during the week. Now see that plain man riding into the town, with a small pair of saddle-bags behind him, containing his entire wardrobe and library. He takes his stand by the roadside and begins to sing,

"How can a sinner know

His sins on earth forgiven?" etc. The people gather round him, wondering if he is not an escaped lunatic. He speaks. In one brief hour he unfolds to his amazed, startled, terrified, melted auditory, the tremendous,

forgotten realities of sin, death, hell, the new birth, and eternal glory. He speaks of all these things as downright realities. Hell is not to him the shadowy conception of a remote and barely possible inconvenience, but a burning pit, on whose crumbling edge the feet of his hearers are heedlessly treading; and the salvation he offers is as quick and complete as the exigency is fearful. How do you explain this? Ah, "the pains of hell" had got hold upon the man himself; God had delivered him and put a new song into his mouth.

Let not that great Church which is now striking the key-note of a new century forget that the power of Methodism has always been the experience of Methodism. All along its shining track of one hundred and twenty-seven years Methodism has been singing its inspiring, twofold anthem of bliss and longing:

"Jesus all the day long

Is my joy and my song;

O that all his salvation might see!"

"The joy of the Lord" has been its "strength." 3. It was evidently a question of immense importance to this infant Church, by what methods these doctrines and this experience should be propagated. For the answer we must look to the ecclesiastical peculiarities of Methodism. The scope of this article, so far from requiring a full discussion of all these peculiarities, will permit only a rapid glance at the chief among them.

One grand fact concerning these peculiarities, and also with regard to the entire religious system which they have done so much to make successful, ought to be prominently stated and perpetually remembered-it is this: Methodism was a child of Providence. Its striking peculiarities were providential peculiarities, every one of them. It was not a system carefully thought out and skillfully arranged by any man or combination of men. John Wesley never devised Methodism. He simply went forth, under the pressure of one of those mighty motives which make men heroes, to preach repentance and holiness. He had no thought of founding a Church, and he had actually accom-, plished the work before he knew it. The whole philosophy of Methodism is contained in the final sentence of Mr. Wesley's answer to the question, "What was the use of Methodism?" and is most judiciously inserted in our book of Dis cipline, "God thrust us out to raise a holy peuple." This analysis is profoundly wise. It is not more modest than truthful. We must not suffer our attention to be so monopolized by the well-chosen and admirably-adapted instru