cational foundations in all the higher institutions of learning for the Freedmen. More should be done than to pay current expenditures for sustaining these colleges. Every one of them should be well endowed. Thus will our benevolence be most wisely directed, and most permanent in its fruits. There is no doubt in my mind that the United States Government should establish common schools for the Freedmen, and endow them with a sufficient foundation. It has done this for the whites by setting apart public lands for common schools in all the States; but when this was done the Freedmen were not provided for. They are not yet. The school funds of several of the late slave States have been greatly depreciated, if not entirely lost, by the war. Where this has not been the case, yet color caste, and poverty combined, render the education of the Freedmen doubtful and imperfect. If it was right to emancipate the slaves, it is right to enable them to maintain their freedom. This cannot be done without education. Enfranchised, the safety of our institutions demands that they be educated.

ART. VI.—METHODISM IN THE CITIES OF THE UNITED STATES.

CITIES are centers of civilization. A great nation cannot exist without them. Jerusalem was the seat of the Jewish kingdom. The magnificence and power of Egypt centered in Memphis and Thebes. Nineveh was the glory of the Assyrian, and Babylon of the Chaldean empire. Athens was Greece, and the city of the Tiber was Rome. Modern cities are not less potent. Their power is bold, subtle, multiform, far-reaching. London is England's heart, and its throbs are felt by the extremities of the United Kingdom. Paris is the light and pride of France. New York shapes the commercial and financial destinies of America. The burning of a part of Chicago sent a shudder through the land, and saddened the nations of a distant hemisphere. Every great city is the focus of so many influences that its extinction would cause wide-spread disaster and lamentation.

In the great city every form of human life exists. There poverty shivers, and ignorance grovels, and wealth builds its palaces. There science sheds its benignant influence, and art displays her beauty. There literature opens its refreshing fountains, and charity reaches her hand to the needy and weeps over the perishing. There pleasure invites to gay and gilded halls, and music pours enchanting strains. There poetry weaves divinest numbers, and eloquence sways admiring multitudes. There vice shows all its hideousness, and religion shines in its fairest loveliness.

Every aspiring movement is ambitious to become a part of the mighty force of the great city. This is equally true of enterprises that seek the welfare and those that aim at the injury of the race. Great cities are the Thermopyles of the world. They are the last fortresses of humanity. Vanquished there, truth will go down in final defeat. Victorious there, it will triumph over the earth. Therefore, he who marshals hosts to the conflict, whether for or against the right, cannot ignore the city. Except the strongholds yield there can be no decisive conquest.

The Captain of our salvation early fixed his eye upon the city. When but twelve years of age he began to teach in Jerusalem. In the city and its suburbs he performed his public labors. The two most momentous events of Christianity-the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ—did not transpire in an obscure hamlet, but in the populous metropolis of Judea. When the risen Master sent forth his disciples to preach the Gospel to all the world, he caused them to begin the proclamation in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, too, amid the fiery tongues and rushing sounds of the Pentecost, the Church received the equipment for its warfare and won its first great victory. From the gates of the sacred city it marched with shoutings to the conquest of the nations.

The Church of the apostles was chiefly in cities. So markedly was this so that Renan was almost justified in saying, "This proselytism was confined to cities. The first Christian apostles did not preach in the country." Damascus, Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, Athens, Jerusalem, Ephesus, Rome, are conspicuous in the records of Christian propagandism in the apostolic age. In those great centers of life and thought the

Church lifted her banners, and thence advanced upon the surrounding regions.

Throughout its history the Church has devoted its best resources to the cities. It has given them its treasures. In them it has employed its highest skill, culture, and learning. There it has reared its grandest temples and gathered its greatest assemblies. There it has exercised its loftiest gifts of music and eloquence. There it has printed its Bibles and produced its literature. The great cities of Christendom are to-day towering bulwarks of the Christian faith. They are fountains of evangelic life whence roll the streams that gladden the moral deserts of the world and make them to blossom as the rose.

American Methodism began its career in a city. Without prestige, culture, numbers, wealth, or patronage, it boldly sounded its first trump in the commercial metropolis of the continent. It did not put its candle under a bushel, but on a candlestick. A city set upon a hill cannot be hid. Had Methodism, after a careful survey of the territory, selected New York as the scene of its initial movement in the New World, it would have earned a claim to high sagacity. But as the fortunate place of its beginning was not due to human design, but to providential guidance, the praise must all be ascribed to Him who leads his people like a flock.

Since the founding of Methodism in New York the American Republic was born. In the genial air of freedom the nation has grown from three to forty-three millions, and its giant arms have embraced the shores of the two great oceans. Cities have risen and flourished. Provincial towns have suddenly swelled into vast centers of population, commerce, and wealth. From twenty thousand inhabitants the city of New York has developed into metropolitan grandeur, with more than a million souls. From similar dimensions Philadelphia. has advanced to nearly equal magnitude. From nothing Brooklyn has risen to the third in population of American cities. On the lonely and wild prairie, washed by the waves of Lake Michigan, the daring hand of Yankee enterprise has built in half a life-time a city which is among the first in trade and splendor-pride of a continent-wonder of the world -Chicago.

Beginning in a city, American Methodism has advanced

into all the cities of the land. It has grown with the cities. Its vigor has been equal to the demands of their rapid and vast development. In them it has purchased sites, and built sanctuaries for the people at immense cost of money and skill. In them it preaches to hundreds of thousands of willing hearers. In them its Sunday-schools impart religious truth and moral instruction to an equal number of children and youth. It illumines with gospel radiance the mansions and garrets of our populous centers; visits the sick, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, makes the poor rich in faith, and the sorrowful joyful with the comfort of God. Nay, more. In nearly all the great cities of the United States Methodism has put its presses in motion, and in tracts, weekly papers, magazines, and books, it thence scatters its generous and quickening theology, its experience and its songs, employing in this work to-day a capital of a million and a half of dollars. Thus it nourishes the nation's intellect while stirring its mighty heart. Thus it has made great cities the magazines whence its hosts draw their ammunition.

Methodism had a hard struggle for recognition in New York, and other of the older cities. It met not only the hostility of the world, but the contemptuous aversion of the Churches. It, however, maintained the ground in New York, though alternating between victory and defeat, until 1790, when in eight weeks it won four hundred converts to Christ. In thirty-seven years after the first society was formed there were a thousand members in the city; and in fifty years the number was 2,572, nearly a third of whom were colored. Founded by a GermanIrish carpenter, and its ministrations chiefly confined to the poor and lowly, it was not until 1821 that the Methodist Church was able to compel the favorable notice of aristocratic New York. In that and the following year John Summerfield was stationed in the city, and his preaching awakened the wondering admiration of all classes. Summerfield, youthful, graceful, seraphic-with a voice whose tones were suggestive of the murmurs of angels' harps; an eye,that beamed with celestial light; a hand that swayed the crowd like a scepter from the skies; Summerfield-clad in the beauty of holiness, eloquent in every movement and utterance, master of the heart, whose audiences no church could hold, the gentlest, sweetest, most captivating pulpit orator America has seen; Summerfield

-more than half a century dead, but whose memory sheds a perfume through the Church that pulsates with a deathless power. Summerfield lifted the Methodist pulpit of New York before the eyes of all the people, and as many of every rank as could crowd around him sat with delight under the spell of his inspired eloquence.

The denomination was, however, jealous of any disposition of the cities to monopolize its best preachers. It showed this by enacting a law that no preacher should remain in any city more than four years at a time, and it is only about twenty years since it was abolished. The most powerful preachers of early Methodism, such as M'Kendree, George, Lee, Bascom, Fisk, Bigelow, Pitman, Olin, devoted their eloquence chiefly to the country. Yet there was wisdom in this method of the fathers. Society was forming. The foundations of a mighty republic were being laid. The expanding energies of the young nation needed to feel in every part the shaping hand of an evangelical, spiritual Church. A rich agricultural land, the greater part of the population was, and would continue to be, outside the cities. It was a great boon to the country that such intellectual and spiritual giants went forth to lead the praying and shouting hosts of Methodism over the continent. The refining and ennobling influence of their labors upon America's gathering millions can never be fully told. One of the results is that in nearly all the States Methodism is predominant. It might not have been so had the best talent of the denomination been given chiefly to the large cities.

At the beginning of Methodism in America the social power of the cities was with the other Churches; and the social influence affects Church life far more in cities than in the country.

In New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and elsewhere, the older denominations were securely founded before Methodism was born. They had good church edifices, schools, colleges, and an educated ministry. In Boston, Congregationalism was sustained by the State. In New York city the Episcopal Church and the Reformed Dutch Church were largely endowed. Methodism, without a school, or an elegant church, or influential members, had, therefore, to make its way in the cities against powerful denominations, who showed it no favor. FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXIX.-31