regulate the local affairs of Churches and schools so as to require the admission of both white and colored persons into all the institutions under its control, on the other hand it has never passed an act or made a regulation by which any person is excluded from any Church or school on account of race, color, or previous condition. That such exclusions have been made can not be reckoned as an unmixed evil. The African race in America has had the instinct of separation. The vast majority thereof have preferred to worship and study in churches and schools of their own; and in both of these the Negro has given the best account of himself.

The division of money by the Freedmen's Aid and Southern Education Society between the two classes of its beneficiaries has been about in the proportion of four to one in favor of the original claimants. The following figures from the latest report of the Society will show, in part, the extent and the direction of its success. They are, for the year ending June 30, 1894:

"Membership of Methodist Episcopal Church in the sixteen southern states and District of Columbia:

THE

CHAPTER IX.

THE CONSTITUTION.

HE history of Methodist legislation, so far as the organic structure of the Church is concerned, has nowhere been given in complete, compact, and accessible form. To supply this important requisite, the following chapter has been compiled:

DEFINITIONS.

The commonly-accepted definition of the word "Constitution" is, "A written form of organic law." In view of the absence of anything in the Methodist Episcopal Church which would answer to this description, three peculiar definitions of the term have come into use.

I. The first of these occurs in the first London edition of the Minutes of the American Conference or Convention of 1784. In place of a proper title page, the following note appears at the top of the first reading page:

"The General Minutes of the Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America, forming the Constitution of the said Church." (Nutter's reprint of Minutes of 1784, p. 1.)

A similar use of the word is found in the heading of Section III of a later edition of the same book, which reads: "On the Nature and Constitution of our Church." The section thus named treats of the departure of the American Methodists from the Church of England, and announces the formation of an "independent Church," "with an episcopal form of government, etc." (Nutter's third edition of Minutes of Christmas Conference, p. 5.)

In like manner Sherman, in his History of the Discipline, uses the word as equivalent to the whole product of formative legislation, thus:

"The Discipline provided in 1784 was designed to serve as a Constitution, to be supplemented by such statutory provisions from time to time as the Conference might find necessary. In this irregular way the Church continued to legislate until the establishment of the General Conference in 1792." ("History of Discipline," page 27.)

In early times the Church had little use for organic forms. The preachers organized classes and societies, and the bishops organized district and annual conferences. These were the efficient and sufficient forms under which the great evangelistic movement went on.

II. The second Methodist definition of the word "Constitution" signifies a certain set of "regulations," so called, which were passed at the General Conference of 1808. The Journal of that session for May 10th contains provision for a delegated General Conference; and in view of the modified form. and order of government thus ordained, six "shall nots" were added, with a proviso for doing what was therein forbidden. Though quoted in a previous chapter, the following minutes are repeated here:

"Bishop Asbury having called for the mind of the Conference whether any farther regulation in the order of General Conference be necessary, the question was put and carried in the affirmative. .

"Moved by Stephen G. Roszel, and seconded by William Burke, that a committee be appointed to draw up such regulations as they think best, to regulate the General Conference, and report the same to this Conference. Carried." (Journal of General Conference of 1808, page 78, May 10th.)

After a time it came to be the custom to speak of the six "Restrictive Rules," so called, as the "Constitution of the General Conference." This was done for convenience, and, perhaps, also for the reason that there was nothing else in the Methodist organization to which that dignified term could properly be applied. This application of the term seems to be intended in the Preface to the treatise on "Ecclesiastical Law," by Bishop Harris and Judge Henry. (See page 5.) Until within a few years this was almost the only sense in which the word "Constitution" was used. The Church at large did not seem to know that Episcopal Methodism had any Constitution, and only in General Conference debates was the term likely to be heard. It seems that at the date when the above-mentioned treatise appeared-i. e., in the year 1878-there was in the Church at large no considerable thought of any form of organic law. If those eminent Methodist jurists, Harris and Henry, had suspected that so much use would

be made of the word "Constitution" in the legislation or administration of the Church, they would, doubtless, have given, somewhere in that exhaustive volume, a chapter, or at least a page, devoted to an exact definition of this basal term. no such chapter or page, or even paragraph, appears.

But

So, also, in the painstaking work of Dr. Sherman, entitled, "The History of the Discipline," etc., first published in 1874, the word "Constitution" appears only incidentally in the first sense already indicated, while in the copious index of that admirable work the word does not appear at all. Thus the merit of freshness must certainly be accredited to any other use of that term.

III. This suggests the third use of the word "Constitution" by a school of Methodist jurists, who, under repeated sanction, and even direction, of successive General Conferences have been attempting to furnish the Church with a voluminous basis of "organic law."

Any exact definition of such an outcome of Churchly spirit and legal lore would be impossible. That it can not be a Constitution is evident, since "Constitution" signifies organic law, and this thing, being an after-thought, can

"organic." Besides, a Constitution is a written body of structural materials;* but in the structural era of the Methodist Church no such body of organic matter was ever written. Hence it can not be a "Constitution."

Nevertheless, the records of recent General Conferences abound with phrases in which the word "Constitution" is used, in a sense, different from either of the two already noticed, hence the need of the nearest possible approach to a definition according to this new use of the term. Perhaps the following may serve the purpose:

"Definition 3. The Constitution of the Methodist Episcopal Church comprises all those legal and proper acts of legislation by which the Church has come to be constituted as it now is."

With this brief outline of the whole situation under review, attention will now be called to a chronological record of the legislation of the Church by distinctive eras, in which

*See Cooley's "Principles of Constitutional Law," as quoted by Judge Sibley in his treatise entitled, "The Organic Law of the Methodist Episcopal Church," page 11.

structural material and "organic law" can be found. The distinction between the two "Constitutions" just quoted, the one included in the other, will not be followed. So far as legislation, either organic or statutory, is concerned, the Church is the General Conference, and the General Conference is the Church. The distinction alluded to seems likely to increase the confusion already existing in Methodist minds in relation to this important subject.

THE WESLEYAN ERA OF THE CHURCH.

In its largest and highest sense, the word "Church" may properly be used to designate that distinct class or body of true Christian believers whose beginnings in the British colonies of North America in the year 1766 suggest the familiar names of Robert Strawbridge, Philip Embury, Barbara Heck, and Captain Webb.

The names of these good people were, doubtless, written in heaven; and devout Methodists have not been wanting who believed the same to be also true of the form and order of their Church. No longer ago than 1868 a memorial containing this distinct idea was presented to the General Conference at Chicago: the heavenly origin of "our beloved Methodism" being alleged as an argument against lay delegation.

But heavenly inspirations come through mortal minds, the mortal mind in this case being that of John Wesley. He was the Moses of the early Methodist Israel. He made all the Rules, both General and Special, and his followers believed in him as a veritable prophet of God. And such he was. Those who think they find the secret of his success in his genius for government are mistaken. It was the supernatural element in the Methodist movement which gave Wesley his autocratic power. "Genius" is shortlived; and in the later portion of his life Wesley's "genius" failed him, first in America, and then in Britain; but while he lived, and since his death, the divineness of his mission and of the power by which he fulfilled it placed him in the foremost rank of men.

The Wesleyan Era of American Methodism began with Rankin, and ended with the Christmas Conference. When Asbury refused to be made and consecrated general superin