Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/101

1868.] souls—or more than one-fifth of the entire population of the United States. Adding Canada, it would be still greater. The average taxable property of each person in the city of New York is over $800. Apply this to the Methodist Church, and we have—population, 8,000,000; wealth, $6,400,000,000.

This vast power is organized, and thus is made ten times as potent for good, or for evil, as if it remained individualized. Herein is the power of the Methodist Church, and thus we are led to look to it with anxiety and interest.

In the year 1866 the Methodist Church celebrated its hundredth birthday in America, so that it is one of the youngest of all the forms which religious sentiment or belief has taken. It has grown in this hundred years to be the largest of all our churches. Besides its churches and parsonages, it has now twenty-five colleges and theological schools, with 158 instructors, 5,345 students, and property $3,055,000. It has also 77 academies, with 556 instructors, and 17,761 students. Its "Book Concern" has a capital of $837,000, 500 editors, agents, clerks, and workmen. It sold in 1867, 3,984,000 volumes; it prints over two thousand different books; fourteen periodicals, which circulate over one million copies per month; and it issues tracts (the last four years) to the enormous number of 34,000,000. It has a wide-spread and comprehensive Sunday School Union, which (1867) comprised 15,341 schools, 175,000 instructors, and over 2,800,000 books in its libraries, and it issues monthly over 300,000 numbers of its periodicals.

I am obliged, in the absence of reliable statistics, to confine myself to the reports of the church North for the year 1867. It appears from these that there were in this great missionary field 8,004 travelling preachers, and 9,469 local preachers; together, 17,473. An immense army, whose numbers are swelled by exhorters and class-leaders, who will be referred to hereafter. Over these all are nine bishops—overseers simply—who have no church duties and no power of rule. Notwithstanding that this organization aims to cover this continent, and has now to bring into its fold some thirty millions of souls, it has the amazing audacity—as it seems to us who are not in it—to attempt to evangelize the whole world; it has missions in Liberia, in China, in India, in Bulgaria, in Turkey, in Germany, in Scandinavia, in Switzerland, in South America, in Mexico—and it need surprise no one if some fervent soul should convert the very Pope of Rome in the doors of St. Peter's itself. Living churches and live men are always aggressive, and this Methodist Church is not the least so of all.

Money is the sinews of war; it is essential, also, to the business of a church. The total amount which goes to carry forward the purposes of this vast organization it is impossible to ascertain; because there is no central treasury. Each local church or society raises its own funds for the support of its own preacher, etc., etc. But in a general way I find the following reported in the Minutes of 1867:

Conference Claimants ...... $118,618

Missionary Society ....... 584,725

Church Extension ....... 88,600

Tract Society ...--... 20,133

American Bible Society ...... 100,070

Sunday School Union ...•-.. 21,165

933,308