The 65,000 has repeated itself about 91 times, or once every 13 months during the last century. The percentage of gain is 8,977. If the population had increased at the same rate it would now be 476,000,000 instead of 76,300,000. The average annual gain has been 58,350. The gain in preachers in the Methodist Episcopal Church is indicated as follows: The gain for the century is 17,413. The 287 have been multiplied by 62; average annual gain, 174. The beginning in a sail loft in 1766, the erection shortly afterward of a church costing $3,000, gave no more promise of ecclesiastical wealth than it did of growth in membership. Our 27,000 churches, worth $116,000,000, show a development of resources as wonderful as a miracle. It takes now between $23,000,000 and $24,000,000 a year to carry on the work of the Methodist Episcopal Church, to say nothing about its universities, colleges, and hospitals. The consecration of wealth is truly stupendous. Methodists have not been stingy. Methodism was ninth among Protestant denominations in number of churches in 1775, and third in number of communicants in 1800. It soon advanced to first place in numbers, and easily holds this place at the end of the century. It was only a handful of corn on the top of the mountains at the beginning. How wonderfully has God multiplied it! It is pertinent to ask, How did it win its success? Not by immigration, as many other Churches did. Roman Catholics came here from Europe by hundreds of thousands. The Lutheran, Reformed German, and Presbyterian Churches gained immensely by the streams of immigration. But Methodists and Baptists have grown out of American soil and drawn their chief strength from the surrounding elements. Not by proselytism. We have lost hundreds of thousands of converts; we have gained comparatively few in return from the denominations we have fed. We would like to hold all who are converted at our altars, but we do not feel that our losses have impoverished us, though they have enriched our neighbors. Not because of wealth, social prestige, ecclesiastical antiquity, or what an historian calls "the aristocracy of education and position." Other Churches had these; we began with nothing but a needy field and earnest men, full of the Holy Ghost and flaming with zeal for the Gospel.